At a Glance

👤 Active Candidates (8): Ivonne A-Baki (Ecuador; nominated by Tonga), Michelle Bachelet (Chile; nominated by Brazil and Mexico), María Fernanda Espinosa (Ecuador; nominated by Antigua & Barbuda), Rafael Grossi (Argentina), Rebeca Grynspan (Costa Rica), Olara Otunnu (Uganda), Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett (Guyana), Macky Sall (Senegal; nominated by Burundi and Senegal)

🗳️ Next Milestone: Next UNSC straw poll (date TBD)

⚙️ Current Phase: Interactive Dialogue with any other candidates who might emerge; continued public campaigning by candidates; secret ballots in the UN Security Council to winnow down candidates and see if there is a front-runner

Jump to:

Milestones • The Field • Straw Polls and Vetoes • The Politics • Reading and Resources

📅 Milestones

• August – September 2026: Subsequent Straw Poll Rounds — Security Council holds subsequent rounds of straw polls under the presidency of France (September). Expect color-coded ballots (distinguishing P5 veto-holders from the E10) during these rounds, likely later in the process (late September or early October).

• September 22–28, 2026: UNGA High-Level Week — World leaders gather in New York. A window for bilateral meetings and any “dark horse” candidate entries.

• October 2026: Formal UNSC Recommendation — The Security Council aims to adopt a resolution recommending a single candidate to the General Assembly. However, this could be delayed until late in the year (Kofi Annan did not make it out of the Security Council until December 13, 1996).

• October-December 2026: Transition — The 193 Member States will vote in the General Assembly (historically by acclamation) to appoint the 10th Secretary-General, allowing for a planned three-month transition period.

• January 1, 2027: Term Begins — The new Secretary-General officially takes office.

👤 The Field

Legal basis:

UN Charter Article 97 — “Appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” Modalities: GA Resolution 79/327 (pp. 6–8, 2025) sets timelines, eligibility, withdrawal rules, and ethics for campaigning.

Key rules:

• Candidates can be nominated by any Member State, individually or jointly (no requirement to be nominated by their own country) at any point until the next Secretary-General is selected and appointed.

• Member States can withdraw nominations; only one candidate at a time.

• Requirements: CV, vision statement, campaign finance disclosure. Candidates holding UN roles should suspend them or consider doing so.

Active Candidates

Withdrawn Candidates

📊 Reading the Field

With the first Security Council straw poll having taken place on July 30 (leaked results here, and our analysis here) and the second round on August 21 (leaked results here), both candidates and analysts now turn to making sense of each vote. Experienced watchers of the selection process suggest that zeroing in on "discourage" votes (the higher the number, the lesser the chances) is key. For those in the lead, figuring out where the “discourage” came from will be essential. As for what results mean for late entries, some analysts say that a strong late entry only works if the front-runner has genuinely stalled.

1. A Compact Field (For Now)

With eight candidates, the 2026 field is slim compared to the 2016 race, when 13 contenders were in the frame. However, because there is no official deadline for nominations, candidates can theoretically enter right up until the Security Council votes to recommend a single name.

2. Geographic Matters (Until It Doesn’t)

By the informal regional rotation system, it is traditionally the turn of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, which account for five of the eight active candidates (with the remaining two coming from Africa). Notably absent is the Eastern European Group (EEG) — the only UN regional group that has never produced a Secretary-General (and was passed over in 2016). (See the official list of UN Regional Groups for background.)

3. The Pressure for a Female Secretary-General

All nine Secretaries-General have been men. General Assembly Resolution 79/327 urged Member States to “strongly consider” female candidates. With five women among the eight active candidates, the Security Council will face public scrutiny if it passes them over in favor of a 10th male Secretary-General.

4. The Nomination Game

Member States are ignoring the traditional convention that a country only nominates its own national. Burundi nominated former Senegalese President Macky Sall, who was later also endorsed by Senegal. Antigua and Barbuda (GRULAC) nominated Ecuador’s María Fernanda Espinosa. Tonga nominated Ecuadorian diplomat Ivonne A-Baki. Multiple nominations protect candidates from withdrawals, keeping Michelle Bachelet in the race when Chile withdrew its sponsorship on March 25.

🎙️ The Public Campaign and Debates

Before the race moved behind the closed doors of the Security Council, candidates spent months on the public campaign trail. Between April and July, they presented vision statements at the General Assembly’s Interactive Dialogues, participated in independent hustings across London, Geneva, and Jeju, and faced off in a televised UN Town Hall in New York.

⚙️ How Straw Polls and Vetoes Work

While the General Assembly hosts public debates, the power to select the Secretary-General rests firmly with the 15 members of the UN Security Council. A P5 veto is decisive; broad support across the E10 and regional groups is critical.

To filter the field without triggering formal vetoes too early, the Council relies on a series of informal, secret votes known as straw polls.

1. The Early Rounds (Standard Ballots)

Starting in late July under the Presidency of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 15 Council members cast secret ballots for each candidate. Members can select one of three choices:

• Encourage

• Discourage

• No Opinion

While these ballots are strictly confidential in theory, the totals leak to the press within minutes, but mystery remains on how each country has voted. The initial rounds serve as a war of attrition to test candidate momentum and pressure underperforming “tailenders” to withdraw.

2. The Late Rounds (Color-Coded Ballots)

As the field narrows (typically in August or September), the Council switches to color-coded ballots to reveal where the permanent members stand. The E10 vote on white paper, while the P5 vote on red paper.

A single “Discourage” vote on a red ballot signals an insurmountable P5 veto. Usually, P5 countries push for colored ballots to be used as early as possible, while the E10 fight to keep the playing field level.

3. The Winning Threshold

To secure a formal recommendation from the Security Council to the General Assembly, a candidate must achieve two things:

1. Secure at least nine “Encourage” votes out of 15.

2. Receive zero red “Discourage” votes from the P5.

The Security Council’s recommendation is likely to specify a five-year term (”for a term of office from January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2031”), although some have argued for a single seven-year term.

At that point, it is over to the General Assembly to approve the candidate, by acclamation (usually) or by secret ballot (Rule 141).

4. The Transition

After the Secretary-General–designate is sworn in before the General Assembly, we will see the first senior hires (Deputy Secretary-General, Chef de Cabinet, key Under-Secretary-General posts). Expect them to reflect priorities, regional balance, and any horsetrading during the selection process.

The 10th Secretary-General’s first day in office is on January 1, 2027. Look out for their inaugural priorities speech later that month.

🏛️ The Politics

While we all focus on what candidates say in public, what matters most is what they say to the key players in the Security Council, and what the major powers are signaling to each other.

The race also does not happen in a vacuum, and global events could easily start to reshape the negotiations.

1. The Key Decision-Makers

• The P5 (The Veto Holders): China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States hold most leverage. Any one of them can sink a candidacy with a single red ballot.

• The E10 (The Elected Members): The ten elected members vote but cannot veto. However, their collective support is mathematically essential for a candidate to reach the nine-vote minimum threshold. The current E10 roster features Bahrain, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia.

2. The Power of the Presidency

The Security Council President is a monthly rotating chair who holds significant influence over the frequency, timing, and rules of the straw polls.

• July (Democratic Republic of the Congo): Oversaw the first standard ballot round.

• August (Denmark) & September (France): Under the presidency of Denmark, the second straw poll took place in late August, and probably more rounds will be held ahead of UNGA in September. History suggests that France will oversee the shift to color-coded ballots.

• October (Greece): The preferred window for the Council to resolve the contest and finalize its recommendation to the General Assembly.

• November (Latvia) and December (Liberia): The deadlock zone. If the Council fails to resolve a veto standoff by October, all bets will be off in November and December.

• January (Portugal): Five new elected members join the Council in January, including Portugal, which takes the Presidency. Don’t discount the nightmare scenario where no new Secretary-General is in office as the new year starts (because insiders haven’t and they’re already creating contingency plans).

3. External Events to Watch

The late stages of this race collide with international events that could shift strategic priorities if the selection runs late into the year, or may shape the Secretary-General-elect’s transition plans:

• September 12–13: BRICS Summit (India) — A major gathering of the Global South, pulling the focus of P5 members Russia and China right before the UNGA.

• September 22–28: UNGA High-Level Week (New York) — The ultimate diplomatic mixer where backdoor deals are made.

• October 4 (and Oct. 25 runoff): Brazilian General Elections — A critical election for Latin America’s largest power (and co-nominator of Michelle Bachelet).

• November 3: U.S. Midterm Elections — A domestic distraction for Washington if the race is not wrapped up in October as planned.

• November 9–20: COP 31 Climate Summit (Türkiye) — A major multilateral test for the UN system.

• November 18–19: APEC Summit (China) — Hosted in Shenzhen, this summit will demand diplomatic attention from the P5 right in the middle of the potential “deadlock zone.”

• December 14–15: G20 Summit (Miami) — The final major gathering of world leaders before the new Secretary-General’s term begins on January 1.

🔍 Reading and Resources

• UN Charter Articles 97-101 on the role of the Secretary-General and Secretariat

• GA Resolution 79/327 on the selection process, paragraphs 38–46

• Joint letter by the President of the General Assembly and President of the Security Council to Permanent Representatives on the process, inviting nominations

• Official UN Site on Secretary-General Selection Process

• Security Council Report’s report on the history of the selection process, December 2025

• 1 for 8 Billion Ultimate Guide and Candidate Policy Profiles

• Guide from Center on International Cooperation at NYU

• Proposals for process improvements from the Accountability, Coherence, and Transparency (ACT) Group (informal group of 27 Member States)

• Tracker of UN Member State support for a woman to be Secretary-General by 1 for 8 Billion, Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, and NYU Center for Global Affairs.

Abbreviations

• APG — Asia-Pacific Group

• E10 — Elected members of the Security Council

• EEG — Eastern European Group (has never had a Secretary-General)

• G77 and China — Group of originally 77 and now 134 developing countries

• GRULAC — Latin America & Caribbean (rotation turn)

• MS — Member State

• P5 — Permanent members of the Security Council

• PGA — President of the General Assembly

• PR — Permanent Representative

• PSC — President of the Security Council

• UNSG — UN Secretary-General

• UNGA — UN General Assembly

• UNSC — UN Security Council

• WEOG — Western European & Others Group

In last week's primer, we mapped the crisis in the UN development system. Today, we turn to the choices facing the incoming UN Secretary-General. Think of it as a Rubik’s Cube: a puzzle with six faces, where twisting any single side inevitably shifts all the rest.

Four of them describe the UN’s “product portfolio”: (1) how it sets global goals and norms; (2) its systemic and catalytic role; (3) the platform it provides for multi-stakeholder partnerships; and (4) its operational role in the field.

The other two faces are enablers of delivery: (5) how the system is configured and (6) the political and financial direction it receives.

The current wave of UN80 reforms focus heavily on the enablers. But without a shared vision of what the UN should deliver, they have become bogged down in process, in the “how” rather than the “why” and the “what.”

To give you a sense of what’s at stake on these strategic questions, here’s my take on the state of the debate, starting with the first face of the cube: how the UN sets global goals and norms.

Face 1: Goals and Norms

Goal-setting is one of the UN’s primary levers for normative influence, with former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailing the Millennium Development Goals as triggering “the most successful poverty reduction movement in history,” and for having “reshaped decision-making in developed and developing countries alike.”

The 2030 Agenda has not replicated this success. None of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and just 25 of the targets are likely to be delivered by 2030. Even when a target is on track, we often lack robust evidence that it has bent the curve in a significant way.

Designing a replacement goal framework will be high on the new Secretary-General’s to-do list in 2027, as Heads of State convene in New York for the final SDG Summit in September. Four options are floating around for a successor to the 2030 Agenda:

1. More of the same. Roll over the existing goals. This is the path of least resistance, and in my view, the most likely outcome.

2. Update and expand. Add new goals to reflect emerging priorities like AI governance. It’s true that the world has changed since 2015, but do we really need more than 17 goals?

3. Less is more. Cut the list down to focus on critical priorities. This fits the need for focus, but intergovernmental negotiations rarely produce simpler outcomes.

4. A graceful exit. Accept that the Global Goals era is over (an outcome that could happen by default if intergovernmental negotiations deadlock).

When work started on the design of the 2030 Agenda, Ban Ki-moon played an active role by appointing a High-Level Panel to produce a first draft of the SDGs. The next Secretary-General must decide early whether to make similar efforts to shape the debate, or whether to leave the argument to Member States.

To ground this decision, the new leadership team needs historical analysis of where, how, and why Global Goals have added value to national policy making. Otherwise, we will continue to treat goals as if they were magic spells, hoping that if diplomats write a promise on paper, it will conjure change in the real world.

Face 2: A Systemic and Catalytic Role

Many countries no longer value standalone development projects. Instead, they want the UN to play a systemic and catalytic role. This can mean:

1. Rewriting the rules of the game. The UN uses its legitimacy and convening power to address gaps in the sovereign debt architecture, scrutinize credit rating agencies, reform international taxation, or give the Global South more power in global economic governance. The Sevilla Commitment from the Fourth Financing for Development Conference gives the UN a mandate to play this role.

2. Navigating existing rules. The UN acts as a strategic adviser to host governments, helping them strengthen institutions, mobilize domestic resources, and attract international capital. This positions the Resident Coordinator (RC) as a deal broker, aligning multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and private investors behind a country-led development plan.

3. Generating global public goods (GPGs). The UN helps safeguard the operating systems on which economies depend. It acts as a “single source of truth” for understanding systemic risk, establishes the standards and regulations that enable interoperability, and provides the framework for collective action in domains like climate, health security, and AI.

The UN has potential in each of these roles, but it also faces pushback. It has long had aspirations to rewrite the rules of global economic governance, but many Western countries resist moves into territory they believe belongs to the G20, OECD, and International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Its track record is therefore restricted to worthy, but modest, initiatives such as the new Borrowers’ Platform, which provides a forum for countries to share debt management strategies, but will not push for debt restructuring.

When it comes to navigating existing rules, the UN’s funding model undermines its ambitions, as UN agencies compete against one another for resources rather than collaborating on the bigger picture. RCs often lack the tools, budgets, and specialized teams to help governments design bankable SDG investment projects, tap private capital, rewrite tax frameworks, and restructure debt. And the UN’s six transitions (launched at the 2023 SDG Summit) are yet to meet their promise to deliver investment at the scale needed to drive SDG acceleration.

Demand for global public goods is high, but the UN’s ability to generate them is constrained by geopolitical gridlock. In health and climate, consensus-based treaty-making is largely stalled, while traditional, government-led regulatory models fall short when it comes to borderless frontiers like AI. A new Secretary-General will not get early wins by championing GPGs in the abstract. They will need to identify breakthrough opportunities and build the alliances needed to exploit them.

In their first year, a new Secretary-General will face a flashpoint as negotiations culminate on a proposed UN tax convention (with a zero draft revealing predictable divides about its ambition and scope). They are also scheduled to convene a second biennial summit for the UN, G20, and IFIs to coordinate global economic policy. Debt, capital flows, and IFI governance will be among the tricky issues on the agenda. And they will need to decide how much political capital to spend on proposals to put the RC system on a more sustainable financial footing.

