We are at a fork in the road. Will we choose solidarity over fear?

In European capitals of multilateralism — Geneva, Brussels, Vienna — a new season is dawning. The illusion that we could just “hang on for another four years,” after which everything would return to normal, has faded. In its place, a new realization is slowly taking shape: the values, beliefs, norms, funding flows, and rules that form the international development system are tipping in real time.

The late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine had a name for these moments: bifurcation points. His experiments with complex systems demonstrated that once a system reaches a bifurcation point — the critical tipping point when transformation happens — it becomes too unstable and cannot maintain its previous structure.

If that sounds too abstract, here’s a simpler way to put it: we are standing at a fork in the road. Starkly different futures lie ahead for the international development system — some more probable than others.