When world leaders convene next week for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, the assembled nations will be anything but united. Geopolitical rivalries, political grievances, economic upheaval, and ecological crises are testing the legitimacy and credibility of the seventy-eight-year-old body. The coming days will reveal whether and which countries are prepared to temper their strategic and ideological competition in the interest of advancing their many shared global interests—and whether the United Nations remains relevant in a divided world.
The gap between the demand for international cooperation and its supply is widening. Humanity is grappling with simultaneous, compounding, and rapidly evolving challenges—among them accelerating climate change, collapsing biodiversity, persistent poverty and inequality, declining democracy, mass displacement, destabilizing technological innovation, plodding recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, and intensifying diplomatic and economic fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On these and other issues, the UN has fallen short, both because it is no longer fit for purpose and because its member states do not trust one another.
Complicating matters, today’s diplomatic fault lines run not just East-West—pitting China and Russia against the community of advanced market democracies—but also North-South, setting richer nations against lower- and middle- income countries. Many developing-world governments and citizens regard their wealthy-world counterparts as indifferent to their needs, from access to vaccines to debt relief to climate adaptation financing. They also regard existing institutions of global governance, such as the UN Security Council, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as hopelessly stacked against their interests and unresponsive to their needs. This perceived lack of solidarity has reinforced the instinct of many developing nations to stand on the sidelines and hedge their bets rather than pick sides in the Ukraine conflict and the deepening Sino-American rivalry.
Against this somber backdrop, we will be watching for the following five signs of life for global cooperation.
One: Progress on Security Council Reform
In his UNGA speech last year, U.S. President Joe Biden declared U.S. support for increasing the number of both permanent and nonpermanent seats of the Security Council, including permanent membership for countries from Africa and Latin America. That has both excited and worried member states, nearly all of whom support enlargement in principle but are deeply divided on the details. Given the decades-long paralysis on this topic and fierce divisions on the contours of any potential reform, close UN observers are not holding their breath. Indeed, cynics may say that Biden raised the topic only to put Russia and China on the spot—and to curry favor with pivotal or swing states such as India and Brazil. That said, the United States has conducted months of diplomatic outreach on this topic, and U.S. officials privately insist this U.S. initiative is genuine.
Although the odds of a breakthrough remain long, a recent Carnegie compendium of essays surveying the global landscape identifies at least two narrow, diplomatic pathways to Security Council enlargement. The first, which would require launching actual negotiations on a single rolling text, could pave the way for agreement between the main aspirants to permanent seats and the African Union, a critical diplomatic player. The second would involve the creation of a new category of longer-term, renewable, elected seats, as opposed to permanent ones.
This year, Biden will have a public platform to explain what the United States has done to push this agenda and redouble momentum behind it. While the hurdles to any reform remain high and perhaps insurmountable, the U.S. initiative has at least brought the debate out of the shadows. It has also placed pressure on major powers and regional blocs to explain where they stand, including from the dais of the General Assembly. Biden—who will be the sole head of state or government among the permanent five Security Council members in New York—should make the most of this opportunity.
Two: Restoring Momentum on the SDGs
World leaders will also assess progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the seventeen concrete objectives for eradicating extreme poverty, advancing social welfare, and improving environmental stewardship by 2030. Endorsed in 2015, the SDGs have been widely adopted not only by national governments and multilateral organizations but also by local authorities seeking to deliver for their communities and investors looking to align their funds with ethical values. But halfway to 2030, how is the world doing, and what more must be done? That’s the question UN member states are meant to address at the two-day SDG Summit on September 18–19.
The signs are not encouraging. Progress has stalled or reversed for more than a third of the goals and is slow on nearly half; only 15 percent remain on track. More people live in extreme poverty than before the pandemic, and the goal of gender equality will take nearly 300 years to realize at the current pace. Still, there has been some progress: 146 countries are expected to meet the under-five mortality target by 2030, the number of people using the internet has increased by 65 percent since 2015, and 800 million more people have access to electricity.
At this year’s UNGA, developing nations will be looking for more than empty platitudes from Western leaders, including (often hypocritical) expressions of fealty to democratic ideals. In one promising signal, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States have accepted a final SDG Summit declaration containing surprisingly bold language on reforming the international financial institutions (IFIs) to make them more “equitable and responsive to the financing needs of developing countries” and to “strengthen the voice and participation of developing countries in international economic decision-making.”
Still, observers should temper their expectations. Any major strategic and resource decisions regarding global development are likely to await the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF next month in Marrakesh, Morocco. Although nominally part of the UN system, the IFIs have distinct governance structures that advantage major shareholders, and they command much larger resources than UN agencies. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly called for “a new Bretton Woods moment” to increase the voice and heft of lower- and middle-income nations and allow the IFIs to provide global public goods. His case is compelling, but such architectural decisions will ultimately be made not in New York but in Washington, by the institutions’ governing bodies.
Three: Mobilizing Development Financing
This year’s UNGA will also signal whether wealthy donor nations are willing to open their wallets. Since the SDGs were first agreed, their estimated annual financial cost has surged to $4.2 trillion, up from the original $2–3 trillion. Over the same period, hopes of expanding global development resources from “billions to trillions” by using public funds to leverage private finance have evaporated. Meanwhile, donors have failed to fulfill their 2009 commitment to mobilize $100 billion a year in climate financing. Finally, the loss and damage fund that nations endorsed at last year’s climate conference has yet to get off the ground.
