‘State of the World’ Conference Addresses Multilateral Challenges at UN

The UN General Assembly adopted a “Pact for the Future” on September 22 to reinvigorate multilateral cooperation and better meet the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. The pact, which came at the start of the two-day Summit of the Future, aims to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and lays out 56 ambitious actions across areas including peace and security, global governance, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation and human rights that member countries pledged to achieve.

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Columbia SIPA and the Institute of Global Politics convened leading experts and UN practitioners for a conference on September 25 to discuss how the agreement’s lofty commitments and promises can be translated into concrete action. The inaugural “State of the World” event featured two panels – the first focused on the pact’s pledge to transform global governance and reboot the multilateral system, and the second on reform of the international financial structure.

Daniel Naujoks, professor and director of the International Organization and UN Studies specialization at SIPA, emphasized in his opening remarks the need to take the pact’s high-level, broad and often vague language and aspirations and implement the objectives into “clear, measurable, accountable activities.”

“Just because the pact is framed around these 56 actions does not mean that key actors will actually take actions, take sufficient action or action that will have an impact,” Naujoks said. “The question we need to ask is how can civil society, academics, and government representatives use the ideas in the pact as advocacy tools, as the foundation for lobbying, for convincing – how can we fill the actions with meaning?”

In the first panel, Michèle Griffin, UN policy director of the summit, spoke about the lengthy process of negotiating and finalizing the pact, noting that it was almost derailed by last-minute opposition from Russia and Iran. She explained how the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan have highlighted the need for a reevaluation of the state of multilateralism and institutions like the UN.

The Pact for the Future contained meaningful outcomes in several areas that hadn’t seen agreement in decades, Griffin said, including nuclear disarmament and UN Security Council reform, as well as outcomes in new areas like digital governance.

Panelists discussed calls for the Security Council to add two new permanent seats for African countries, and the necessity of an updated UN Charter to address the 21st century’s most critical threats, including artificial intelligence and climate change.

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“The UN Charter is essentially the same document that we have had since 1945, but of course the world has changed in dramatic ways since then,” said Augusto Lopez-Claros, executive director of the Global Governance Forum, explaining the document is no longer fit for purpose. “It does not mention the world ‘climate,’ there is no reference to what today is perhaps the most fundamental global catastrophic risk that we face, and that young people in particular are going to be the primary sufferers of our inaction.”

In the event’s second panel, participants discussed key issues that included reforms in multilateral development banks (MDBs), managing sovereign debt, the global financial safety net, and international tax reform. Panel moderator José Antonio Ocampo, who directs SIPA’s Economic and Political Development Concentration, stressed that the Pact for the Future is "one of the most ambitious documents in the history of the United Nations" and warned that "the big challenge is the implementation."

Iyabo Masha, director of the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development (G-24) that represents developing countries in the Bretton Woods Institutions, spoke about the lack of voice and representation for developing countries in global financial institutions, as well as the challenges they face in mobilizing climate finance. Masha highlighted the need to reform development financing in a way that it can provide more predictable and consistent financing for countries to be able to meet the SDGs and climate goals.

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David Passarelli, who serves as director of the Centre for Policy Research at United Nations University, echoed Masha’s comments, drawing on his recent report, “The Demand for a Fair International Financial Architecture.” He pointed out that the Global South in particular shares “common demands,” which include having a seat at the table and increased participation for underrepresented countries in institutions of global economic governance. “They want to see greater speed and agility in these institutions, and a greater scale of finance to combat global challenges and address legacy challenges like the anti-poverty agenda,” Passarelli said.

Shari Spiegel, director of the UN Financing for Sustainable Development Office, lauded the Pact for the Future for creating links between different fields and disciplines. “You need to bring finance and foreign affairs together,” she said, adding that she believed the language of the pact encourages and urges the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to give greater voice to developing countries.

The conference also featured two SIPA students, who shared their insights with the panels. Saru Duckworth (MPA-DP ‘25), who was involved in the Summit of the Future as a youth delegate, stressed that more needs to be done to enhance the presence and role of youth in global decision-making and long-term planning processes, especially at the grassroots level and during the Pact’s implementation. Ariadne Mael N. Putri (MIA ‘26) drew on her experience at Indonesia’s Finance Ministry, where she worked on the G20 and multilateral development banks before joining SIPA. She emphasized that there was a disparity of influence between impoverished versus wealthy countries in the World Bank and the IMF, and hoped that the UN with its many low- and middle-income member states can push for a stronger voice for developing countries in the emerging international financial architecture.

“Let's not be misled by the divisions within the United Nations, and recognize that at this important moment, the Pact for the Future may be a beautiful dream, but it's a dream shared by billions of people, and up to a point by most of their governments,” said Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Arnold A. Saltzman professor of practice in international and public affairs and director of the Kent Global Leadership Program on Conflict Resolution at SIPA.