With multilateral institutions and the international legal order under pressure and facing an extreme liquidity crisis, states and civil society partners committed to collective security, sustainable development, human rights, and multilateral diplomacy must step up to defend and champion a stronger, reformed, and more capable global governance system. A growing financing gap and weakening political support for the Paris Agreement further threaten progress on tackling the world’s most urgent challenge: climate change. Against a backdrop of political division and mistrust among major powers, world leaders convened the Summit of the Future in September 2024 to renew international commitments and reimagine how aging institutions can better cope with twenty-first century risks and opportunities. The Global Governance Innovation Report 2025 (GGIR’25) offers tools for assessing and promoting implementation of the summit’s outcomes—the Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact, and Declaration on Future Generations—and explores how to overcome barriers to change ahead of the Pact’s official high-level review in September 2028. It further analyzes and offers novel policy and institutional reform proposals to grapple with the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution—an underemphasized issue at the summit. GGIR’25 finds a slow yet visible headway to date in realizing key goals of the Pact. Its success hinges on effective multilateral diplomacy, sustained United Nations (UN) leadership, civil society engagement, and a rigorous follow-through.
Global Governance Innovation Report 2025. Advancing the Pact for the Future and Environmental Governance. Creative approaches to advancing the Pact for the Future and revitalizing environmental governance through multilateral diplomacy and institutional innovation (Stimson Center)
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