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.
About the authors
Carlos Alvarez Pereira
Carlos Alvarez Pereira is the secretary-general of The Club of Rome, where he promotes systemic sense-making to inspire responsible decisions toward equitable well-being on a healthy planet. An aerospace engineer, he has had academic, entrepreneurial, and management positions in international contexts and is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, or WAAS.
Katherine Milligan
Katherine Milligan is a senior lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute and an elea Fellow at IMD Business School. A recognized thought leader in social innovation and former executive director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at WEF, she advises social sector organizations on systems change approaches and coauthored the No. 1 article in Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2022 and 2024.