Face 3: The Coalition Builder

With Western aid budgets falling, some believe the UN should slim down its operational role and become a platform for partnerships instead. This is consistent with the growing reliance on minilateral groups, regional clubs, and issue-based coalitions in an age when formal multilateral frameworks are often blocked.

It also fits with the refrain that the UN must pivot from making goals to enabling their delivery. But this is not new advice: we are in year seven of a so-called “decade of action and delivery” that was launched at the SDG Summit in 2019. When so many delivery promises have been made and then forgotten over the past decade, you would be wise to be skeptical when you hear a new one.

The SDGs have had a partnership goal from day 1, while the UN created a Partnership Accelerator to drive “systems shifts” on the 2030 Agenda. But although impressive SDG-era partnerships certainly exist, any audit would conclude that the UN has failed to persuade others to unleash the energy, capital, and innovation at a scale that matches its “supremely ambitious” development agenda.

At least in part, this is a problem of culture. Successful platforms create the shared connectivity and standards that allow “fluid alliances” to work together to solve complex problems. But that requires lowering organizational boundaries, something that the UN’s territorial development actors struggle to do. They have throttled as many partnerships as they have accelerated, and have often launched UN-branded initiatives instead of elevating collaborations that others are best placed to lead.

To make this pivot, the new leadership team needs an analysis of what a “multilateralism-as-platform” model would look like in practice. That means extracting lessons from global platform businesses and innovative public sector models, alongside a learn-from-the-winners review of the SDG partnerships that delivered the most impressive results.

For a new Secretary-General, next year’s SDG Summit offers a final opportunity to convene an “army of doers” for the 2030 Agenda’s home stretch and its post-2030 successor. But that would only be the prelude to a deeper overhaul of culture, incentives, and strategy that would turn the UN into a platform for coalition-building. Once again, not a simple task.

Face 4: Operational Delivery

The fourth face of the Rubik’s Cube is where the money is largely spent: operational delivery in-country.

Some argue that it is time to sunset the UN’s operational role, stepping back so that domestic ministries, private capital, multilateral development banks, and grassroots organizations can take the lead on implementation.

I have sympathy for this view. If the UN wants to create the rules, provide the stadium, and referee the game, it is inevitably going to face resistance when it invades the pitch and tramples over other players in the scramble for project funding.

If the UN is going to shrink its operational role, its footprint must follow. The UN80 reforms call this moving toward a “tailored” country presence. But a new Secretary-General will find that “tailoring” is a polite euphemism for the work of restructuring or closing country offices where the UN no longer needs a physical presence.

But a full withdrawal is not on the table. With roughly 70% of the UN’s development and humanitarian budgets already concentrated in fragile and crisis-affected settings, the gravitational pull on the UN’s field presence is strong. Expect an ongoing shift to places where:

• Poverty is increasingly concentrated, institutions are weakest, and population growth remains strong.

• Risks are highest and regional or global spillovers are most damaging.

• The UN has comparative advantage as a delivery mechanism of choice, given that multilateral development banks and private actors struggle to spend money unless the UN plays a de-risking role.

But this shift risks forcing the UN into a trap. By concentrating its footprint in the world’s most difficult environments, it could be reduced to a subcontractor of last resort, spending other people’s money, bound by their rules, and accountable for results in places where they are incredibly hard to deliver.

There are two ways out of this trap. First, a new leadership team will have to confront the decades-long failure to get the UN’s development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding arms to deliver as one. If its comparative advantage in operational delivery lies in preventing conflict, building resilience, and supporting development in the world’s most dangerous places, that only holds if it brings all relevant tools to bear.

Second, the new leadership team will have to resurrect the prevention agenda that the current Secretary-General championed in his early years, but then abandoned. In 2018, the UN and World Bank’s joint framework for prevention (which I helped create) drove home the need for sustained engagement in the institutional reforms and social cohesion that are a counterweight to short-term firefighting.

That message still resonates. After all, the point of development isn’t to respond to emergencies, but to support societies strong enough to withstand them.

Twisting the Cube

It is when we move from the what to the how of Face 5 (the UN’s institutional configuration) and Face 6 (its politics and funding) that the Rubik’s Cube bites back.

Depending on their priorities for Faces 1–4, a new Secretary-General will need a different configuration across the UN Development System’s untamed ecosystem of funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices.

To make global goals matter again (Face 1), you need political skill, diplomatic heft, and intergovernmental savvy. To catalyze systemic change (Face 2), you need to upgrade your strategic, research, and technical functions. To build a platform for partnerships (Face 3), you need champions who can turn the UN into a low-friction space for others to work in. And to support fragile states (Face 4), you need integrated strategies combined with world-class logistical capacity and field-level operational strength.

Twist the cube to align one face, and you scramble the others.

If the UN were a multinational corporation, a new CEO would throw some money at a big management consultancy to set out all the options, spend a few weeks getting the board to make a decision, and then start the restructuring on a Monday morning. For better or worse, it would be done — redundancies and all — by the weekend.

But the UN doesn’t have shareholders. It’s an intergovernmental club. That means no Secretary-General can simply choose what makes the most strategic sense. They have to figure out what the political and funding environment will allow. Dedicate time to strengthening their license to operate. And encourage like-minded coalitions to generate the demand signals to which they can respond.

But all of that requires Member States to know what they want, debate their differences, and set a clear direction. Which might be the hardest puzzle of all.

Related Reading

The world is going to hell in a handcart. And while we love the UN at [Re]Group, multilateralism can be boring. Just ask any Third Secretary trapped in a windowless room arguing about square brackets in a Second Committee resolution.

That is why we try to find fresh ways to look at the international system and avoid writing in UN-ese wherever possible. If you are going to add us to your email overload, the least we can do is keep you entertained. (And if you are reading this but haven’t subscribed, please do so now!)

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This week, however, we broke our own rule and published a wodge of text — nearly 4,000 words long — on the UN’s development system. This primer brings together all the raw materials on one of the big challenges facing whoever takes over as the 10th Secretary-General.

So for this [Re]Group weekly, we are sharing an overview of the primer's key points in a more digestible (and entertaining) format. We follow up with the strategic questions that they raise for a new Secretary-General and their team — questions that we will unpack in a longer article next week.

Also below: the results of the second straw poll and a roundup of what has happened in a big week in the race to be Secretary-General.

The Development TL;DR

If you haven’t had time to read our primer, here are the main points.

1. The “funding crisis” is really a post-boom bust. The UN’s development and humanitarian arms are scrabbling for cash, but this isn’t an unprecedented drought, it’s the hangover from a post-2015 boom. Financing reached historic highs following the launch of the SDGs, and expanded further during COVID-19 and other recent emergencies. Current cuts look terrifying because they are being measured against what proved to be an unsustainable peak.

2. The World Bank is benefiting from the bilateral retreat. As bilateral donors gut their aid agencies (look at the UK’s FCDO), governments seem unconvinced of the return on investment from UN grant-making. Instead, they are shifting a growing share of (shrinking) development budgets into concessional loans. That creates a two-speed multilateral system where the UN is suffering far worse than the multilateral development banks.

3. “Hunger Games” competition kills strategic thinking. During the high-rolling years, the UN Development System expanded dramatically. Now, dozens of agencies, funds, and programs are competing against one another for a slice of a shrinking pie. It is tough to focus on long-term strategy when your days are consumed by meetings about the next cut in headcount.

4. The UN faces a delivery problem. Few of the Sustainable Development Goal targets are on track, and core goals like the elimination of absolute poverty and hunger have stalled or are actively reversing, damaging credibility. The UN80 reforms have triggered a series of political battles (mostly over proposed mergers), with limited debate on broader strategic questions.

Read the whole primer for more.

A Problem with Six Faces

In our primer, we quoted a long-ago UN report that compared sustainable development to a Rubik’s cube: “where a solution is impossible with a focus only on one side at a time: all sides must be considered in relation to each other if the puzzle is to be solved.”

The same image could be applied to the UN development system. It has become so complex that few people can see every side of the cube — let alone know how to turn all six sides at once.

Next week, we will explore each of the main strategic questions on development awaiting the 10th Secretary-General. For now, here’s my take on the six faces of the development challenge:

• Face 1: Global Goals and Norms. Should the UN roll over the 17 Sustainable Development Goals when they expire in 2030, add new goals (on AI, for example), prune the goals back to the essentials, or abandon the goal framework entirely?

• Face 2: A Systemic and Catalytic Role. Should the UN focus on helping developing countries rewrite and navigate global economic rules. And can provide Resident Coordinators with the tools they need to be deal-brokers and strategic advisors to governments?

• Face 3: The Coalition Builder. Should the UN become a platform for an “army of doers”? Or is its bureaucracy hardwired to compete with outside partnerships?

• Face 4: Operational Delivery. Should the UN scale back its operational role? Or should it position itself as the platform of choice in conflict and crisis settings?

• Face 5: Institutional Configuration. Given decisions made across these four dimensions, how should the 44 entities in the UN development system be configured to deliver results?

• Face 6: Politics and Funding. Beyond what makes strategic sense, what will Member States mandate and fund the UN development system to deliver? And do governments know what they want — or just what they don’t want?

Further Development

Reading List

Our development primer has lots of links to official sources, but here’s some of the best reading from external experts and commentators.

• Will this be the year of the big squeeze on the UN Development System? John Hendra looks at the financial horizon for the UN as major donors cut Official Development Assistance. He finds “an even further deterioration in the quality of the funding it receives thereby undermining its core mission and compromising the multilateral nature of UN support.”

• Beyond aid: a new vision for the UN development function. This paper from the German Institute of Development and Sustainability argues that incremental UN reforms have hit a ceiling and calls on the system to pivot away from project delivery toward knowledge facilitation and normative leadership.

• The Triple Disconnect: Power, Money, and Voice in the UN Development System. Philipp Schönrock, Frederik Matthys, Arelys Bellorini, and Anna Novoselova map out how decisions in the UN Development System are “increasingly shaped by informal power, financial leverage, and unequal access to influence.”

• Mapping of Multilateral Organisations’ Response to the Current Funding Environment. A survey from the Multilateral Performance Network across 31 multilateral agencies tracking the shift from “do more with less” to “doing less with less,” documenting staff layoffs, office closures, and programmatic scale-backs.

• The Future of International Development Cooperation: Insights from the Global South. A paper from Southern Voice synthesizes perspectives from researchers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It calls for Global South countries to act as co-designers and co-deciders in development cooperation, shifting from donor-driven aid toward long-term structural transformation and systemic financial reform.

The SG Roundup

• A New Candidate Entered the Fray. The field has expanded to eight candidates with the late entry of Ivonne A-Baki of Ecuador, who was nominated by Tonga.

• The GA Dialogues Resumed. Both A-Baki and Uganda’s Olara Otunnu stepped into the limelight this week. PassBlue has a writeup.

• The US Pushed Back on the PGA. Tensions have been bubbling for a while between the Security Council and the President of the General Assembly Annalena Baerbock. They spilled out into the open this week when US Ambassador Jennifer Locetta called out the PGA for “overreach and irresponsible actions.” She was especially upset at the informal audience survey at the July town hall.

• And the Security Council held the Second Straw Poll. Denmark (which has the presidency) pushed for the poll to be held today, August 21. Results are below, with those from the first poll in brackets so you can see what has changed. (Read our history of how the straw polls work.)

• Bad-Tempered August? Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett now leads the pack in “Encourage” votes, followed by a tied Rebeca Grynspan Mayufis and Rafael Grossi. She also boasts the joint-fewest “Discourage” votes. But what’s striking is that the Security Council seems to be in a much grumpier mood than the first round. Average “Encourages” dropped from 6.4 per candidate to 4.9, while “Discourages” jumped from 3.4 to 5.3. Maybe everyone needs a holiday.

From the Archive

ICYMI

JUMP TO: History, UN Development System, The Development Pillar, International Development in Crisis, UNDS Under Pressure, UN80 and the UNDS, The Development Playbook

One | A Bit of History

The UN’s mandate was never just about stopping wars. It was also designed to build the conditions for lasting peace. In the preamble of the UN Charter, signatories promised to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,” establishing the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to oversee global economic, social, and health matters.

As explored in our series of historical essays tied to the World’s Toughest Job podcast, the UN has played four distinct roles in the development space:

An operational provider

The UN development system has its roots in the support provided to newly independent nations emerging from postwar decolonization (A Mutual Defense Pact for Besieged States). The system has steadily grown in size, scope, and complexity, spending $21 billion dollars or a third of the UN's budget in 2024.

A champion for systemic change

Beyond its operational role, the UN has also influenced the global financial architecture, although this is a space where it has much less influence than International Financial Institutions (IFIs). In the 1990s, the UN challenged the "Washington Consensus," warning against the systemic risks of globalization and demanding a fairer international economic order (A Tale of Two Agendas). Today, through its work on Financing for Development (FfD), it has ambitions to overhaul the global financial system to make it more resilient, effective, and equitable.

A platform for partnership and for global public goods

As private capital began to eclipse state aid budgets, the UN shifted toward public-private partnerships (Kofi's Fragile Web) and the creation of global public goods (Nothing on Earth). Today, the UN plays a catalytic role in an ecosystem of multistakeholder coalitions, while creating many of the norms and standards that the world runs on, and the scientific and statistical truths that are used to make collective decisions. It also helps create global public goods in health, climate, and other areas.

A goal setter

The UN has become a prolific creator of goals and targets, from its goals for children in the 1990s, to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which expire on December 31, 2030. Goals play a central role in the UN's development playbook, allowing it to influence the strategies and programming of actors at all levels from the global to the local. (Coming soon: our history of the UN and global goals.)

Two | What is the UN Development System?

The United Nations Development System (UNDS) is an umbrella term encompassing UN funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices that have “the promotion of development and the welfare of developing countries” as their primary objective.

There are a lot of these entities — around 44, depending on how you count. They fall into four broad categories:

• Funds and programmes: Operational bodies like the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), World Food Programme (WFP), and UN Women.

• Specialized agencies: Autonomous intergovernmental organizations with their own governing boards, membership, and assessed budgets, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Labour Organization (ILO), and UNESCO.

• Secretariat departments: Central departments responsible for policy analysis and intergovernmental support, such as the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) or UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

• Regional commissions: Regional bodies — such as the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) — tasked with fostering economic integration and regional policy dialogue.

Managing this sprawling architecture is hard. Responsibility for herding the cats is distributed across three levels, with recent reforms proposing additional coordination at a regional level:

• The UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) brings together the executive heads of 38 UN development entities to align policy and strategic direction.

• On the ground, the UNDS operates through UN Country Teams (UNCTs), which encompass all UN agencies present in a host nation.

• Following the 2018/2019 reforms, UNCTs are led by an independent Resident Coordinator (RC) — the highest-ranking UN development official in-country, reporting directly to the Secretary-General.

Three | The Development Pillar

Over the years, the UN's leadership has tried to bind development to the organization’s other mandates. As Kofi Annan put it:

“We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.”