Several new initiatives seek to close these financing gaps. They include the Bridgetown Agenda, spearheaded by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, as well as the Summit for a New Financing Pact, hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in June. For his part, Guterres has proposed an “SDG stimulus” of $500 billion per year, accompanied by increased concessional lending from multilateral development banks, an additional expansion (and recycling) of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, and more generous debt suspension provisions. Whether donor nations are prepared to endorse this plan remains to be seen. Beyond mobilizing these vast sums, international donors—both multilateral and national—face the complex challenge of determining what proportion of these development resources to allocate to traditional bilateral aid programs versus international funds and initiatives to provide global public goods such as climate financing, pandemic preparedness, and humanitarian relief.
Four: Another Chance to Show Solidarity on Global Health
Member states will also have an opportunity to bridge global differences and ease bruised feelings on global public health in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, during which multilateral cooperation and humanitarian impulses proved little match for geopolitical rivalry, financial stinginess, and vaccine nationalism. That opportunity takes the form of three high-level meetings on global health.
The first, on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, is intended to create political momentum and solidarity on this shared agenda. It takes place just as intergovernmental negotiations heat up in Geneva on both a new pandemic treaty and on amendments to the International Health Regulations, which constitute the only legally binding framework that defines countries’ rights and obligations for handling cross-border public health emergencies. Negotiations will culminate in the World Health Assembly’s meeting in May. A key question is to what extent these efforts to strengthen global pandemic governance will limit themselves to technical concerns or expand to address issues of equity and access.
The second, on universal health coverage, is meant to renew attention to the 2019 declaration that set an ambitious target for universal coverage of essential health services and access to essential medicines and vaccines for all people by 2030. Advocates are hoping the meeting will jump-start progress that stalled during the pandemic.
The third, on the stubborn challenge of tuberculosis, seeks to review progress and remaining obstacles to achieving targets set in 2018. Although international efforts to combat TB have saved more than 140 million lives since 2000, cases have increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, and multidrug resistant strains have proliferated. The meeting is intended to mobilize scientific advances and financial resources to “end the global tuberculosis pandemic.”
In principle, all three events will culminate in declarations intended to galvanize global action. Unfortunately, negotiations over these documents have stalled over two concerns. The first is funding, with developing countries insisting on robust finance commitments from developed nations to avoid repeating the “severe shortcomings” of the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. The second is a diplomatic push by Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and other countries that have been on the receiving end of increased U.S. sanctions to persuade the G-77 and China to include unrelated and irrelevant language in these declarations criticizing the use of “unilateral coercive measures.” These economic and geopolitical divisions could scuttle any meaningful declarations, rendering global health security and equity yet another casualty of our fragmenting world.
Five: Demonstrating the UN’s Centrality in a Multi-Multilateral World
Finally, we will be looking for evidence and statements reaffirming the UN’s continued centrality to world order, at a time when governments have many alternative vehicles for collective action. Faced with paralysis at the UN, member states increasingly rely on more “minilateral” frameworks that allow narrower coalitions of the interested, capable, and like-minded to cooperate in pursuit of shared strategic priorities, economic interests, and ideological preferences. For Western nations, the G7 and NATO provide indispensable foundations to defend the rules-based international order. Similarly, revisionist and emerging powers see the expanding BRICS group as an important platform to challenge entrenched global inequities, like the dollar’s role as the main reserve currency. Even the G20, whose heterogeneous membership is a microcosm of the world’s divisions, provides its members with a more flexible framework for decisions than the UN.
Losing sight of the UN’s enduring value is easy given this flurry of institutional competition. No other framework enjoys the legitimacy conferred by the UN’s legally binding charter and universal membership, its monopoly on the authorization of armed force, and the invaluable work of its specialized agencies and programs in domains spanning humanitarian relief, global health, nuclear inspections, transnational crime, outer space, and more. Ultimately, a resilient and legitimate world order depends on universal institutions, grounded in international law, with standing technical capabilities. Global governance cannot rest simply on affinity groups and pickup teams.
Guterres is clearly sensitive to this question of relevance. In an effort to place the UN at the heart of a reinvigorated multilateral system, Guterres proposed a Summit of the Future that UN member states will hold during the opening of next year’s UNGA. A high-level board has already offered multiple proposals for institutional reform, and the UN Secretariat itself has drafted numerous policy briefs. Member states recently negotiated the scope of a Pact for the Future document that will include chapters on sustainable development and finance, peace and security, digital cooperation, youth and future generations, and transforming global governance. When representatives convene later this month, UN watchers will be looking for potential fault lines of disagreement, as well as signs that member states are prepared to make tough decisions on updating international institutions.
The incoming president of the General Assembly has chosen the theme of “rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity” for this year’s UNGA. The theme highlights the two commodities that have been in short supply in recent years. Next week’s annual gathering of leaders—the first such full-fledged, in-person meeting since before the coronavirus pandemic—is an apt moment to begin replenishing the world’s store of both.
