The Good—and Bad—News About the UN’s Summit of the Future

Next week, global leaders convene in New York for a much hyped Summit of the Future, the centerpiece of this year’s annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly. The event is the brainchild of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who bills it as a “once in generation” opportunity to retrofit the multilateral system to meet twenty-first-century challenges.

Four years ago, in the depths of the pandemic, UN member states asked the secretary-general to develop recommendations for strengthening global governance on the UN’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Guterres responded with Our Common Agenda, a sweeping report calling for a new era of “networked and inclusive multilateralism,” capable of nurturing global solidarity, mitigating transnational threats, and delivering results for both people and the planet. Next week’s gathering aims to turn that vision into reality.

Navigating Fault Lines

The good news is that the vast majority of UN member states continue to support multilateral cooperation, notwithstanding a parlous geopolitical context that includes wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza. The bad news is that countries disagree over the terms that cooperation should take and who should get to call the shots.

The most important diplomatic fault line in these negotiations runs not east to west (though Russia has become a major spoiler) but rather north to south. It pits wealthy nations that have long been the “makers” of world order against developing and post-colonial nations no longer content to be passive “takers.” The former prefer a piecemeal approach to global reform and to preserve the prerogatives they enjoy in international institutions, particularly of global economic governance. The latter want a more egalitarian multilateral system that enhances their voice, power, and interests and can deliver on debt relief, development aid, trade opportunities, climate financing, and access to cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence. Governments and citizens in the Global South have become incensed by the wealthy world’s perceived indifference toward their plight.

These tensions are most obvious in contentious, ongoing negotiations over the text of the proposed summit outcome document—christened the Pact for the Future—intended to provide a blueprint for global institutional reform. As of this writing, and with only a few days to go, diplomats are still debating key issues in that document and its two proposed annexes, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. Similar to last year’s summit on sustainable development, negotiations are likely to go down to the wire.

Against this fraught backdrop, it is tempting to dismiss the summit as a distraction from immediate crises as well as existing pledges—such as preventing atrocities, alleviating extreme poverty, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions—that the world has yet to fulfill. That impulse is understandable but shortsighted for three reasons. First, crises can be moments to offer bold reform proposals, since they tend to loosen attachment to previous orthodoxies and provide openings for new ideas. Despite the breadth of the agenda covering highly politicized issues, the negotiations have revealed a greater willingness on the part of almost every government in the world to cooperate. Second, the draft pact itself offers some glimmers of hope, provided one manages expectations and remembers consensus-based multilateral diplomacy is an inherently messy exercise that’s vulnerable to lowest common denominator outcomes. Finally, taking the long view is imperative: the summit was never intended to be a one-and-done affair, but rather as the first step in a decades long reform process. Progress is invariably incremental, and a few steps forward is often better than none. What matters is that there’s movement at all.

A Roadmap for Reform

The thirty-page pact begins with an inspirational call to action, noting that today’s interconnected challenges are beyond the capacity of “any single State alone” to resolve. The draft document then commits member states to fifty-eight specific actions in five areas: advancing sustainable development and its financing; promoting international peace and security; supporting science, technology, and digital innovation; addressing youth and future generations; and transforming global governance.

The pact offers much to applaud at a rhetorical level. It endorses the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and promises to close the financing gap that is a major obstacle for many states hoping to make progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. It reaffirms the Paris Agreement climate goals and pledges ramped up efforts against global warming, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. It asserts the obligations of all nations to respect one another’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and commits them to resolve their disputes peacefully. It also pushes states to combat terrorism, protect civilians in armed conflict, ameliorate humanitarian emergencies, improve UN peace operations, uphold disarmament obligations, mitigate risks from AI and lethal autonomous weapons systems, pursue a world free of nuclear weapons, and comply with decisions of the International Court of Justice.

Finally, the pact commits its adherents to transforming the institutional infrastructure of global governance. Such changes are essential to enable the United Nations to better grapple with threats only dimly perceived (if at all) at its founding, to harness the capabilities of modern technology and nonstate actors, and to enhance the representativeness, accountability, and resources of its main organs and agencies, including the Bretton Woods Institutions.

This superficial unanimity, however, conceals important disagreements that lurk below. Here are just a few of the flashpoints that have surfaced in the ongoing negotiations.

International Financial Architecture (IFA)

This remains one of the stickiest issues, with clear battle lines pitting developed against developing countries. Rhetorically, all governments support the goal of a more inclusive, equitable, and representative system of global economic governance. In practice, wealthy members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), led by the United States, argue that the specifics of any IFA reform should not be discussed and determined within the one-nation-one-vote UN General Assembly. They believe the debate should occur in other frameworks with “competence” to address financial issues, particularly the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, where OECD nations benefit from weighted voting.

This position has fallen on deaf ears among emboldened governments from the Global South. These low- and middle-income countries are fed up with lack of progress on their demands for greater voice in international financial institutions, as well as for more generous access to development and climate finance, emergency credit lines, and debt relief. They are convinced that a mealy-mouthed compromise that lacks specifics will simply leave them empty-handed.