This framing formalized the so-called “three pillars.” In some ways, development stands alone, due to its political mandate, operational machinery, and funding structures, but its success is linked to other pillars: peace and human rights.

To further complicate matters, the transition from the MDGs to the SDGs marked a shift from development to sustainable development (with its three dimensions: economic, social, environmental), a concept that is itself linked to peace and security (“there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development”).

The 2030 Agenda is rife with promises to deliver its goals in a “universal, indivisible and interlinked” manner. In other words, to implement all 17 goals and 169 targets as a single integrated package in all countries, whatever their income levels. Some critics believe the failure to deliver the SDGs is the result of a failure to escape from siloes. Others, however, argue that integration can lead to paralysis and hinder practical, sector-specific delivery.

For the UNDS at an operational level, the challenge of integration becomes especially important in “crisis-affected countries and their neighbours,” where 70% of all country-level spending is now concentrated (mostly through the humanitarian budget). In these contexts, it believes that progress will only be possible if its development programming is integrated with its work to tackle humanitarian crises, build peace, and secure human rights.

Cross-pillar approaches can be unpopular with Member States, however, due to fears about “securitising development,” the dilution of national sovereignty when conditions are attached to development programs, and the potential for compromising the neutrality of humanitarian workers.

Four | International Development in Crisis

The debate on the future of the UN’s development work is shaped by a broader crisis in the international development system.

1. Money is too tight to mention

After Elon Musk boasted about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” other traditional donors — including France, Germany, and Sweden — used the political cover to cut their own development programs.

Long gone are the days when the UK lectured others about spending 0.7% of its Gross National Income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (ODA). It is now targeting just 0.3%, with “savings” redirected to defense and security spending. Only four countries now meet the 0.7% target (Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden).

Global ODA fell by a record 23.3% in 2025. It is projected to drop by a further 6.9% in 2026 and to keep falling at least until 2028. Many believe we have entered a post-ODA world, asking whether the aid industry is dying, or it is simply on “life support.”

The reaction to the fallout from the ongoing U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict is noteworthy. During past shocks, development finance has surged as donors open the purse strings to help vulnerable countries respond.

In the current emergency, donors say they lack fiscal space to spend more. Some are cannibalizing development budgets to fund emergency humanitarian relief, but there is little new money on the table. That leaves countries exposed to food, fuel, and fertilizer price spikes without access to additional finance.

2. More strings, and less for the poor

As the overall pie shrinks, the flows of funding have also changed.

Grants have been cut more aggressively than loans as development finance flows through IFIs. This brings stricter conditionality and heavier debt burdens for recipient nations.

Poverty eradication was the leading priority in the 1990s and 2000s, but those days are long past. Russia’s invasion transformed Ukraine into the single largest recipient of aid on record, while over a fifth of global ODA (22%) was spent within donor countries in 2023, predominantly on the costs of hosting refugees.

This shift has diverted billions away from the poorest nations, hollowing out programming for health, education, and other core social services, and diverting resources away from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and sub-Saharan Africa.

Bilateral aid to these countries is projected to drop by around 11% in 2026. Humanitarian aid and civil society funding are projected to see cuts of around 40%, while funding for tackling communicable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is projected to drop by more than 50%.

As Western countries retreat, non-traditional donors are playing an increasingly important role in development cooperation, through South-South and “triangular” cooperation, which has potential to inject “trust, equity and ownership into development efforts.”

However much of this emerging assistance remains “invisible in data, not captured by traditional development metrics.” Neither is it structured or scaled to fill the voids in broader development funding that the Western exodus has created.

3. A shifting balance of power

The decline of ODA reflects a fracturing of the political consensus that underpinned international cooperation in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The Global North has turned inward. When traditional donors spend overseas, their aid is increasingly transactional — tied to national security, trade, or migration objectives rather than to poverty reduction.

The United States, for example, has recently promoted a Trade Over Aid Initiative, arguing that it “represents an opportunity to build a development model based on national sovereignty, mutual economic benefit, and the proven success of free-market principles.”

At the same time, countries in the Global South increasingly reject a traditional aid model that is perceived as paternalistic and accused of ignoring national ownership and domestic political choices.

Budget support gained popularity around the turn of the century, as a mechanism for fostering “country ownership,” but may have provided donors with greater influence over domestic policy. Its decline has been associated with a more antagonistic relationship between donors and recipients, and a greater reliance on fragmented project funding.

A further point of friction is the failure to tackle systemic imbalances in the global financial architecture. The Sevilla Commitment — the most recent FfD agreement — focused on overhauling development cooperation, addressing sovereign debt crises, and scaling up investment.

But the agreement was not signed by the United States, which claimed that the proposed reforms interfered with the governance of IFIs (like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and objected to calls for tripling multilateral lending capacity.

Meanwhile, many developing nations and civil society groups felt the final agreement was watered down to reach a consensus. The outcome failed to address “concerns about the undemocratic structure of the international financial architecture” or to tackle issues like the sovereign debt crisis, the need to regulate rating agencies, or the obstacles blocking access to capital markets for countries in the Global South.

Five | UNDS Under Pressure

The last wave of reforms (2018/19) aimed to position the UN development system as a “trusted, reliable, accountable, and effective partner to countries for achieving the 2030 Agenda.”

The UN believes it has largely fulfilled this promise. It reports that more than 90% of governments believe that UN Cooperation Frameworks align with their priorities and that UNDS support is effective.

According to the Secretary-General, this has translated into “more people receiving food assistance; more children gaining access to education; more individuals and families benefitting from social protection; and more national institutions better able to deliver on development.”

Impact has also been delivered at a lower cost, with the UN saying it has exceeded its own targets for efficiency gains. UN entities saved $981.1 million in 2025 “by streamlining services and supply chains, increasing the use of shared services and other measures.”

But while Member States praise the new Resident Coordinator system, they have proved reluctant to fund it, leading to a shortfall of $45.7 million for coordination.

Critics argue that UN’s development work remains fragmented, that it has failed to respond to a rapidly changing external environment, and that it may not be sustainable in the current funding environment.

1. Falling ODA budgets have hit the UN hard

Multilateral ODA fell by 12.7% in 2025 and is projected to fall by 3.4% in 2026. This is the worst drop since 1992-1997 (a period which pushed the international development system towards a renewed focus on poverty reduction and prepared the ground for the MDGs).

The UN saw its core contributions fall by 27% in 2025, with further cuts expected. By 2028, UN funding is projected to remain about 18% lower than when implementation of the SDGs began.

Some donors have partially balanced their cuts to bilateral aid with a shift toward multilateral channels. While bilateral aid to Sub-Saharan Africa fell by 7.2% from 2021-2024, multilateral support grew by 23.4% (but only enough partially to compensate for bilateral donors pulling back).

But this is not benefiting the UN, as donors direct funding as concessional loans through the development banks rather than grants through the UN system. Funding to the World Bank increased by 6.4% in 2025, and regional development banks saw an 11.9% rise (although both are likely to experience cuts in 2026).

This has left UN development actors facing “not a temporary liquidity issue but a structural contraction,” with some agencies losing a third of their core funding.

UN agencies have tried to retrofit their plans for a constrained funding environment, but cuts have often been unplanned and reactive, “skewing priorities toward short-term outputs, inhibiting horizontal collaboration, and undermining oversight and accountability.”

As a result, the UNDS risks being reshaped more by a funding emergency than a long-term strategy for what it is best placed to deliver and where.

2. The financial crisis is increasing fragmentation

In 2024, the UN Funding Compact restated commitments to financing “a more strategic and responsive UN development system.”

Its core promises, however, have not been kept. Member States committed to providing 30% of their voluntary contributions as core funding, but by 2024, more than 90% of funds to some UN agencies were earmarked, often with increasingly “hard” restrictions.

The heavy reliance on project funding works against collaboration, as earmarking “fragments programming and drives competition among entities for donor resources.” As UN entities compete for a slice of a shrinking cake, they are less able to come together to act as a strategic and trusted advisor to the governments they work with.

In a 2025/2026 survey, 58% of host countries say that they view competition among UN entities as unproductive and most disagree that it leads to an increase in overall funding for their country.

Cuts have also rendered the UN’s presence in some countries barely viable, with some country teams having fewer than 50 personnel and many entities maintaining stand-alone offices even though they implement minimal programming.

The funding crisis also undermines the ability of Resident Coordinators to drive strategy and coordination, given they lack financial leverage over agencies that have every incentive to follow edicts from their own headquarters and governing bodies.

In the most recent survey, 65% of UN Country Teams say they have a joint fundraising strategy, but only 44% of Resident Coordinators and 35% of UN Country Team members view these strategies as effective. In most cases, the UN is not able to make a joined-up case for its investment priorities.

Budgets remain overwhelmingly in the control of individual UN entities. Only 31 programme countries channel at least 15% of their non-core development spend through inter-agency pooled funds, while pooled funds receive only 12.4% of non-core funding, well below the target of 30% by 2027 in the Funding Compact.

3. Delivery promises have been broken

Behind the funding crisis lurks the specter of a failure to deliver results that matter to people and societies.

The contrast with the MDGs era is marked. A few years before these goals expired, the UN was in a position to hail “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history” and to hold summits “to accelerate action and get the job done by 2015.”

As the SDGs enter their final phase, the mood music is very different. Just 15% of the 169 targets are on track, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any of the 17 goals will be delivered in full. The SDGs need a rescue mission, more than an acceleration agenda.

Even core poverty objectives are under threat, with the 2030 Agenda pledge to “leave no one behind” largely ignored.

Progress on the elimination of absolute poverty has stalled and will reverse after 2030 on current trends. More than half a billion people are projected to be hungry in 2030, while the number of children out of school has increased for seven years in a row.

This is not, of course, all the UN’s fault, but the failure to deliver the 2030 Agenda could have serious consequences for its future role in development.

In reaction, the UN has tried to find ways of simplifying delivery of the SDGs, launching six “transitions” (spanning food systems, energy, digital connectivity, education, jobs, and climate) at the last SDG Summit in 2023.

The ambition behind these transitions was to move away from siloed projects and towards entry points that could solve the interconnected “Rubik’s cube” of development.

But while the UN can point to some successes — from expanding social protection initiatives and digital learning platforms to the launch of the Global Accelerator on Jobs and Social Protection — the transitions are yet to demonstrate the “catalytic and multiplier effects” that were promised at launch.

Six | UN80 and the UNDS

Through the UN80 Initiative, the Secretary-General has proposed a series of reforms to channel a larger share of the UN’s resources into development results, while positioning the UNDS as a partner to host countries as they deliver the SDGs.

Key proposals include:

• Knowledge and technology as an enabler: Rolling out Joint Knowledge Hubs (Work Package 7) — initially on trade and regional integration, productive transformation, and strategic foresight — alongside an Expertise-On-Demand mechanism (WP8) to deploy specialized skills where countries need them most. This would be supported by a Technology-Accelerator Platform (WP15) designed to scale system-wide digital solutions.

• Operational integration: Implementing a Unified Services Roadmap (WP14) to integrate the administrative, supply chain, and back-office functions of UN agencies to reduce duplication and costs.

• Structural consolidation: Proposed mergers between UNDP and UNOPS, as well as UNFPA and UN Women.

• Field-level reconfiguration: Redesigning field presence through more tailored and strategic UN Country Teams (Work Package 5). This includes a “Shared Platform Initiative” to co-locate Resident Coordinators and Humanitarian Coordinators in crisis settings, as well as new Regional Platforms for Integration that bridge the humanitarian, development, peace, and human rights pillars.

• RC Funding: Because voluntary contributions and the 1% coordination levy have failed to provide reliable funding for the RCs, the Secretary-General is pushing to fund the system through the regular UN budget. He has also proposed moving from a “one-size-fits-all” structure to configurations tailored for standard, complex, and multi-country settings.

• Funding and mandate discipline: Delivering on the Funding Compact’s targets (including the goal to reach 30% core funding), alongside tools for better mandate creation and review under General Assembly resolution 80/251.

• Global financial reform: Urging implementation of the Sevilla Commitment, to provide meaningful debt relief to developing nations facing shrinking fiscal space and rising debt.

UN80 has been dominated by a massive row about the mergers, as institutions fight to maintain their independence and their supporters worry about the dilution of their mandates. This has sucked oxygen away from other reforms. Back-end fixes are mostly moving ahead, but the direction of travel on field-level operational shifts remains unclear.

Some believe that UN80 reforms are inevitably facing headwinds because Member States are yet to reach a consensus on strategic questions (“What do we want the UN to deliver on development over the next decade?”).

And even in the best case, UN80 will deliver incremental improvements in the capacity of the UN to deliver its development goals, leaving the bigger strategic challenges to whoever takes over as Secretary-General in 2027.

Seven | The Development Playbook

In Friday’s Regroup Weekly, we will take a first look at the strategic questions awaiting the new Secretary-General. But before zooming out, it helps to look at the calendar and what opportunities it offers the new leader to reposition the UN’s development work:

• The Priorities Speech (January 2027): The new SG’s first address to the General Assembly will obviously cover a range of issues, but it is an opportunity to lay out a high-level vision for development and begin generating political momentum for the SDG Summit.

• UN80 Implementation (ongoing): Behind the scenes, the new SG will inherit the implementation of the UN80 reforms, and probably an ongoing struggle to reach agreement on the most contentious proposals.

• Annual Development Report (Spring 2027): Each year, through the QCPR process, the SG presents an annual overview of the UN development system’s transformation. While data in the 2027 report will be largely already locked in, this is a platform for the new administration to signal priorities for system-wide reform.

• SDG Summit (September 2027): The High-level Political Forum (HLPF) in July paves the way for the final quadrennial SDG Summit. Heads of State will convene to squeeze whatever progress they can out of the 2030 Agenda in its last three years. They will also probably trigger the intergovernmental process of designing the post-2030 agenda.

• QCPR Review (Spring 2028): The SG publishes the comprehensive report for the four-year QCPR cycle. This is the administration’s opportunity to set the agenda and propose the operational machinery needed for the next decade.

• QCPR Resolution (December 2028): The General Assembly will adopt the 2028 QCPR resolution. If successful, the new SG will gain a mandate to close out the 2030 Agenda and lock in a modernized structure for the UN’s work in development in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

What’s Coming Next

• This Friday’s [Re]Group Weekly: The strategic questions awaiting the next Secretary-General as they navigate the future of UN development.

• Coming Soon: Our deep dive into the history of the UN and global goals

Jump to:

Interactive Dialogues • Independent Debates • UN Town Hall • Upcoming Events

What is Debate Season?

Ahead of the Security Council’s straw polls (read our guide, Less Solid Things), candidates made their pitch to the General Assembly and took to the road to build support for their vision for the future of the UN.

Debate season opened in April with the UN General Assembly’s Interactive Dialogues, where candidates presented their vision statements to Member States. It reached a crescendo on July 23 with the UN Town Hall in New York — a presidential-style debate bringing candidates together on the same stage.

