15 Months to Go: Will the World Make Something of the UN Summit of the Future?

In September 2023 — a mere 15 months from now — the United Nations’ 193 member states are expected to convene a Summit of the Future during the General Assembly’s annual high-level week in New York City. At a series of thematic consultations held in February and March 2022 by the president of the General Assembly on Secretary-General António Guterres’s groundbreaking report, “Our Common Agenda,” government representatives called for an “inclusive intergovernmental process” and for the 2023 summit to adopt an “ambitious, action-oriented, future-oriented and tangible outcome document with a view to improving global governance.”

Not since the UN60 Summit, held in September 2005 in New York City, have world leaders gathered to consider systemic reforms across the world body’s three pillars of peace and security, sustainable development and human rights. To better deal with today’s pressing issues such as great-power tensions, extremist violence in fragile states, pandemics, the prospect of runaway climate change, cross-border economic shocks and more sophisticated cyberattacks, the Summit of the Future will need to identify the best ways to marshal the world’s talent and resources with new voices, tools, networks, knowledge and institutions.

Adapting our aging but essential UN system to current and emerging crises will require far-reaching institutional, legal, policy, normative and operational (including financing-related) changes. Simultaneously, these changes must complement and help to deliver on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Agreement. Against this backdrop, Our Common Agenda proposes some 90 timely ideas to upgrade governance for issues that transcend borders, including a new Agenda for Peace, a Declaration and Special Envoy for Future Generations and a Global Digital Compact.

The Global Governance Innovation Network brings world-class scholarship together with international policy-making to address fundamental global governance challenges, threats, and opportunities. Research will focus on the development of institutional, policy, legal, and normative improvements in the international global governance architecture.

GGIN is a collaborative project of the Stimson Center, Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), Plataforma CIPÓ, and Leiden University.

Building on the UN75 Global Governance Forum (16-18 September 2020) and follow-through to the UN75 Political Declaration, the Stimson Center, Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), Plataforma CIPÓ, and Leiden University are partnering on a Global Governance Innovation Network (GGIN), bringing world-class scholarship together with international policy-making to address fundamental global governance challenges, threats, and opportunities.

Through policy research on the underlying causes and dynamics of the “anti-multilateralist” turn in many countries and development of institutional, policy, legal, and normative improvements in the global governance architecture (as well as other possible responses to the crisis), the GGIN will convene and amplify the voices of a new generation of scholars, policy researchers, and practitioners from the Global South and North, alongside established experts and UN Mission Representatives. Specifically, the network will focus on analyzing and responding to gaps within and across the following global governance thematic areas:

Enhancing Post-COVID Recovery and Global Economic & Social Governance
Rethinking the UN’s Approach to Peace, Security & Humanitarian Action
Strengthening Rules-Based Governance, Human Rights & Inclusive Governance
Innovating Climate Governance: The Paris Agreement & Beyond

Given the strength of scholars and policy analysts to adopt interdisciplinary approaches and work at multiple levels of governance, the Global Governance Innovation Network will give special attention to: (a.) addressing cross-cutting themes (e.g., gender, poverty, financing and ensuring more inclusive and accountable global institutions), (b.) strengthening linkages between global, regional, and sub-regional governance actors, and (c.) putting-forth ambitious ideas that can be discussed initially in the UN75 follow-through “Our Common Agenda” context of 2021-23, and be brought to fruition in 2025 (UN80) or, in some instances, 2045 (UN100). The network will also encourage evaluation of successes and failures that collective action through the UN system has brought to date, and considerations of such performance against future need.

The network’s “theory of change” is rooted in an understanding that greater results can be achieved when: (1) individual states and non-state actors, provided with evidence-based on solid research and analysis, recognize that their priority issues or institutional reforms can benefit from an inclusive global coalition that facilitates positive systemic changes; (2) greater opportunities arise for “package deals” and linkages between innovative proposals across distinct sectors and institutional settings; and (3) momentum for reform is generated and sustained by early wins on less contested issues that lay the groundwork for progress on harder questions.