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The reform process will require compromise, adaptability, persistence, and sustained political will. It would be unrealistic to expect a rapid or comprehensive overhaul.
Meaningful multilateral institution reform is urgently needed, as they are hopelessly bureaucratic, bloated, sclerotic, and politicized. The necessary change is so profound in scope that the reform process will take a decade or more to achieve, once implemented. While major changes to global governance systems are possible, or perhaps even likely over the long-term, they will probably come in the form of incremental adjustments that balance the interests of powerful nations with those of emerging and developing economies.
The reform process will require compromise, adaptability, persistence, and sustained political will. It would be unrealistic to expect a rapid or comprehensive overhaul, but steady progress toward more inclusive, efficient, and transparent institutions is achievable over time. The key will be to set realistic goals, build coalitions of the willing, and accept that genuine transformation will take many years, if not decades.
Once the multilaterals have successfully reformed to become more agile, inclusive, tech-enabled, and geopolitically attuned, their focus over the next 25 years should be on delivering tangible global public goods, strengthening resilience, and shaping a just, sustainable, and interconnected world. The multilaterals should prioritize issues that transcend borders and require collective action, such as climate stability and biodiversity protection, coordinating biodiversity restoration and regenerative agriculture across continents, enabling pandemic prevention and health equity, refocusing on achieving peace, security and human rights, and leading on cybersecurity and digital governance. As existential global challenges intensify, multilaterals must prioritize planetary needs that cannot be addressed by states acting alone and/or the private sector. These public goods transcend borders and require scale, legitimacy, and coordination.
But they must not stop there. It is essential that they strengthen the world’s ability to bounce back from shocks by creating shock-responsive financial instruments with the agility necessary to pivot at short notice. Coordinating the transition to resilient, regenerative, and inclusive food systems using AI to monitor productivity, trade flows, and risk should make a real dent in the global war on poverty. Leading massive investments in renewable infrastructure, digital connectivity, and climate-proof transport systems—especially in Africa and South Asia—continue to make a difference in access to energy. Mitigating the impact of cascading climate, food, pandemics, and financial crises can provide proactive shock absorbers to build resilience into global systems.
This is clearly a tall order. How can the multilaterals achieve all of it? By establishing agile, pre-agreed crisis response facilities with rapid disbursement capabilities. By implementing AI-based fiscal risk tracking dashboards and expanding concessional finance that rewards preparedness and resilience-building. By coordinating resilient seed banks, AI-based crop forecasting, and water data platforms that can aid in ensuring that emergency food reserves exist and are easily distributed. By setting up green hydrogen corridors and climate-resilient grids across continents to expand decentralized renewable energy access in the Global South. And by shifting from aid-as-charity to partnership-based development, thereby contributing to localized decision-making, mainstreaming indigenous and grassroots knowledge.
Radical transparency can be maintained via blockchain tracking, AI-generated impact dashboards, and public digital audits to close the global trust gap. The objective is participatory multilateralism, launching “Policy Labs” where civil society, youth, and indigenous leaders co-shape agendas while making all voting, lobbying, procurement, and evaluation data publicly accessible. Helping countries transition to net-zero, tech-driven economies without leaving anyone behind will catalyze just transitions. Financing and coordinating global green jobs programs in sectors like energy, construction, and conservation leads the way in green job creation. And scaling up education, reskilling, and digital capacity building, aligned with automation, AI, and decarbonization trends will build skills for the future.
Multilaterals should act more like platforms than clubs, creating mission networks that convene governments, cities, businesses, civil society, and indigenous communities around shared global challenges. They should serve as a connection point between the public, private, and academic sectors to pilot and scale breakthrough innovations and support regional innovation hubs that test and export context-specific solutions. Technology should be a public good, not a source of inequality or control. The multilaterals should serve as guardians of inclusive, safe digital spaces, funding affordable Internet, local cloud infrastructure, and low-Earth orbit satellites for hard-to-reach areas.
Knowledge and policymaking must flow bottom-up in a world of rapid change. They should create global frameworks for ethical algorithm deployment, while supporting capacity-building for low-income countries to participate in AI rule-making. They should encourage communities to vote on pilot program designs via digital platforms and set up permanent foresight units to model the future of migration, pandemics, or food shocks. The objective is to move from gatekeepers to enablers, siloed actors to network conveners, and outdated bureaucracies to real-time predictive institutions.
Imagine a world where multilateral institutions are no longer merely governing bodies defined by bureaucracy and veto politics, but are instead agile, inclusive, and AI-powered ecosystems—designed to anticipate global challenges, enable coordinated collective action, and uphold dignity, justice, and sustainability for all.
This vision aligns with growing calls for mission-oriented multilateralism and digital-first institutions that can integrate predictive analytics, inclusive design, and dynamic systems thinking to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.
Multilaterals like the United Nations, World Bank, and World Health Organization are beginning to embed AI and machine learning in crisis response, development finance, and early warning systems—offering a pathway toward a more responsive and equitable global governance architecture. They have a long way to go.
Hugh Dugan and Daniel Wagner are co-authors of the new book “The New Multilateralism: Making Multilateral Organizations Accountable and Fit in the 21st Century”.