In between, candidates engaged in a series of independent debates and forums organized by think tanks and civil society across London, Geneva, and Jeju Island, and are expected to continue presenting their ideas at other public events as the straw polls continue and if new candidates enter the race.

1. Interactive Dialogues in the General Assembly

The Interactive Dialogues gave each candidate the opportunity to present a vision statement and take questions from Member States and civil society.

Each session lasted for three hours, split into segments on leadership and UN 2.0 reform, as well as peace and security, development, and human rights. There were around 230 interventions and more than 600 questions. Half the questions came from regional blocs, just over a third from individual Member States, and the rest from civil society.

Our analysis shows that major themes (in order of prominence) were: UN 2.0 reform and financial liquidity; peace and security and preventive diplomacy; the international financial architecture and sovereign debt; development and vulnerable geographies; climate, oceans, and small island developing states; and human rights and international law.

• Michelle Bachelet (April 21, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Rafael Grossi (April 21, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Rebeca Grynspan (April 22, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Macky Sall (April 22, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• María Fernanda Espinosa (June 15, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett (June 18, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Olara Otunnu (August 19, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Ivonne A-Baki (August 20, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT)
  Vision Statement | Video | Transcript

• Bloomberg: Race for next UN chief heats up with first round of interviews

2. Independent Debates and Hustings

After the official UN General Assembly Interactive Dialogues in New York, the race for Secretary-General moved onto the public stage through a series of independent hustings and forums co-hosted by civil society networks, think tanks, and international platforms. The main events were in London, Geneva, and the Republic of Korea.

The public debate season opened in Central Hall Westminster (where the first General Assembly met in 1946), with a civil-society-driven event that grilled candidates on integrity pledges, UN structural reform, and whether the world needed more of a “General” or a “Secretary.”

Next up, a debate brought together the “International Geneva” ecosystem, with questions centered on international humanitarian law, human rights, global governance reform, and elevating female leadership in multilateralism.

In South Korea, finally, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited candidates to “write an epic chapter in the history of the United Nations” before they fielded questions on hard security, nuclear non-proliferation, AI governance, and climate resilience.

London: The Leader the World Needs

The Leader the World Needs was hosted by the United Nations Association - UK (UNA-UK), with support from RELX. on May 28 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. BST. The event took place at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster in London.

After a high-level panel, BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet interviewed each candidate.

• Introduction and panel (with Margarita Gómez, Executive Director of Southern Voice; , former UN Deputy Secretary-General; and , Writer and Historian)
  Video | Transcript

• Michelle Bachelet
  Video | Transcript

• María Fernanda Espinosa
  Video | Transcript

• Rafael Grossi
  Video | Transcript

• Rebeca Grynspan
  Video | Transcript

After her entry into the race on June 25, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett spoke with the BBC’s Mark Lobel on Thursday, July 16:

• Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett
  Video | Transcript

• Devex: The nominees for UN secretary-general have spoken. What did we learn?

Geneva: The Candidates Debate 2026

The Candidates Debate 2026 – #NextUNSG was hosted by GWL Voices, in collaboration with the United Nations Foundation, on June 9, 2026. The debate took place at the Ivan Pictet Auditorium at the Maison de la Paix in Geneva.

Michelle Bachelet, María Fernanda Espinosa, and Rebeca Grynspan spoke with journalist Zeinab Badawi, while Macky Sall appeared on video:

• Video | Transcript | Trailer | Photo Library

• Pass Blue: Fact-checking a UN Secretary-General candidates’ debate in Geneva

Republic of Korea: Reimagining Multilateralism

Reimagining Multilateralism – A Dialogue with UN Secretary-General Candidates was co-hosted by the Jeju Peace Institute, Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future, United Nations Foundation, and GWL Voices, as part of the annual Jeju Forum. The debate took place on Thursday, June 25 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. KST.

Ban Ki-moon, eighth UN Secretary-General, and Cho Tae-yul, Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea were distinguished guest speakers.

María Fernanda Espinosa, Rafael Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, and Macky Sall spoke with journalist Sharon Gale. Michelle Bachelet participated via a pre-recorded video message.

• Video | Transcript

• Yon Hap News Agency: At Jeju Forum, UN chief candidates vow to reclaim relevance

Latin America: Regional Dialogue

The Regional Dialogue on the Future Leadership of the United Nations, hosted by the Government of Uruguay (in its capacity as Pro Tempore Presidency of CELAC), the GQUAL Campaign, and CEPEI, took place on August 3. This dialogue brought regional candidates together to share their visions and proposals for the future of the UN. Michelle Bachelet, María Fernanda Espinosa, and Rebeca Grynspan attended in person, while Rafael Mariano Grossi and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett were virtual.

Journalist Carmen Aristegui moderated the conversation, while various ministers from the region asked the candidates questions.

• Video | Transcript

3. UN Town Hall

Hosted by the Office of the President of the General Assembly (Annalena Baerbock), in partnership with Bloomberg, the UN Town Hall was held on July 23 in the General Assembly Hall, New York.

All six candidates formally nominated at the time participated in person — Michelle Bachelet, María Fernanda Espinosa, Rafael Mariano Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, and Macky Sall. The moderators were Bloomberg’s Haslinda Amin and Romaine Bostick.

• UN TV | YouTube | Transcript

Structured like a presidential-style debate, the format featured two-minute opening statements and a series of timed thematic rounds. Discussions focused primarily on navigating Security Council paralysis, reforming the UN and addressing the UN’s liquidity crisis, modernizing the global financial architecture, and responding to cross-cutting threats such as the security impacts of climate change and the establishment of governance frameworks for artificial intelligence.

During their closing statements, candidates outlined their priorities for their first 100 days in office.

• Macky Sall: Focuses on appointing a diverse leadership team, strengthening preventive diplomacy, reviewing UN mandates and structures under the UN 2.0 initiative, addressing the liquidity crisis, and launching consultations on the post-2030 development agenda to “restore trust and put the UN on a path to become more agile”.

• Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett: Prioritizes deploying a high-competence senior team with gender and geographical balance, advancing Secretariat reforms, applying mediation tools, addressing humanitarian logistics, and engaging financial institutions on concessional funding, “in partnership with Member States... not speaking to the IFIs from a pedestal”.

• Rebeca Grynspan: Plans to establish a high-level Good Offices Support Unit to return peacemaking to the UN’s core, overhaul internal incentive structures, and stabilize finances through Resolution 78/270, declaring that “momentum is set on day one.”

• Rafael Mariano Grossi: Focuses on establishing a direct dialogue with staff and Member States while separating executive action from legislative mandate, insisting on “brutal honesty to recognize what we can do” over “statements, speeches, good intentions.”

• María Fernanda Espinosa: Prioritizes forming a cabinet based on “competence, competence, competence, plus one — integrity,” accelerating UN 2.0 implementation, addressing unpaid member dues, and establishing an early action hub, vowing to be visible in crisis zones “carrying the UN flag.”

• Michelle Bachelet: Focuses on balancing senior appointments, securing assessed financial contributions, reviewing Chapter VI peacemaking mechanisms, and expanding development and climate financing to make the UN “leaner but muscled.”

• France 24: UN leadership candidates outline their visions ahead of Secretary-General race

• Bloomberg: Pre-debate commentary by the UN Foundation’s Elizabeth Cousens (transcript)

4. Upcoming Events

We will add upcoming events as we hear about them and update with video/transcripts after they end. Get in touch if there is anything we’re missing.

In the fourth episode of World’s Toughest Job, our podcast co-production with Foreign Policy, we explored the UN’s first-ever resolution, which failed in its efforts to regulate atomic energy because the reigning superpowers had zero interest in ceding control.

We covered this story — with Truman, Stalin, and Oppenheimer in starring roles — “for the light it sheds on the governance of another revolutionary technology: artificial intelligence.”

The episode asked “whether the UN can mobilize the Global South, middle powers, and civil society to ensure that global governance isn’t captured by Silicon Valley lobbying or superpower rivalry.”

A lot has happened in AI governance since then.

This edition of the [Re]Group Weekly brings you up to speed on the developments in a defining challenge for the 10th Secretary-General in their first year.

It features a new interview with podcast guest Dr. Nur Laiq, who is about to take up a new post at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the International Peace Institute.

Previously on… AI Governance

There have been four big developments in recent weeks. Three took place in conference rooms in Geneva, while the last happened in the real world — and underscored the Secretary-General’s warning that, “We may be the last generation able to set the terms on which humanity and machines coexist.”

1. The “IPCC for AI” publishes its first paper

On July 1, we got an interim report from the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

You’re not supposed to call this the IPCC for artificial intelligence, but it plays a similar role to the climate body, using evidence to give policymakers the “common ground from which the world can begin to act.”

📖 Read the panel's full report, its main findings, and (if you're short of time) a mini-manifesto from its co-chairs, Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa.

2. The Global Dialogue on AI Governance (July 6–7)

The independent panel’s report provided homework for the ministerial delegations, tech lobbyists, experts, and civil society representatives who turned up for the UN’s inaugural dialogue on how to govern AI.

This was a test to see if global consensus is possible — both on an overall governance framework, and on priorities for immediate action to manage the risks and promote more equitable access to the opportunities AI creates.

🎥 If watching four hours of speeches is your idea of fun, the UN has video of all the speeches from the opening session. Or you can skim our edited transcript to find what was said on the issues that interest you the most.

3. The AI for Good Global Commission

Sponsored by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), this newly minted commission pairs heads of state with tech executives from heavyweights like Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

It is co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, with ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin as Vice-Chair.

The commission’s remit is to figure out how to harness AI for sustainable development by closing the infrastructure and skills gap, securing public-private commitments to use AI to tackle global challenges, and “promoting public trust through responsible AI.”

🔍 Read about the Commission's members (and a critique of its lack of civil society representation), along with an overview of its proposed work.

4. Memo from the Real World

While Geneva was busy with AI governance, Silicon Valley offered a reminder of who still holds the cards.

The decision by Anthropic to halt the release of its new “Mythos” model — deemed too dangerous for public consumption — was a curtain-raiser for the Geneva dialogue, leaving a private CEO to make a global governance call on behalf of the entire planet.

Since then, the stakes have grown further. We have seen autonomous AI agents break out of testing sandboxes, orchestrate complex cyberattacks, and actively deceive their human creators.

✉️ Read the open letter from 1,300 industry insiders calling for an international effort to "develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."

Beyond Rage against the Machine

So where do things now stand?

Levels of Uncertainty are Off the Scale

When faced with a novel governance challenge, the international system usually has years to react (as you’ll see below in our history of ozone diplomacy). But AI models and autonomous agents are evolving faster than institutions can track them — and their uses are diversifying even more quickly.

• António Guterres, UN Secretary-General: "The internet took 15 years to reach a billion people. AI got there in two. And these systems are no longer tools awaiting instruction... Our institutions were built to govern machines that follow commands. They are not ready for machines that decide."

• Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly: "Never before has the pace and scale of change been so blinding…. If we are frank, who among us in this room... really understands the depth and scale of what is happening with AI model architecture, autonomous agents..."

• Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Panel Co-Chair: "There are still no known technical guarantees that AI will follow human instructions, norms, or laws. And as it gets more powerful, this becomes more of a problem."

• Maria Ressa, Scientific Panel Co-Chair: "Please do not wait for certainty that will not arrive in time to matter. These times demand courage from you."

My experience is that many governments are FREAKING OUT, in part because they can't agree how much they should worry and about what. This creates an opening for any platform capable of inching the world toward even the shakiest consensus about how to calm these fears.

The Geopolitics of State Survival

The U.S. and China dominate AI hardware and the models, accounting for roughly 75% and 15% of global compute respectively. But while the U.S. was "engaged, but at a distance" in the dialogues, China was pushing an open source approach and supported G77 calls for shared global governance of AI.

At the same time, most countries find themselves locked out of the rooms where AI policy is being shaped. That's creating demand from the Global South — and parts of the Global North — for a more equitable approach.

• António Guterres, UN Secretary-General: “The computing power, the data, and the talent behind the most advanced systems are concentrated in a handful of companies and in a handful of countries. Most nations, including many developing countries, have had no say in decisions that will shape their futures.”

• Mohamed al-Menfi, Libyan President: “The African continent represents 1.4 billion people, 10% of the global population, who have fewer than 2% of global data centers… We also refuse to have our data exploited without us being able to benefit from it.”

• Mikheil Kavelashvili, Georgian President: “This unprecedented concentration of power must not become an instrument of totalitarian control, a new digital tyranny that infringes upon national sovereignty and individual liberty.”

As we have argued before, fears about AI could change the way we think about national sovereignty. Instead of worrying that multilateralism will dilute their power, countries may start to see the international system as the only mechanism capable of protecting their capacity to govern.

Get a Grip

In the wake of the Geneva dialogue, the Atlantic Council’s Konstantinos Komaitis argued that “the world increasingly agrees that artificial intelligence needs governance, but we completely disagree on what that governance is ultimately meant to achieve.”

This has created a strategic deficit on two levels. On the one hand, progress towards a “big picture” governance framework will be blocked without what Komaitis calls a “North Star.”

But on the other, progress may be fastest where there are concrete opportunities to tackle a smaller part of the overall problem. For example: energy consumption (projected to grow by 15% annually), child safety (a breakout issue in Geneva), and lethal autonomous weapons.

• Balaraman Ravindran, Scientific Panel member: “Scaling laws in training and growing inference workloads are driving unprecedented computational demand. This translates directly into surging energy use, water consumption for data center cooling, and rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

• António Guterres, UN Secretary-General: “My main concern is with lethal autonomous weapon systems. Let us call them what they are: killer robots. Machines selecting and engaging their target and taking a life without human control and judgment... it must be banned by international law.”

• Maria Ressa, Scientific Panel Co-Chair: “A 14-year-old boy died in 2024 after months of conversation with a chatbot... When he was in crisis, [the chatbot] never broke character, never suggested he call for help. His mother testified before Congress that it encouraged him to take his own life... This is what AI risk looks like once you stop describing it in the abstract. A mistranslation, a vulnerability, a child.”

The UN’s record on the nuclear threats shows what can be done with a piecemeal approach. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1 (I) tried to solve everything and failed. What followed was the more modest Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has played a sizable, if underappreciated, role in keeping the peace.

Maybe we will see AI follow a similar path.

Dr. Nur Laiq

Five Minutes on the Future of AI Governance

We sat down with Nur to discuss her views on the intersection of policy, geopolitics, and AI, and what the next Secretary-General must do in their first 100 days to get to grips with AI governance.

On why governance can’t wait:

"For legislators and policymakers at the UN, AI is not just a technological issue; it is a question of power, of equity, sovereignty, safety, who profits, who regulates, and who gets a say. The technology is moving fast, but we have been managing power for millennia. That gives us a foundation to act."

On the Global South and the threat of the "Splinternet":

"The UN can champion 'plug-and-play' standards so countries avoid getting locked into a single geopolitical bloc or a single company's ecosystem. The bargain must mandate local ownership. We need to share a language that empowers governments to say no to extractive arrangements, especially in procurement."

