Opinion: The future of global governance is collective, not top-down

Next week, the United Nations General Assembly will convene in New York for its 78th session, a reminder of the lasting impact of the brave new experiment that sprang from the aftermath of two World Wars. The catastrophic clash of great powers moved world leaders to seek to “provide sensible machinery for the settlement of disputes among nations,” as then U.S. President Harry Truman called on delegates to the U.N.’s first 1945 conference. Now, as the world faces challenges that transcend borders, from climate change to the risks of artificial intelligence, we must innovate boldly once again to establish a new global governance paradigm driven by new players, governed by new rules, and responsive to our new reality. Our outdated 20th-century model of global governance enables a handful of major powers to unilaterally dictate resolutions to global challenges, while today’s most pressing problems require broader collective action to ensure that solutions benefit everyone. Take for example the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that required international collaboration to protect the world’s public health. Instead, it highlighted the ways in which our current global systems are ill-equipped to address inequalities — and ultimately risk perpetuating them. When South Africa informed the world about a new variant of the novel coronavirus, the international community met their good neighbor efforts with an isolationist response; Western countries closed their borders and hoarded newly available vaccines. And instead of a widespread public health response that prioritized the most vulnerable, fractured nation-by-nation approaches let many low-income, high-risk populations slip through the cracks, condemning countless people to preventable deaths and exacerbating economic inequality in a vicious cycle. As the head of international programs at a global foundation working to combat inequality worldwide, I have seen firsthand the ways in which the global status quo fails those who need it most — and the power of new partnerships to find a better way. We work with individuals all over the world to combat unprecedented climate disasters, food insecurity, gendered violence, and more. But for many years, we focused on the way individual governments were grappling with these issues, trying for instance to resolve conflicts over natural resources in Brazil, or the fight to secure Indigenous land rights in Indonesia. We were not always reckoning with and centering the larger, interconnected systems, such as supply chains and commodity markets, that affected these seemingly isolated problems. Now, in addition to our country-specific initiatives, we are engaged in a truly global effort, supporting Indigenous coalitions across continents as they use their collective power to secure greater autonomy, a more equitable stake in local industry, and the right to responsibly steward natural resources. We work not only with governments but with the communities themselves, as well as environmental nonprofits and civil society, attacking interconnected issues from many angles. And instead of bringing solutions for these regions, we now look for solutions from them — and collaborate with them to scale what works. Our efforts are just one proof point illustrating the need for many decentralized groups working in tandem to create and execute solutions. Already, other regional and ad hoc alliances have curtailed harmful fishing practices and codified the rights of people with disabilities across the globe. And while institutions such as the U.N. continue to play an important role in addressing these issues, our new reality calls for more than just a few chosen flagship organizations solving global problems. By adopting more pluralistic modes of global governance, we can become nimbler and more responsive to some of this century’s most pressing problems. We must make space for new people to contribute their perspectives to global governance — including and especially those in the global south who for too long have suffered the impacts of environmental and economic policies in which they have had little say. Meaningfully involving these new players means lowering the threshold for collaboration between unconventional partners. “Coalitions of the willing,” championed by political philosophers and thought leaders in global governance, present opportunities for nation-states to form fluid, temporary alliances around discrete issues, such as capturing solar energy or combating human trafficking, solving common problems even if they lack common ground elsewhere. And crucially, we must engage new stakeholders who operate outside and across borders. Corporations, philanthropy, civil society, and people themselves all have roles to play in building a more equitable, representative, and accountable multilateral system. Community-led initiatives, such as the ones the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria invests in, provide models of successful collaboration between and beyond governments that are worth spreading and scaling. In this journey toward reforming our global governance system, an open and representative process is just as important as any product. At every step, we must center the people affected by the problems we seek to solve, as experts, not just as recipients. We must honor each other as equal partners at the table with policymakers and create solutions that work for all. In short: our approach must be both people-centered and people-led. To be sure, this ambitious process will be messy and, at times, full of contradictions and uncertainties. But we have had the audacity to reimagine our world before in the name of international peace and security. Now, we must once again embrace new thinking, and members of the old order, from nation-states to nonprofits, must reexamine the power we wield and the privilege we hold. It’s time to take the hard, necessary steps away from our previous top-down system, toward a more egalitarian future and the chance to get global governance right.