Co-facilitators from Germany and Namibia have tried to strike a balance between developing countries’ desire for more prescriptive language and the strong resistance of several industrialized countries that believe these specifics would be better addressed in the international financial institutions. One bright spot in this debate is the intention to convene a biennial summit at the level of heads of state and government to strengthen links between these financial institutions and the UN. However, expect many of these battle lines to persist into 2025.

UN Security Council Reform

The issue of Security Council expansion remains the tightest of diplomatic Gordian knots, with member states deadlocked over whether expansion should include new permanent members or only elected members, and whether any new permanent ones should have veto power. The draft pact does not cut this knot, but it does begin to loosen it, by acknowledging the need to make the council “more representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, democratic and accountable.” It advances a set of guiding principles for reform, including that any enlargement should “redress the historic injustice against Africa” and other “underrepresented” regions and balance the goals of representativeness and effectiveness. The pact also calls for agreement on categories of Security Council membership and on the future scope and limits of the veto. It includes a provision to review periodically whether the council is “deliver[ing] on its mandate and remains fit for purpose.”

In an important procedural breakthrough, the draft pact also empowers the negotiation’s cochairs to pull together a consolidated model for council enlargement, based on various models that parties have proposed. Significantly, the pact also calls for full implementation of a UN Charter rule that requires countries that are party to a conflict to refrain from voting in resolutions involving the pacific settlement of that dispute —a commitment that Russia has repeatedly violated. Finally, the pact includes helpful language supporting the General Assembly’s growing activism in matters of peace and security, including when the Security Council is blocked, encouraging continued use of both the Uniting for Peace and Veto Initiative resolutions.

Climate Change

The so-called zero draft of the pact, released in January, endorsed the goal of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But during recent negotiations that provision was unceremoniously deleted, thanks to opposition from oil and gas producers. Following public advocacy by a group of Nobel laureates, the latest revision includes the language agreed at COP28 in Dubai last December, reaffirming the call for parties to transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly and equitable manner,” so as to achieve the goal of net zero global emissions by 2050. It also includes a reference to the loss and damage fund, intended to compensate nations injured by climate change; calls for the significant scaling up of adaptation financing; and commits signatories to a doubling of energy efficiency and tripling of renewable energy. While some backtracking seems possible, the ultimate text is likely to be consistent with the UAE Consensus reached at COP28.

Nuclear Weapons

The draft pact contains strong language endorsing nuclear nonproliferation and the nonuse of nuclear weapons, including an explicit statement that nuclear wars can never be won and must never be fought. Many UN member states have also been pushing for a prohibition on nuclear weapons themselves, consistent with the Ban Treaty. All five recognized nuclear weapons states (the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom) have resisted these pressures, with Russia being the most adamant in obstructing any language that would threaten its prerogatives as a nuclear power. Several delegations have jointly proposed bridging text, based on existing language agreed to in previous UN agreements, but important nonnuclear weapons states have been holding out for more ambitious commitments. As of this writing, the fate of these provisions remains uncertain.

Controversy has erupted on other topics, too. One is human rights. Authoritarian governments, supported by many members of the Group of 77, advocate deemphasizing human rights and elevating concern for sustainable development. In contrast, many Western nations—particularly members of the European Union—regard the draft as unacceptably weak and have pushed for much stronger rights language.

Another flashpoint pertains to the appropriate role in any revamped UN system of nonstate stakeholders, and particularly civil society and private sector actors. Here, divisions break down on ideological lines, with open societies more amenable to opening the UN’s doors and authoritarian powers being adamant on reinforcing the fundamentally intergovernmental nature of the United Nations. The irony is that negotiations for a summit intended to launch a new era of “inclusive and networked” multilateralism have been decidedly exclusive, as nongovernmental stakeholders have been barred from the negotiating room.

Disputes have also arisen over some of the secretary-general’s institutional proposals, including one to appoint a UN Special Envoy for Future Generations and another to establish an emergency platform to manage “complex global shocks” such as pandemics. Although most governments agree that the UN should consider the intergenerational implications of UN decisions, many remain leery of creating a standing envoy, citing funding and organizational concerns. The most recent draft has likewise eliminated any mention of the emergency platform, reflecting member state concerns that it might encroach on the Security Council’s role, duplicate existing crisis response arrangements and mandates, and infringe on state sovereignty. These concerns may indicate a weariness among member states with creating new UN institutional mechanisms. In the end, this lack of buy-in may not matter much, since as a practical matter the secretary-general still retains significant leeway to appoint special envoys and to convene and coordinate emergency responses to global crises on an ad hoc basis.

To borrow from Mark Twain, we suspect that reports of the death of multilateral cooperation are greatly exaggerated. Despite frustrations about the UN’s effectiveness, the attention and energy that member states have devoted to this exercise reveals the value that they continue to place on the body, as well as their willingness to invest in its future. They believe that the UN remains very much alive—if unwell—and that restoring its health and vitality matters. That is why they have engaged in energetic—and at times impassioned—discussions over an expansive global agenda that was both technically and politically complicated, and under a relentless timeline. Far from abandoning the United Nations, the majority of member states are seeking to revive it, so it is capable of addressing shared challenges. That is grounds for hope in a world that could use some.