On the need for coalitions of the willing:

"The SG's role is not to replace state power, but to create political space for inclusion, safety, interoperability, and access. You don't need all 193 States to agree on everything. The UN can identify overlapping interests through formal blocs and informal groups of friends. We can bring in civil society and the private sector."

On the next Secretary-General’s first 100 days:

"A new Secretary-General must arrive with a clear framing: AI governance is a core planning issue for the next decade of multilateralism. We need to build an accountability machine — common standards, public disclosures, and public registries — rather than just hosting broad conversations about principles."

Navigating the AI Frontier

Reading List

Here are four things to read on how governance, development, and power intersect with artificial intelligence.

• The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance The Simon Institute’s debrief on the Geneva meetings is as thorough and insightful as all their work. It maps out where member states converged, where divisions remain, and recommended next steps on the AI governance agenda.

• People, Power, and AI: Rethinking Development for the New Era by Claire Melamed and Paul Ladd. This UN Foundation white paper moves past the binary of existential risk versus utopian growth to explore how AI is actively reshaping inequality, public accountability, trust, and environmental limits, using the 2030 Agenda as its framework.

• Geopolitics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jake Sullivan and Tal Feldman. I am always struck by the gulf between the multilateral and national security debates on AI. If you can get past the paywall, this Foreign Affairs essay sets out scenarios that hinge on three questions: whether the world is accelerating towards superintelligence or not, whether a state can ever catch up if it falls behind, and how hard the US and China will fight to get to the frontier first.

• How AI Will Change the Global Balance of Power by 2035. from the Council on Foreign Relations, a new survey of 350 foreign policy experts (mostly from the U.S.) on what the global order will look like in a decade. While experts are split on whether AI capabilities will remain concentrated or diffuse, over 80% believe that global AI governance will remain fragmented, with different markets and governments adopting competing standards for safety, security, and accountability. A serious AI accident or a U.S.-China bilateral agreement are viewed as the most likely catalysts for a more cohesive governance framework.

The SG Roundup

There were not many public developments in the selection process this week, but you should definitely read this excellent piece by Alec Russell, the foreign editor of the Financial Times: Wanted: a leader to rescue the UN.

Next up: Olara Otunnu’s interactive dialogue with the General Assembly on August 19. The Danish chair of the Security Council also hopes to hold a second straw poll on August 21, although some are betting that it will be delayed.

ICYMI: Who Will Save AI From Itself?

To round out this week’s focus on AI, make sure you read this week's [Re]Group essay Who Will Save AI From Itself?

The dominant narrative in Silicon Valley is that tech companies innovate in a vacuum while slow-moving governments struggle to catch up.

Dr. Nur Laiq — who is joining the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as a Fellow and also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the International Peace Institute — challenges this view.

In her analysis, public policy is not just “background noise,” but drives the tech economy. Her research examines “both continuity and disruption in the development of policies related to public goods, innovation, regulation, and geopolitics.”

Viewing the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence through this geopolitical lens, Laiq warns against the “wild west” approach to competition between global superpowers.

As she recently argued in The National Interest:

Dr. Laiq is currently exploring this dynamic in a forthcoming book with the working title Move Fast, Break Things: The Policy Origins of Today’s AI Race.

Yet where others see inevitable fragmentation, Laiq sees an opening for the multilateral system. She argues that the UN can anchor global AI governance while leveraging the technology for sustainable development, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution.

We recently hosted Laiq on World’s Toughest Job, where she offered an optimistic take on the UN’s position to govern AI. With the inaugural Geneva dialogues now completed, we sat down with her again for a follow-up conversation to assess the actual state of play.

We focused on three challenges: whether Geneva delivered momentum or was just a talking shop, how the 10th Secretary-General can broker coalitions as the superpowers guard their tech sectors, and how the UN can promote interoperability to avoid countries being locked into an AI Cold War.

[Re]Group: The Geneva dialogues are over, the Scientific Panel has published its first report, and the ITU has launched its new commission. How do things stand on the UN’s push to govern AI?

Nur Laiq: Geneva achieved momentum by sharpening the conversation. It showed where convergence is actually possible — child safety, for example, emerged as a potential governance floor.

It was also notable that the Secretary-General put two other major issues on the table: human oversight of weapon systems and the environmental footprint of AI. By 2030, he said that data centers could use more electricity than all but five countries on the planet. His call for an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative — demanding companies disclose their carbon, land, and water footprints — is an important step.

Geneva exposed divergent approaches among Member States, but that is fine. Policy always requires political coalitions to get off the ground. Geneva delivered a clearer political map. The Global South, especially the G77 plus China, reiterated their support for the UN as a primary forum for global AI governance, grounding their position in sovereignty and development interests.

The next task is turning those ideas into concrete mechanisms.

[Re]Group: The Independent Scientific Panel noted that the evidence base for AI will likely come together too slowly to make policy decisions. Usually, the multilateral system has the luxury of time to gradually form a consensus. How can the UN keep up with the speed of change?

Nur: For legislators and policymakers at the UN, AI is not just a technological issue; it is a question of power, of equity, sovereignty, safety, who profits, who regulates, and who gets a say. The technology is moving fast, but we have been managing power for millennia. That gives us a foundation to act.

The first decision for the next Secretary-General is whether they are willing to spend political capital on AI. If so, it must be treated as a priority for the first 100 days.

A new Secretary-General must arrive with a clear framing: AI governance is a core planning issue for the next decade of multilateralism. We need to build an accountability machine — common standards, public disclosures, and public registries — rather than just hosting broad conversations about principles.

The strategic question then becomes how the Secretary-General and the UN system can use their convening power, procurement leverage, and moral authority to ensure AI develops within a public interest framework, rather than being ruled entirely by concentrated private and geopolitical power.

[Re]Group: The United States wants to maintain national control, while China is promoting open source and a shared governance approach. There’s then a massive bloc of consumer countries terrified of being locked out. If you were Secretary-General expending political capital, how do you navigate that geopolitical map?

Nur: The Secretary-General’s role is not to replace state power, but to create political space for inclusion, safety, interoperability, and access. You don’t need all 193 States to agree on everything. The UN can identify overlapping interests through formal blocs and informal groups of friends.

We can bring in civil society and the private sector — there is a real constituency in Silicon Valley deeply concerned about safety, as we saw with the recent Pacing the Frontier letter signed by tech insiders.

But we will need strict transparency and conflict-of-interest rules to ensure that cooperation with the tech sector doesn’t turn into institutional capture.

[Re]Group: This looks like an accelerated version of what the climate world built. Formal negotiations provide structure and overall objectives, and offer a platform for launching alliances with capacity to deliver on priority objectives. You then build an accountability framework around the whole thing. But that is a colossal political lift. Do people in the AI space realize how hard it is to build machinery of this sort?

Nur: The climate analogy is right. That is why the open question remains whether the next Secretary-General wants to spend the political capital and secure the financial backing required to pull it off.

Looking at the candidates, it isn’t clear yet. Michelle Bachelet talks about AI through a human rights lens; Rebeca Grynspan approaches it through a development lens. Others have had less to say. There is an ongoing debate within the UN about whether to focus solely on the original Charter issues of peace and security, or to expend serious capital on AI.

The UN already has a framework for a fair AI bargain: the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Secretary-General can use the SDG machinery, national voluntary reviews, and development banks to demand that Big Tech’s models support SDG delivery and respect common standards for access and safety.

The UN can also champion “plug-and-play” standards so countries avoid getting locked into a single geopolitical bloc or a single company’s ecosystem.

The bargain must mandate local ownership. We need to share a language that empowers governments to say no to extractive arrangements, especially in procurement.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Related Reading

AI enthusiasts imagine a heaven in which artificial intelligence accelerates the discovery of new medicines, helps farmers grow more food on less land, and gives every child access to a brilliant, patient, personalized tutor. Others fear a hell, where AI entrenches inequality, ravages the environment, and ultimately produces uncontrollable systems whose interests diverge from ours.

The public, increasingly, take the pessimistic view. People don’t trust AI and fear what it will do to their jobs, their privacy, their children’s futures. Even in a country like India, rapid AI adopters and prolific AI builders, anxiety is rising sharply. In the United States, home of the AI industry, the hostility has turned physical. Hundreds of community groups are organizing against data centers, blocking more than $152 billion worth of investment in 2025 alone. The homes of prominent AI executives have been attacked.

But look at what people do, as well as what they say: AI is the fastest-spreading technology in human history.

The AI industry itself has its own version of this paradox. CEOs warn of AI dangers, to the point of calling for a halt to AI development, but keep building it, for fear that someone else will get there first. The only thing worse than hell, it seems, is hell built by a competitor.

Companies will always be pulled toward profit; the incentives aren’t there for them to solve this problem on their own. Sometimes they chose to behave responsibly, as when Anthropic chose not to release the powerful Mythos model to the public, fearing it could be used for cyberattacks. But it’s hardly reassuring to a bank in Botswana or a hospital in Honduras that the security of their systems depends on a Silicon Valley CEO choosing to do the right thing. People are looking to governments to resolve the paradox. Eighty-two percent of people in a global survey wanted more government regulation of AI, and less than half of them trusted companies to regulate themselves.

But few are rising to the challenge. Elected politicians are trapped in their own version of the AI paradox. They want and need the positive version of the AI story to be true so they can persuade electorates that opportunity is at hand, as the economic outlook elsewhere darkens. They are dealing with electorates who increasingly don’t believe them and want action. And they face tech CEOs telling the story that they are in a race to the death, and the only thing stopping a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI, so build, build, build.

Trapped in this dilemma, elected leaders — national and local — are most comfortable with immediate, focused actions like banning things (recently: social media for under-16s and data center construction). Talking to the public about the complexity of tradeoffs and decisions involved in AI, and acting seriously to resolve them, is something that few have contemplated.

But the reckoning is coming. AI is creating new risks in four areas: inequality, accountability between states and citizens, trust in institutions, and environmental breakdown. In a new paper, my co-author and I argue that humanity is not powerless in this quickly changing landscape. If politicians can’t or won’t take people’s fears seriously, even as they start to materialize, then the vacuum will be filled and they won’t like the results. U.S law enforcement bodies are already warning of the risk of large-scale unrest driven by anti-tech extremism. AI is just one serious incident away from a huge global backlash.

Politicians have more power than they think to create the positive world they want but, captured by the CEO’s narrative of the “AI race,” they are reluctant to seriously work together to create it. This is a mistake. Both the UN Secretary-General and the Pope have correctly identified that only global cooperation can take the heat out of the intensity of AI competition, offer companies and governments the security they need to create incentives to prioritize safe innovation, lead to shared information on risks and vulnerabilities, and safely manage any crises that occur.

It’s fashionable to argue that geopolitics makes this impossible. But history suggests otherwise. As the risks of climate change or nuclear apocalypse became too big to ignore, and beyond any single government’s ability to handle alone, it brought governments to the table. The machinery for that future AI moment is being built in the UN right now, with the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance held in Geneva in July and the Independent Scientific Panel on AI publishing its preliminary report. It’s been an uphill battle to get these established, with several countries opposed and many more quietly skeptical that the effort will pay off.

But these are the institutions that might save AI from itself. They will bring people around the table if a crisis hits. They will be the forum for finding solutions and brokering trust between competitors. The question is if governments will invest in them before the crisis that makes them wish they had.

Related Reading

In their public appearances, candidates to become Secretary-General have talked a lot about the need to win back trust in the United Nations.

To find out more about that, you need to read and ’s recent article for [Re]Group on what the polls tell the next Secretary-General.

Their synthesis of recent data shows that the public believes in the need for international cooperation, but doubts the international system can deliver real world results.

“The UN cannot rely on public relations to find its way out of a deficit of trust, because communications cannot substitute for action,” they write. “Rebuilding confidence will require tangible performance, clear alignment with public priorities, and greater visibility for real-world successes.”

I am a big believer in this delivery mantra. All things being equal, we invest our money and political capital in governance systems that demonstrably outweigh their costs.

But I am not convinced the UN gets the most bang for its buck by pitching its performance directly to the global public — at least, not outside the countries where it still has a visible footprint on the ground.

The overwhelming majority of people (wisely) spend as little time as possible thinking about multilateralism and outsource their opinions to national intermediaries.

Trust is built when domestic politicians, the media, public intellectuals, and campaigners see the multilateral system playing an essential role in one domain or another, and when they pass that message on.

This is an argument for the UN to spend its scarce resources on strategic rather than mass communications. That means substantive conversations with a few thousand actors in each country — those who can only achieve their own objectives if the international system also does its bit.

But there are some ordinary people who spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about the UN. The problem is that many of them are the international system’s most implacable enemies.

This is not new. Few people remember Agenda 21, a non-binding agreement from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, but it looms large in the minds of those who believe it offers a blueprint for a totalitarian one-world government.

This is a conspiracy theory that smolders for years before igniting again. As it did when the Tea Party movement swept through the Republican Party in the 2010s. And again, when it was remixed with anti-vax and anti-5G messaging during the COVID pandemic.

Before you discount the Black Helicopter brigade as marginal actors, remember the warning from our piece on Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the sixth UN Secretary-General:

“Underestimate this movement at your peril, as it is now winning more battles than it loses. It sunk its teeth into climate science during the Climategate leaks, which contributed to the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. It mobilized across Europe to torpedo the 2018 Global Compact for Migration.

And it then weaponized the COVID-19 “infodemic” against the World Health Organization and its pandemic treaty. The United States threatened to leave the WHO twice — and finally found the exit.”

Populist movements thrive on conflict with an external enemy. And when that enemy lurks beyond national borders, the narrative gains mythic power: a faceless, rootless foe that will not rest until it has erased national borders, destroyed local customs, and trampled on individual freedoms.

So how does the international system respond when it triggers a populist backlash? The answer I’d have been tempted by was: “By sticking its head in the sand.”

But this week in [Re]Group, we published an interview with academics Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark. In their new book, Global Governance Under Fire, they argue that the multilateral system is not a passive victim in the culture wars. Instead, it fights back, using a mix of appeasement and marginalization to survive.

When faced with a populist playbook, the UN and other international organizations might quietly appease a hostile leader by softening their demands, or sideline them by finding new partners and funding streams. They can also help populist leaders negotiate behind the back of their constituents, or mollify those constituents by presenting their own work as a defense against predatory elites.

I sat down with Allison and Richard (before a storm knocked out Allison’s internet) to find out how the next Secretary-General can populist-proof the UN.

Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark

Five Minutes on Surviving the Populist Wave

An interview with Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark, authors of Global Governance Under Fire

[Re]Group: In your book, you distinguish between politicians who need an international enemy to rail against, and the red-meat populists who genuinely want to tear the system down. How does that distinction play out?

Allison Carnegie: We posit that populists could have one of two motives... One could just be opportunism. They see that the electorate has become more populist, and they channel that anger toward the elites because it helps them electorally... This is versus other populists who might be genuine populists, who have these deeply held ideological beliefs — anti-elitism, pro-state sovereignty... Regardless of which factor is more motivating, you get the same result, which is this anti-international, anti-global outlook.

[Re]Group: The UN is now choosing a new leader. If the next Secretary-General wanted to populist-proof the UN, and you had an hour to advise them, what would you say?

