Multilateralism is straining at the seams: Is global cooperation in retreat? |
Multilateralism is straining at the seams: Is global cooperation in retreat?
Over a decade ago, in a rare moment of global unity – rather difficult to fathom today – all members of the United Nations (UN) unanimously adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Agenda 2030, at the 70th session of the General Assembly in New York City.
This agreement marked the culmination of decades of global dialogue and ambition, beginning with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, followed by the Millennium Summit in 2000, the Johannesburg Declaration in 2002, and Rio 20 in 2012. Each of these milestones laid the foundation for a shared vision of forging a global partnership to advance peace, prosperity, and sustainable development for both the people and the planet.
Importantly, the SDGs attempted to build on previous global efforts and address their shortcomings. The Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that preceded them and had shaped development priorities for 15 years prior, achieved notable progress but were viewed as being narrowly focused on anti-poverty and public health in developing countries, and driven by a paternalistic top-down approach from external actors (largely UN agencies and donors).
The SDGs broadened the scope to ambitiously include decent work, climate action, affordable clean energy, peace and justice, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, among others. They evolved through a participatory bottom-up process and placed the responsibility for implementation on all countries, not just developing ones.
The year 2015 was marked by two other significant events.
The third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, underscored the importance of ramping up private and blended finance tools to achieve the SDGs. It highlighted that public flows alone would not be enough, popularising the phrase ‘from billions to trillions’. Additionally, donor countries reaffirmed their commitment to allocating 0.7 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance (ODA), an unlikely triumph given preliminary discussions a few years ago at the heels of the financial crisis had not been promising.
The second was the Paris Agreement in December in France, a legally binding international treaty on climate change with an overarching goal to limit the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius. It was understood that the developed world would take the lead on providing financial assistance, technology and capacity building to support the less endowed and more vulnerable countries for emissions mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Fast forward to date, development practitioners reflect on 2015 with somewhat of a nostalgia. What was observed then, some argue, was the peak of multilateralism rather than a take-off for a new era of global cooperation – an apex, not a beginning. It may yet be early to say whether this pessimism is warranted and whether the development agenda has derailed or simply detoured for now. But warning signs are blaring: only 18pc of the SDGs are on track, the financing gap to achieving them has been estimated at a staggering $2.5 to $4.5 trillion annually till 2030, and the latest global warming projections imply that there is a two-third chance that the current mitigation policies will only keep warming below 2.8°C by the end of this century.
For one, the designers of SDGs crafted a vision of a better world that fell short of the realities of politics, argues Professor Adam Tooze of Columbia University in the September cover essay for the Foreign Policy magazine. They, furthermore, failed to foresee how status quo powers would react when development eventually occurs. What would happen if, for instance, Mexico reached Canadian levels of GDP per capita, or Ethiopia and Nigeria achieved Turkish levels? Look no further than China, Tooze asserts, a remarkable development success story, which fostered neither greater trust nor reinforced the international rules-based order but has rather triggered a new Cold War. Development, he put forth, is fundamentally political and a more developed world is inherently more multipolar.
The rise in public sentiment of inward-looking, nationalist ideologies across rich democracies is maybe then not a coincidence. Instead, it reflects the growing belief that supporting development elsewhere comes at the expense of prosperity at home.
In March 2025, the US formally denounced the SDGs stating that such globalist agendas were incompatible with national sovereignty and had ‘lost at the ballot box’. Instead, the US called for ‘responsible’ development, emphasising that countries should take greater ownership of their national development priorities over compliance with global targets. When the US Agency for International Development became a casualty to this re-positioning, there was expectation that other donors and supporters of multilateralism (especially Europeans) would pick up the tab. Yet, it wasn’t the case. Indeed, aid budgets have been slashed across the board with Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimating global aid to fall by 25pc by 2027.
But politics aside, there are other critical factors that deserve attention. The past decade has been one of unprecedented polycrisis: global pandemic, increasing conflicts, mounting public debt burdens, and rising geo-economic fragmentation.
The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major setback to the SDGs, halting progress across multiple fronts. In 2020, an estimated 100 million children and........