Global public investment shows international cooperation can succeed

Much of the discussion at this year’s United Nations General Assembly high-level week in New York focused on the acute challenges facing international cooperation. Many media reports, understandably, emphasized areas in which countries diverged. We were inspired, therefore, to be involved in one major step forward for multilateralism taken at UNGA week: The inaugural meeting of a coalition working to advance global public investment. Global public investment is an equitable, 21st-century approach to tackling global challenges, through which all countries benefit, to which all contribute according to their means, and in which all decide together as equals. It starts from the recognition that in an interconnected world, our fates are interdependent, and that solutions to our shared challenges need to be shaped by all of us together. On Sept. 24, Uruguay helped convene the first working meeting of governments and international institutions on how to design and implement it. It is an approach that experts and civil society organizations from regions all across the world have been developing together through the Global Public Investment Network for over a decade. Momentum accelerated in Sevilla in July this year with the launch of the Sevilla Platform for Action commitment on global public investment at the Financing for Development Conference. This September in New York, the work to plan how to put global public investment into practice commenced, with over a dozen governments taking part, and over a dozen more already interested in connecting with the process going forward. Alongside governments, the coalition involves regional bodies, including the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, or CAF, former heads of government from the Club de Madrid, international organizations, and over a hundred civil society organizations. The Global Public Investment Network provides the secretariat. Regular convenings will take place across 2025, 2026, and 2027. Together, we will work to pilot and scale global public investment through regional dialogues, policy research, and pilot projects. Our shared hope is that global public investment can unlock the joint investment needed to address the threat of pandemics, seize the opportunity of renewable technologies, and ensure rapid response to disasters. It has the potential to recalibrate international cooperation, steering the world away from entrenched and inequitable power dynamics, toward truly collective international cooperation. This would not only be fairer than the current approaches inherited from the last century, but it would also be much more successful, helping to transform lives across the world. In Uruguay, our own national experience highlights the need to move beyond outdated approaches. High-income “graduation” didn’t close Uruguay’s development chapter; it exposed the limits of a threshold-based system. We need cooperation that is ongoing, flexible, and assessed with multidimensional metrics beyond basic indicators. Global public investment would strengthen accountability, flexibility, concessionality, and legitimacy, while reducing fragmentation. It would harness the power of mutual interest — that we are interdependent — and the power of mutuality — that we achieve more by working together. Global public investment would help revitalize multilateralism, reshape international cooperation, and renew the social contract. Global public investment is not, of course, a silver bullet. Global challenges are complex, and no single measure will suffice. Global public investment would complement other forms of international financing and reinforce the gains that can be made from international collaboration on debt and tax justice. Global public investment would be a beacon of what can be achieved by countries working together in a new framework of equal partnership. We have entered an era of disruption. We are living in times of great shared peril — from social to ecological breakdown to pandemic disasters — and great shared potential — from low-cost green energy technology to transformative progress in medicine. We can overcome these new challenges and seize these new opportunities, but only if we do so in new ways, and only if we do so together. We cannot rise to meet global challenges if we retreat into isolation or compete for domination. Countries need to collaboratively cocreate shared solutions to shared problems. Building a new international architecture based around global public investment is necessary, urgent, feasible, and widely supported. It is an opportunity we cannot afford to lose. Hope is built by action. Turning global public investment into reality depends on the work that is underway of countries listening to each other and developing a plan jointly. No one country has all the answers — but collectively we will get there. We can build a safe, fair, sustainable world together. The progress made this year is demonstrating that it can be done. We invite more partners to join in the work of the coalition of governments and international organisations on global public investment. Shared investment, with shared power, will secure our shared future. International cooperation can succeed. Global public investment is showing the way.