Richard Clark: The obvious one is you don’t want to be over reliant on any one country... Diversifying the base of support is vital. It could mean partnerships with the private sector, or even individual states in the U.S. like California giving money to UN climate agencies. That populist-proofs you...

Additionally, international organizations need to improve their reputations directly with the public. If citizens don’t know what public goods they are receiving, it’s really hard to appreciate them.

Top of the Populists

Reading List

Here’s what else to read if you want to understand how populists build their movements by targeting a globalist elite.

• The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. If you want to understand why populists succeed where traditional politicians fail, Benjamin Moffitt argues you must stop looking at their policies and start looking at their performances. “Populist leaders must negotiate the precarious balance between appearing as ordinary on one hand, and extraordinary on the other.” [excerpt]

• Counter Culture: How to Resist the Culture Wars and Build 21st Century Solidarity. Before her appointment as the UK’s new development minister, Kirsty McNeill co-wrote this Fabian Society pamphlet setting out “solidarity playbook” for those trying to take the sting out of the culture wars. “Culture war issues are those concerned with identity, values and culture which are vulnerable to being weaponised by those concerned with engaging and enraging people on an emotional level, not coming to a policy settlement on a political level.” [pdf]

The SG Roundup

After last week’s straw poll, the field still stands at seven candidates. The Security Council’s next ballot is expected on August 21.

Before then, the newest candidate in the race, Uganda’s Olara Otunnu, is expected to take part in an interactive dialogue in the Trusteeship Council Chamber on August 19 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m EDT.

However, as of a couple of days ago, he was still in Kampala, seeking a travel waiver from the U.S. Government to navigate Ebola-related travel restrictions so he can bring his campaign to New York.

Otunnu is keeping his pitch focused on the basics. “I put out a sketch which I have called ‘Outline of Agenda for the United Nations,’” he says. “Even though the UN is now occupied with a number of issues across the board, the most important single mandate for the United Nations remains the issue of peace and security.”

If you can get past the paywall, I recommend The Economist’s take on the race: Al Capone would recognise today’s world order. That’s not good. It is a candid assessment of the “gangsterish” world the next Secretary-General will inherit.

The UN doesn’t need an Eliot Ness, it argues, but a pragmatist who knows how to navigate great power politics to get things done.

And, in case you missed it…

A look back at our analysis of recent polling data, revealing a clear message for the UN’s next leader on how to rebuild trust.

The candidates running to be the 10th UN Secretary-General agree that trust — or more to the point, the lack of it — is a threat to the future of multilateralism.

Across a packed debate season, they have spoken of how citizens lack confidence in the UN’s ability to improve their daily lives. They have also pointed to the growing friction between Member States — especially those squaring off in the Security Council — and how this dysfunction threatens international cooperation.

The data bear this out. As and found in their recent analysis, the global public still backs the idea of international cooperation, but doubts the current system can actually deliver results on their priorities in areas such as peace, jobs, and health.

Unsurprisingly, the candidates have zeroed in on a prescription for the trust deficit: delivery. The UN needs to earn greater trust by doing a better job.

But there’s a catch. For populist opponents of multilateralism, the problem isn’t that the international system is failing to deliver. The problem is that they see exactly what the system is delivering, and they don’t like it.

Whether the target is net zero emissions, reproductive rights, vaccine mandates, or bailout conditionalities, populist critics don’t see the international system as toothless; they view it as a threat to national sovereignty, local customs, and individual freedoms.

They want less delivery, not more.

So what do international organizations do when effectiveness triggers a backlash? A new book, Global Governance Under Fire, by academics Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark, answers this question.

The Populist Playbook

You can’t counter a threat you don’t understand. Before getting to the solutions, Carnegie and Clark provide a readable primer on how populism works and why it is interested in the international system.

They use Cas Mudde’s characterization of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” — it doesn’t try to answer every question, which means it can be picked up and adapted by those who live in very different parts of the ideological spectrum.

The core creed is simple. A nation’s “true people” are locked into “perpetual conflict” with outsiders, some of whom pose a threat from the margins (immigrants, for example), but others of whom are politicians, journalists, experts, scientists, technocrats, and other establishment elites.

This anti-elite worldview makes the international system a perfect target for populist anger, Carnegie and Clark write. Multilateral bodies are “meddling institutions that impose foreign agendas and undermine the will of their domestic constituencies. By attacking global elites, populists position themselves as the authentic voice of ordinary citizens, amplifying their appeal at home.”

But populists don’t just complain from the sidelines; they actively aim to hollow out multilateral institutions and reduce their capacity to undermine the will of the “true people.”

Carnegie and Clark break this playbook into a spectrum of disruption:

• Toxic Communication: The cheapest weapon in the arsenal. Scapegoating international organizations through speeches and social media to erode public trust and score cheap points with the domestic base.

• Information Manipulation and Effort Withholding: Deliberately hiding vital economic or health data, skipping critical meetings, and simply ignoring rulings to hobble an institution’s ability to function.

• Co-optation: The inside job. Installing loyalists in key positions to actively derail an organization’s original mandate from within.

• The Nuclear Options: When lower-level sabotage isn’t enough, populists escalate. They slash funds, launch competitor bodies, or execute the ultimate disruptive act: exit (think Brexit or the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement).

What sets Carnegie and Clark’s work apart is that they don’t view international organizations as passive victims. In their analysis, international organizations are strategic players that actively fight back, maneuver, and defend their mandates — and the authors have an impressive body of empirical evidence to show how it’s done.

They also highlight the dangers inherent to these defensive maneuvers. Strategies like appeasing hostile leaders might keep them at the table, but they can erode the institution’s legitimacy in the eyes of cooperative Member States.

We caught up with them to talk about how institutions survive when they’re in the line of fire, and what all of this means for the next Secretary-General.

⛈️ Note: Allison joined for the beginning of the conversation before a storm knocked out her internet, leaving Richard to walk us through the rest of their research.

How Institutions Respond to Populism

[Re]Group: In your book, you distinguish between the performative end of populism — politicians who want an international enemy to rail against — and the red-meat populists who genuinely want to tear the system down. Tell me a bit more about that distinction.

Allison: We posit that populists could have one of two motives, or a combination, that led them to become populists.

One could just be opportunism. They see that the electorate has become more populist, and they channel that anger toward the elites because it helps them electorally. Maybe they don’t have genuine views, but are just riding a populist wave.

This is versus other populists who might be genuine populists, who have these deeply held ideological beliefs — anti-elitism, pro-state sovereignty. What we think is probably the norm is some mix of those two motivations.

Regardless of which factor is more motivating, you get the same result, which is this anti-international, anti-global outlook.

[Re]Group: You describe a four-part defensive playbook that international institutions use to counter populists. They target either populist leaders or their domestic constituents, and use two primary methods: appeasement (offering concessions to retain engagement) and sidelining (working around or obscuring engagement).

Is this playbook deliberately constructed and deployed, or is it an ad hoc reaction when an organization finds itself in the line of fire?

Richard: Our framework is a way of sorting disparate responses into a set of categories, but the impression Allison and I got is that it’s pretty ad hoc. You have a challenge from an actor like Donald Trump, and in the moment, you say, “How do we respond to this? What do we do to keep him in the fold?”

If it’s an ad hoc approach, they might choose a suboptimal strategy or rely too heavily on one strategy in ways that damage legitimacy.

If you choose appeasement — giving more vote share, more money, or bigger loans to populist leaders consistently over time — countries that are cooperative will take notice. They’ll think this is bias, and it reduces legitimacy. A comprehensive ex-ante strategy allows you to balance your responses in ways that preserve that legitimacy.

[Re]Group: Let’s look at a concrete example of that balance. You use UN peacekeeping as a case study in how Secretary-General António Guterres and his team executed a mix of appeasement and sidelining.

Faced with a threat from the American administration to cut the UN peacekeeping budget, you say that the Secretary-General framed UN reforms in business-friendly terms (”leaner, more efficient”), while cutting $600 million from the budget. At the same time, he sidelined the U.S. by forging stronger peacekeeping alliances with Europe and Latin America and utilizing technology like drones or satellites to replace U.S. intelligence.

This kept the U.S. in the tent and led to only a modest funding cut, allowing operations to survive intact, with Trump even publicly praising Guterres’ efforts.

Take me through how this example worked.

Richard: Appeasement is an effort to keep the relevant actor in the fold. Peacekeeping is a space where a number of organizations are offering services to countries. The fear is always that if a leader is unhappy, they can go elsewhere. So, some baseline level of appeasement, or saying you’re working with the leader on amenable terms, is necessary.

At the same time, the UN is cognizant that giving too much to skeptical leaders can reduce perceptions of effectiveness and legitimacy. So, some attempt to sideline in order to diminish the impact that skeptical leaders have on your operations is also important. It’s a nice case because it demonstrates the need to balance keeping the country in the fold while limiting the damage they can cause to institutional legitimacy.

[Re]Group: How do you feel the UN came out of this experience? Did it manage to protect its legitimacy and license to operate?

Richard: Peacekeeping is a tough area for legitimacy because there’s this long history of incidents on the ground — like sexual abuse among UN peacekeeping missions. Legitimacy is already teetering, and there are new actors entering this space who can plausibly offer peacekeeping services without this troubled history.

It’s necessary for the UN to think really hard about how to balance these categories to preserve the legitimacy that’s left. They actually performed quite well on this dimension because they were careful not to lean too hard on appeasement and not look like they were giving in too much to hostile leaders.

Why Populists Drive a Harder Bargain

[Re]Group: You have data showing that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reduces its conditionality substantially for populist leaders. Reading it, I thought that one of two different things could be going on. Maybe it just indicates the international financial institutions don’t need as much conditionality as they think they do. Or maybe they’re just giving a better deal to governments who make more of a fuss — which creates incentives for everybody to negotiate harder. How do you unpack that?

Richard: I do a lot of work on the IMF, and bargaining between countries and the Fund. The research is leverage-based. The IMF tries to extract as many reforms as they can — privatization, neoliberal reform — and countries try to avoid them because the short-term economic and political costs are severe.

The literature suggests that leverage drives reductions in conditions. If you’re an elected member of the UN Security Council, or if you vote with the U.S. more often in the General Assembly, you get big cuts in conditions because the U.S. is more willing to intervene on your behalf.

But increasingly, scholars are thinking about domestic political variables. If you have a pro-labor government, it’s hard to push through labor reforms, so you get fewer labor conditions. If you’re a populist, you’re able to credibly say, “I’ll just not take this loan and default,” or “I’ll go to China.”

The credibility of this opposition enables them to bargain harder than another country would.

[Re]Group: We recently had Ambassador Philip Thigo, Kenya’s tech envoy, on our podcast, and he talked about his country’s popular uprising against IMF conditionality, and how it has reordered the way Kenya deals with the international system. How does that kind of on-the-ground populist anger fit into your model?

Richard: The IMF is the most extreme case you can get for populist anger and opposition. There’s a lot of research on African populism and resistance to international courts, which disproportionately rule against Sub-Saharan African countries.

I’ve done research on geopolitical literacy in developed versus developing countries. If you ask someone in Kenya, Ghana, or Zambia how much aid they get from various countries and what the conditions are, they can tell you. In a survey we did in Ghana, citizens could pinpoint that China demands one thing and the U.S. demands another, and they trade off those conditions.

It makes sense because foreign policy decisions impact their daily lives — infrastructure, jobs, etc. The Kenya case was a perfect storm of high literacy about what the IMF does and the politicization of these institutions.

Fear and Loathing Inside the Machine

[Re]Group: You conducted dozens of interviews with people working inside the international system. Can you give me examples of how individuals are grappling with populist attacks on a personal level?

Richard: There was a lot of anger among many of the folks we talked to, and it cut in two directions.

One is: “We are a public goods provider for these countries, and now we have ungrateful leaders that are pulling back.” The sense is that financial contributions are a great deal for these countries.

There were accusations that populist leaders are ignorant and take for granted the things international organizations do. It’s only after a pandemic comes that they understand they need something in place.

Another thread was real fear about the demise of these institutions. When there are no mandatory financial contributions, it’s easy to see how the organization can unravel if actors withdraw funding. For operational bureaucrats, their livelihoods are at stake.

It’s not a great time to be in the expertise business. People in these institutions care deeply about their mission — economists take big pay cuts to work at the World Bank instead of JP Morgan. It’s deeply frustrating for them to see resources pulled away.

How to “Populist-Proof” the UN

[Re]Group: Let’s look at the World Health Organization. Your case study is right in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Does a global crisis make it easier for an institution to respond to populist pressure because the pace is forced, or is it more difficult?

Richard: A crisis gives them some space to change their operations rapidly because there’s a general expectation that you have to be deft to meet the moment. The difficulty is that it’s exactly when you most need resources, yet you have resources being taken away.

The WHO is a good example of an institution that wasn’t prepared to have its funding or information cut off in a moment of crisis. If your budget is mostly from voluntary U.S. contributions and the U.S. becomes dissatisfied, you’re in a dangerous place. In the moment, it was really difficult for the WHO to respond, but over the medium run, it sparked productive reform. The WHO has now diversified its base of information and financial resources.

Other countries are stepping up, and you have strengthened partnerships with private actors and NGOs like the Gates Foundation providing support.

[Re]Group: In the conclusion of your book, you argue that international organizations should move to a proactive approach to populism, suggesting preemptive strategies for both appeasement and sidelining.

For example, actively retreating from polarizing issues to appease governments, or promoting narratives that show how multilateralism protects ordinary people to appease constituents. You also mention sidelining populists by increasing the cost of exit, or even increasing secrecy so populist leaders have a safe, leak-proof backchannel to work with the system without facing domestic criticism.

The UN is now choosing a new leader. If the next Secretary-General wanted to populist-proof the UN, and you had an hour to advise them, what would you say?

Richard: The obvious one is you don’t want to be over reliant on any one country. Look at the U.S. and China at the World Bank and IMF. The U.S. is the majority stakeholder. Over the last decade, these institutions have reallocated institutional authority to India, China, and rising states. With that comes larger financial contributions, and you have a different set of actors heavily invested.

For agencies like the UNFCCC or WHO, you want lots of countries from the Global North and Global South invested financially. Diversifying the base of support is vital. It could mean partnerships with the private sector, or even individual states in the U.S. like California giving money to UN climate agencies. That populist-proofs you, making sure you are insulated if any one actor becomes hesitant.

Additionally, international organizations need to improve their reputations directly with the public. If citizens don’t know what public goods they are receiving, it’s really hard to appreciate them.

[Re]Group: The system is bad at that. They’re so keen to bang the drum about what’s not working that they are awful at articulating the public goods they do create.

Richard: That’s exactly right. Look at USAID collapsing under the Trump administration. Now there are reports that the collapse cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Suddenly public support for foreign aid has gone up, but now it’s too late. That message needed to be clear two years ago.

You have to constantly be in communication with Member States, making clear all the benefits they’re receiving and ensuring their publics understand those benefits. It’s about merging public relations with material negotiation.

The Bottom Line: The Paradox of Survival

So, to bring us full circle: the SG candidates aren’t wrong that “delivery” is central to rebuilding trust. But greater impact can also intensify populist opposition.

Moreover, as Global Governance Under Fire argues, the defensive playbook carries its own risks. Using backchannels to allow “performative” populists to cooperate keeps the lights on, but it degrades democratic transparency. Appeasing hostile leaders with concessions rewards bad behavior and damages institutional fairness.

Appease populists too openly, and you end up alienating your friends.

If the 10th Secretary-General wants to safeguard multilateralism, they will need to balance these trade-offs: appeasing when necessary, sidelining when threatened, and diversifying their base of support before a crisis hits.

Institutional survival may sometimes require backroom deals, but long-term trust requires the UN’s members — governments but also “we the peoples” — to believe the system is on their side.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Related Reading

In ’s absence, I’m bringing you this week’s roundup.

I got my start in multilateral diplomacy in 2014, just a few years before the last changeover in UN leadership, from Ban Ki-moon to António Guterres. I remember the buzz of the 2015-16 process — 13 candidates, media swirl, and new ground broken in designing a more transparent process.

A decade later, media reaction to this contest remains muted. There’s been some strong analysis (read this in the Financial Times, for example) and the occasional breakthrough story (when Gianni Infantino was rumored for the job or when Olara Otunnu was a surprise late entrant), but the race has largely struggled to capture the world’s attention.

That may be about to change. As you read this, you’ll see a flurry of reports (here, here, here and more…) on the Security Council’s first straw poll, held yesterday, and on results that, predictably, leaked within hours to the press:

July 30 Straw Poll Results

In the last edition of roundup, we walked through the mechanics of the straw polls. Now, with the first round behind us, we turn to what the numbers might indicate and how to make sense of “encourage,” “discourage” and “no opinion” votes.

For David’s read on what these numbers mean, check out:

• In an interview with Spanish news agency EFE, he described the first straw poll as primarily a chance to see whether or not we have a frontrunner. With the results in, we seem to have three, each with high levels of support and only one or two “discourage” votes.

• Opposition to any of these candidates could melt away in future rounds or harden into a potential veto once the Council switches to colored ballots for its five permanent members. As David’s history of the straw polls shows, we have precedent for a P5 country discouraging all candidates apart from its preferred choice.

• David also spoke to Devex’s Colum Lynch about Otunnu’s late entry into the race, amid complaints from both the PGA and civil society that his candidacy would go to the Security Council before receiving any public scrutiny. What matters here is the precedent it sets for a “ghost” or compromise candidate to be rushed into the Security Council if a deadlock stretches late into the year, bypassing wider scrutiny.

H.E. Ms. Mathu Joyini

Five Minutes on the First Straw Poll

To find out more about what happened in the first straw poll, I sat down with UN Foundation Distinguished Diplomat-in-Residence, Ambassador Mathu Joyini, former Permanent Representative of South Africa to the UN.

Ambassador Joyini isn’t just an observer of the Secretary-General selection process; she also helped design it. As co-chair of the negotiations that established the rules for this year’s race — including the General Assembly hearings and Interactive Dialogues — she has a great vantage point on how the race is now playing out.

[Re]Group: If you were advising UN watchers on how to read these results, what would you tell them?

Amb. Joyini: The P5 seems to be observing regional rotation, even if it isn’t formally called that, with a gender dimension layered into that message: We may be closer to a first woman Secretary-General than at any point before!

[NB: this is the first time that a woman candidate has led in a first straw poll, while the leading candidates are all from Latin America and the Caribbean.]

[Re]Group: What does a “no opinion” result actually signal to a candidate, considering that a third of all ballots cast in this round of voting — 36 out of 105 — were no opinion?

Amb. Joyini: It’s not one message, and it depends on the candidate. For each one, it reads differently. From my experience as an Ambassador, sometimes “no opinion” (or in the context of voting, “abstain”) means a delegation hasn’t consulted the capital yet. Sometimes it means a Member doesn’t want to get pulled into a dynamic between major powers. Sometimes it’s genuine disengagement.

“It never means just one thing,” is what I would always tell my colleagues for years about reading abstentions the same way.

[Re]Group: Where does that leave candidates sitting on “discourage” votes? Should they go find out who’s against them and court them?

Amb. Joyini: Yes. That’s exactly the advice I’d give: Figure out who’s against you, understand why, and see what’s possible. A candidate with no strong opinion either way is often better positioned going forward than one carrying a real discourage number.

[Re]Group: Are we likely to see more late entrants after this round?

Amb. Joyini: I’d be cautious if I were considering entering the race as a candidate. If this was, in effect, a test of whether a candidate could enter without going through the full process, it clearly hasn’t worked in Otunnu’s case.

[Re]Group: What should we expect next? Another straw poll, or will August be quiet?

Amb. Joyini: Expect another straw poll under Denmark’s Security Council presidency in August, likely by the end of the month, given that the PGA has indicated the next round of interactive dialogues (for newly entered candidates) is expected no later than August 24.

It’s good to see that the process we helped design is working as intended, and I need to give credit also to the President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, for that.

The SG Roundup

• Uganda’s nomination of Olara Otunnu (read his vision statement and biography here), days before the first straw poll, has some asking why now, and why him.

• The PGA has said she wants Otunnu’s Interactive Dialogue to happen as soon as possible and no later than the week of August 24. Candidates continue to meet with regional and thematic groupings of countries.

• Straw polls were designed to push unviable candidates out of the race, but this was slow to happen last time around. Will any of the candidates who did badly in the first vote now drop out?

• What happens next? In 2016, the Security Council held two further rounds of polling in August, but in 2006, there was a lull into the second week of September. Both these contests concluded in early October, but it took until December 13 for Kofi Annan to prevail in the 1996 selection.

From All Angles

Reading List

• The Seven Parts the UN Secretary-General Must Play: Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group borrows Shakespeare’s seven ages to lay out the roles any Secretary-General must play: Administrator, Mediator, Developer, Moralist, Communicator, Visionary, and Human. Read the rest of the summer issue of CIRSD’s Horizons for vision statements from five of the declared candidates.

• Rethinking UN Leadership: A Global South Perspective: The latest report by Southern Voice draws on a survey of think tanks and civil society organizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to present priorities for the next SG and expectations of what the office should deliver. Read more of their publications in [Re]Group’s partner insights section.

• Compromised Candidates: Drawing on more than 40 interviews with former diplomats, past candidates, and senior officials, this piece by Ben Donaldson of the 1 for 8 Billion campaign lays out how all five P5 countries have sought to compromise a candidate’s independence in exchange for support.

And, in case you missed it…

With the straw polls underway, get the full rundown on how the race to be Secretary-General works in our newly updated cheat sheet.

Take a deep dive on all the Interactive Dialogues, debates, and events with Secretary-General candidates in the 2026 UN Secretary-General Debates: A Complete Guide

The 81st Session of the UN General Assembly

This year’s UN General Assembly (UNGA 81) will bring leaders to New York to discuss solutions to the world’s most pressing global issues. Expect the race for the next UN Secretary-General to dominate the conversation.

Explore the UNGA 81 Hub

Entry #11

In the new year, I sat down with a colleague to write a list titled “99 Things That (Probably) Won’t Happen When The UN Selects the Next SG.”

Entry number 11 was called The FIFA Twist and read as follows:

“The U.S. announces support for Gianni Infantino during the World Cup. The finals run from June 11 to July 19 in North America — exactly when the UNSC straw polls are scheduled. Unlike Norway, FIFA awarded the U.S. President its Peace Prize.”

This was just a brainstorm — a bit of fun really. But it was also an attempt to stress test what might happen as an unpredictable selection process was launching in increasingly unpredictable times.

In the end, we only made it as far as number 81 before we ran out of steam. That final entry was called The Boring Outcome.

It read simply: “It all goes smoothly.”

Between the Pedestrian and the Unpredictable

Throughout the year, we have tried to keep both ends of the spectrum in mind: the pedestrian and the unpredictable.

For most of 2026, this has been a fairly standard race, with just six candidates who have dutifully presented their ideas in public, and vigorously lobbied for support in private.

Over the next week, however, the campaign moves into the Security Council, where ambassadors will hold the first in a series of confidential straw polls.

If you want to know how that system works, we just published Less Solid Things, a deep dive on the history of the Council’s secret ballots, described by their Ugandan inventor as a “very vague test” of a candidate’s viability.

If the precedent set by the selections of Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres holds, The Boring Outcome will prevail:

• A leader emerges: One candidate separates from the pack during the initial July rounds of polling.

• Momentum builds: Across successive straw polls, that front-runner’s support inches upward while underperforming candidates read the room and bow out.

• The red card stays in the pocket: No permanent member uses their red ballot paper to threaten the leading candidate with a veto.

If that pattern repeats, the Security Council will coalesce around a consensus nominee by early October, and the General Assembly will endorse by acclamation. It would be an orderly, textbook transition for the 10th Secretary-General to take office on January 1, 2027.

Underpricing the Weird

But over the weekend, something happened that made us wonder whether we have been underpricing the weird and the not-so-wonderful — the black swans and the red-team scenarios.

I am sure you saw it: a thinly sourced story in the New York Post claiming President Trump, fresh from the World Cup final, wants to install… FIFA chief Gianni Infantino on the 38th floor of the UN Secretariat.

Yep. Infantino. Because he “knows how to manage” a fragmented global membership, the article says.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether this is a test balloon being flown with serious intent. Instead, note that this rumor generated more global media coverage in 24 hours than The Boring Outcome has over the entire past six months.

And let’s also use it to illustrate exactly what it takes to bring a wildcard candidate — a dark horse, a late entrant — into this race.

The barrier to entry is low: just a formal nomination from a single UN Member State that hasn’t already nominated someone else. (And remember, nominating governments are free to withdraw their support at any time and renominate someone new).

That nominator could even be the United States itself — although it is worth noting that no permanent member of the Security Council has formally nominated a candidate in recent history (and convention says that P5 nationals can’t get the job).

When the Vetoes Fly

If you read our companion guide to the straw polls and our history of past contests, you’ll know that deadlock is the mother of unpredictability.

Trygve Lie, the UN’s first Secretary-General, got the job because the United States and the Soviet Union blocked each other’s nominees. And when the Soviets later vetoed Lie for a second term, the General Assembly bypassed the Council and extended his contract — a fudge worth keeping in mind if, as some diplomats fear, the Council finds itself still deadlocked in November and December.

Dag Hammarskjöld likewise emerged from nowhere while superpower vetoes were flying. He didn’t know he was under consideration until a reporter called him with the news. His successor, U Thant, spent weeks in the party searching for a compromise candidate, only to discover that he was the compromise the Security Council was looking for.

The pattern held through the rest of the century. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar came into the race to settle a war of attrition between Washington and Beijing, while Kofi Annan only became a front-runner after the United States vetoed Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s second term against the wishes of the rest of the world.

So as the straw poll tallies begin leaking out of the Council chamber, do not just look at who is leading the pack. Listen for signs of a divide between the Permanent Five.

Straw Polls

Reading List

If Less Solid Things, our primer on Security Council straw polls, leaves you wanting more, here is what to read:

• Ambassador Olara Otunnu: If you want to know how the straw polls were born, listen to the man who invented them. “What I was testing had no meaning, only a very vague test... All I want you to do is tell me which of these candidates you would discourage—that’s all.”

• Ambassador John Bolton: The former U.S. Permanent Representative’s memoir provides an unvarnished look at the power of the P5. “We excluded all Secretariat personnel, including the translators... De La Sablière gave out UN pens, so that each of us would be writing in the same color; I joked that they should all be given back for budget purposes, although I noticed some perm reps kept theirs for souvenirs.”

• Ambassador Koro Bessho: Written by the Japanese Permanent Representative who oversaw the crucial July 2016 straw polls, this UN memo is a critique of the straw poll system. “Straw polls should be replaced by official votes at a private meeting of the Security Council… The President should… make the results public.”

The SG Roundup

• Macky Sall, former President of Senegal who was nominated initially by Burundi, secured support from his home country of Senegal, signaling broader support for his candidacy on the African continent.

• Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett of Guyana has secured support from the CARICOM community of nations (15 Member States). CARICOM member Antigua and Barbuda is the nominating country another candidate, María Fernanda Espinosa.

• The UN Town Hall — a U.S. presidential-style debate — took place in the UN General Assembly Hall on July 23, with all candidates answering questions shaped by civil society on a live simulcast on UN Web TV and Bloomberg TV (you can also watch on YouTube, read a report on France 24).

The Youth Job Description

From the Archive

We have heard this week from diplomats who complain that past selections have seen surprisingly little debate about the merit of candidates.

Our Future Agenda, using inputs from more than 2,000 young people from around the world, crowdsourced a Job Description that might help with their deliberations.

Their verdict: In a world marked by deepening distrust and cascading crises, the next leader will be judged not by their ability to win a straw poll, but by whether they can turn global commitments into visible action, stronger accountability, and better decisions about our collective future.

Read: The Job Description and it’s not too late to complete the survey

Survey

And in case you missed it…

Check out Beyond the Hype: AI, Human Well-Being, and the Policy Choices Ahead, an essay by Claire Melamed and Paul Ladd on why AI risks aren’t sci-fi scenarios, but the potential for disruptions to jobs, public services, democratic trust, and our environment.

UN Foundation President and CEO sat down with Bloomberg TV ahead of the UN Town Hall with the six candidates to be Secretary-General. “This selection has always been consequential for the UN. There’ve only been nine Secretaries-General in history, but this one comes at a uniquely defining moment for the UN and for everything it stands for.”

"As take a Straw and throw it up into the Air, you shall see by that which way the Wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a Stone. More Solid things do not shew the Complexion of the times so well."

The Table-talk of John Selden, (compiled by Richard Milward, 1689)

Literary Digest may be the only magazine ever to have died of embarrassment.

Its straw poll was one of the largest in history, with 2.4 million returned ballots. It predicted that Franklin D. Roosevelt would lose the 1936 U.S. presidential election by a landslide, but in fact he won handsomely with 60.8% of the popular vote. Is Our Face Red! was the response printed in the magazine’s next issue. Its credibility destroyed, the magazine folded in 1938.

Statisticians are still arguing about what went wrong (the dominant theory is non-response bias — Roosevelt voters were simply less motivated to mail their postcards back). But a certain George Gallup had other ideas, and spent the rest of his life comparing the magazine’s lax approach to his own more “scientific” sampling.1

Straw polls have not been taken seriously since for predicting elections, but they remain a very American thing, a staple of the primary season, where they generate buzz and demonstrate candidate momentum.

But how on earth did a tool meant for millions of voters end up being used to sound out just 15 diplomats in a locked room? For that innovation, the United Nations has a Ugandan, not an American, to thank.

A Test Without Meaning

Ambassador Olara Otunnu was the Ugandan Permanent Representative and became President of the Security Council as the 1981 war of the vetoes culminated, with China opposing a third term for then Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and the Americans blocking the Tanzanian diplomat, Salim Ahmed Salim.

According to Otunnu, the never-ending round of failed public votes had driven the Council into a mood of despondency. Determined to rescue his colleagues from this slump, he persuaded Waldheim and Salim to step aside for a few days so the popularity of alternative candidates could be explored. This required something less formal than a full vote.

“I organized what one might call straw ballots,” Otunnu recalls. “I asked all of the Permanent Members and their deputies — no interpreters, no delegations, just the two of them — to meet in the consultation room. I explained to them what we were about to do, that I wanted to test the viability... They were informed that what I was testing had no meaning, [it was] only a very vague test.”

And thus the UN’s idiosyncratic version of the straw poll was born. It was codified in 1996 by Indonesian Ambassador Nugroho Wisnumurti, and has remained more or less unchanged ever since.

Wisnumurti even preserved Otunnu’s pleasingly quaint language. Security Council members fill in a ballot paper where they “encourage” or “discourage” each candidate (with “no opinion” added as a third choice in 2006).

The voting happens in secret, the results strictly confidential. And they always leak to the press within a matter of minutes.

(Update: this post was published just a few days before Otunnu was announced at this year’s surprise candidate to be Secretary-General.)

2006: Ban Ki-moon and the Art of Deduction

To see how this plays out, let us look at the selection of the last two Secretaries-General, beginning with the 2006 election of Ban Ki-moon.

Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton’s memoir provides a blunt account of his efforts to get Ban elected, in a process he saw as “essentially a Perm Five decision, expressed through the Security Council and presented to the General Assembly.”

When the Council gathered for the first straw poll in July, it engaged in the same theatre of secrecy that Otunnu had instituted in 1981.

Attendance was limited to two people per delegation, and the French Ambassador handed out identical UN pens so that no country could be identified by the color of its ink (Bolton joked that the pens should be returned for budget purposes, but noted several ambassadors pocketing them as souvenirs).

When the results leaked, Ban was leading, but not decisively. In the second straw poll in September, however, he received a commanding 14 “encourage” votes and only a single “discourage.”

This is where the intrigue of the straw poll shines through: reverse-engineering who voted how. Bolton thought the single “discourage” vote came from Japan, but Ban thought he was being blocked by Ghana. But no matter, by the fourth straw poll in October, the holdout had switched to “no opinion.”

“There was no doubt the race was over,” Bolton wrote. Ban was soon confirmed as the next SG.

2016: Guterres, Color Ballots, and the Battle of the E10

Bolton was open about American tactics in 2006: Encourage your chosen candidate, and discourage everyone else.

Ten years later, the selection of António Guterres demonstrated how powerful this strategy remains, even against countervailing pressure for greater transparency and openness. That is why the Council’s elected members often complain they had little influence on the result, while the rest of the General Assembly feels even further out of the loop.

But the 2016 selection did see attempts to encourage transparency. As the General Assembly held public hearings for candidates for the first time, Guterres capitalized on a stellar performance to build momentum as the race moved into the Security Council in July.

After consistently leading the field across five Security Council straw polls, the culmination came on October 5, 2016, when the Security Council’s members stood before a wall of press microphones to announce that there was no stopping Guterres.

“The crucial moment for me was when the fifth permanent member result for Guterres was announced which led to it being very clear that there was no ‘discourages,’ either from a permanent member or a non-permanent member for [him],” UK Ambassador Matthew Rycroft told the press.

Adding Color

This sixth, and final, straw poll had used color-coded ballots, where the ten elected members (E10) vote on white paper, while the five permanent members (P5) vote on red paper. A “discourage” vote from a P5 member signals a veto and demonstrates that some ballots matter more than others.

As a result, the P5 and E10 clash about when in the process color ballots should be introduced. As Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho — who served as Security Council President during July 2016 — recalls, “Some members sought to introduce color-coded ballot papers at the fourth straw poll, as had been the case 10 years before, while others felt it was best left as late as possible in order for a clear winner to emerge before turning to color-coded ballot papers...”

Reading between the lines: The P5 want their vetoes out in the open as soon as possible; the E10 fight to level the playing field for as long as they can.

The Bessho Proposals

Ambassador Bessho made no secret of his frustration with the straw poll system. In a post-mortem memo sent to the Secretary-General and the Security Council President, he was scathing in his critique of the process he had overseen.

Bessho admitted that the Council had failed to meet the international community’s demands for greater transparency, but was equally infuriated by the routine leaks. It was “regrettable,” he wrote, that persistent breaches put the ambassadors who actually followed the confidentiality rules in an embarrassing and unfair position.

More fundamentally, Bessho argued that straw polls failed at their primary job: forcing unviable candidates to withdraw with dignity. Because the straw polls carried no formal consequences, ten candidates stayed in the race until the bitter end, bogging down the Council’s decision-making.

His remedy: Scrap the straw polls entirely.

“Straw polls should be replaced by official votes at a private meeting of the Security Council,” Bessho recommended, arguing that the Council President should make the results public after every round rather than allowing them to leak piecemeal to the press.

To stop underperforming candidates from lingering, he proposed a survival-of-the-fittest mechanism: eliminating the bottom two candidates after each round of voting until only five remained. He also suggested a rule that if a nominating government withdrew its support for a candidate, that candidate would be immediately disqualified.

The 2026 Race: The Game Begins Anew

Bessho’s recommendations have largely been ignored by the Security Council as it prepares to vote on a successor to Guterres; save for agreeing that candidates should be eliminated if their nominating country (or countries) formally withdraws support.

Otherwise, the Council has chosen to stick with the same flawed, but fascinating, system it has now used for five successive SGs. With the first 2026 straw polls scheduled to kick off between July 24 and 30, here is how the process will likely play out over the coming weeks:

• A war of attrition: There have been as many as nine rounds of straw polls in the past. While a few weaker candidates may bow out early, history suggests many will refuse to leave the race. The longer it drags on, the higher the chance that a “dark horse” candidate enters the fray.

• The theatre of secrecy: While the tallies will leak, the intrigue will remain in guessing who is opposing the front-runners.

• Game theory over merit: Inside the Council chamber, do not expect much debate about a candidate’s merit. Instead, it will all be about working out who can win and who can’t.

• The battle for color-coding: With every round, the P5 will tighten their grip on the contest. They will also push to introduce color-coded ballots so they can flex their veto power. The E10 will fight just as hard to delay them.

• The deadlock wildcard: Remember that the straw poll system was a child of the deadlock of 1981. If this year’s race sees a similar stalemate, the conditions may again be ripe for unexpected innovations in the rules.

From Deadlock to Innovation

As the results filter out from each round of straw polling, only two things really matter: whether a front-runner is gaining momentum, and if they are, whether a P5 veto is lying in wait for them.

The former is easy to see. The latter is where the drama lies.

History shows that when every viable candidate finds their path blocked, deadlock sets in. And that is when the rules can change overnight. If the script flips this year, it will be because the Council has backed itself into a corner and has no choice but to write a new one.

Related Reading

Artificial intelligence has firmly escaped the lab and landed squarely in the middle of arguments about growth, power, governance, and the future of society. Most public debate swings between two familiar extremes. On one side are the warnings about rogue superintelligence and existential risk. On the other is the glossy optimism: AI will cure disease, turbocharge productivity, and bring prosperity to everyone lucky enough to have a decent internet connection.

Both stories contain some truth, but neither captures what is really happening.

The biggest effects of AI are not lurking in the future. They are unfolding now, inside labor markets, public institutions, information systems, and the physical environment — and across education, medicine, science, arts, and just about every other area of human activity. They are shaped by a persistent digital divide, which must be an urgent priority to overcome, and by the choices governments and companies are making now to drive and respond to AI’s impacts. Today’s actions and decisions will to a great extent determine whether the more dramatic futures — for good or for ill — even arrive at all.

A more grounded approach is to look at AI in terms of its impact on human well-being. In a new paper, we use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a way of organizing that discussion. Not because the SDGs offer a ready-made AI playbook (they do not) but because they reflect a broad, hard-fought global agreement about what people everywhere generally want from society: economic security, functioning public services, trustworthy institutions, and a livable environment.

AI’s Opportunity and Challenge for Sustainable Development

From our perspective, AI presents big risks, as well as opportunities, for sustainable development. Which risks or opportunities prevail will depend on choices made by governments in the next few years across four major pressure points.

The first is growth, poverty, and inequality (SDGs 1, 8, 9, and 10). AI is creating productivity gains in a few sectors and locations. At the same time, labor markets are beginning to warp. Work once done by junior lawyers, analysts, designers, coders, and researchers is now increasingly being automated or compressed, which will have an impact on labor markets for years.

The AI industry itself is highly concentrated, with a small number of firms and countries dominating the entire AI stack: chips, cloud infrastructure, training data, frontier models, and products. The unfolding economic consequences of AI are unlikely to end in some smooth, neutral redistribution of opportunity. Without deliberate policy choices, AI will reward those who already own infrastructure, capital, and skills. Beyond technological disruption, the risk is a world in which productivity rises but large parts of the population feel increasingly disposable.

The second pressure point is public services (SDGs 2, 3, 4, and 11). AI is already spreading through health systems, schools, welfare administration, agriculture, and city management. In many cases, it can improve efficiency and expand access. Governments facing shrinking budgets and rising expectations welcome the opportunity to do more for less.

But there is a catch. The more institutions rely on opaque systems to shape decisions, the harder it becomes to explain those decisions to the public. That matters because public services depend as much on legitimacy as they do on efficiency. People can tolerate difficult decisions better than those that are incomprehensible. If an AI-assisted system denies benefits, flags someone to the police, or prioritizes some patients over others, someone — a real person — still has to answer for it. Otherwise, institutions risk drifting into what might be called an accountability recession: decisions everywhere, responsibility nowhere.

The third area is governance, information, and trust (SDGs 5 and 16). AI has driven the cost of generating persuasive content toward zero. Text, images, audio, and video can now be produced instantly and on an industrial scale by almost anyone with online access. The result is not only more misinformation but also a slow destabilization of shared reality itself. Courts, elections, journalism, science, and democratic politics all depend on a basic assumption that public debate is anchored in evidence. AI strains that assumption. When people lose confidence that anything can be verified, trust in institutions begins to corrode long before those institutions formally fail. This is bigger than a content moderation problem –– it is a fundamental infrastructure problem for democracy and social cohesion. Media literacy alone is unlikely to solve it. Asking exhausted citizens to spend their lives verifying every image, quote, and video clip is not a serious long-term strategy for governing an AI-saturated information system.

The fourth pressure point is resources and the environment (SDGs 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, and 15). AI is often spoken about as if it floats weightlessly in the cloud. In reality, it is intensely physical. Data centers consume huge amounts of electricity and water. Hardware depends on minerals extracted from fragile ecosystems and politically unstable regions. And demand for both is accelerating rapidly. There is a real risk that governments, desperate to attract investment and stay competitive, will relax environmental standards in the name of AI expansion. The irony would be sharp: a technology marketed as futuristic and frictionless driving a new scramble for land, water, energy, and raw materials.

Across all four areas, the same underlying themes resurface. Inequality deepens unless gains are deliberately shared. Accountability weakens when decision-making becomes automated and outsourced. Trust erodes as information systems become polluted and unstable. Environmental pressures intensify if AI’s material footprint is treated as someone else’s problem.

Shaping the AI Future

None of this amounts to an argument against technological progress. AI adoption is not going to stop, nor should it. The questions are what kind of societies emerge around it, and the role policy choices play in shaping that transition so it supports human well-being.

For the past decade, digital transformation mostly ran on a simple formula: expand access, build skills, and let innovation work its magic. While the digital divide remains an urgent injustice that must be overcome, that approach now looks incomplete. Skills alone may not absorb labor displacement, innovation alone may not disperse power, and faster adoption alone may not produce healthier societies.

A more deliberate politics of AI is needed. This means paying closer attention to how economic gains are distributed; building public institutions capable of managing increasingly complex relationships among states, companies, and citizens; protecting information systems as a form of public infrastructure; and aligning AI investment with environmental realities rather than pretending those limits do not exist.

The Global Goals as a Blueprint

The SDGs were not written for the AI age. However, they contain a useful reminder that development is ultimately about human lives, not technological capability. As we advance our understanding of AI, the ability to quickly adapt to meet the challenges of tomorrow and prioritize human well-being remains an anchor. AI changes the terrain for achieving our collective goals, but it does not — and should not — change our agreed destination: a better future for all.

Diplomacy at 17,000 mph

Two days before the UN’s annual space forum in Vienna, the hotline rang. The Malaysian Space Agency had a problem: an “urgent conjunction warning.”

A what? In plain English, one of their satellites was heading toward a collision at just under 17,000 mph. They urgently needed to contact the owner of the oncoming satellite to coordinate an evasion maneuver, but they couldn’t just pick up the phone. The owner was the government of North Korea.

As I explored in a recent [Re]Group essay, Nothing on Earth, the real danger in space isn’t a single crash, but what follows: collisions breeding more collisions, making our orbits impassable as they fill up with shrapnel.

Missing by Meters

Most people wonder whether the UN can play any relevant role in space diplomacy, admits Aarti Holla-Maini, who left the commercial sector to run the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). But when Kuala Lumpur realized they had no way to reach Pyongyang, it was UNOOSA they called.

Holla-Maini’s team asked the Chinese Embassy in Vienna to pass a warning to North Korea. It worked. Pyongyang executed an emergency maneuver. The satellites missed each other by just 75 meters. Given the speed at which satellites move, that is the equivalent of a car passing a cyclist with a two-millimeter margin of error.

Right now, frantic phone calls are all we have. There is no international space police.

Space Race

UNISPACE IV is supposed to change that.

Today, the rules of orbit are dictated by a Cold War-era framework managed by a Vienna-based committee, COPUOS, which operates strictly by consensus, alongside an emerging patchwork of national standards, voluntary commitments, and informal alliances.

The UN is hoping to hold its first space summit of the 21st century in Vienna next year, starting on July 12. It also marks the 60th birthday of the UN’s original Cold War space treaty.

The summit’s champions, led by Morocco and Italy, view it as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to update the governance framework for space, tackling urgent challenges like orbital traffic coordination, debris mitigation, and the looming rush for lunar resources.

If it happens, it will be an early test in the diary of the next UN Secretary-General — though Member States are still arguing over the agenda, participation, and funding. Everything, in other words.

Aarti Holla-Maini

Five Minutes on the Future of Space

To understand the stakes, we wanted to hear from the person fielding calls from panicking satellite owners. Here is what Holla-Maini had to say.

[Re]Group: You argue that space is critical infrastructure, but it is not treated with the same urgency as climate change or AI. Why do we need to be paying attention right now?

Aarti Holla-Maini: We take so much for granted. People don’t realize that everything, from global financial markets to electricity grids, relies on the time-stamping system of atomic clocks on navigation satellites, be they Galileo, GPS, or others. They are also the only way to measure and monitor essential climate variables. If we start seeing collisions because of congestion, there’s a real risk that space becomes unusable for decades to come.

[Re]Group: I think we underestimate how fast space is changing. Next year’s proposed UN space summit, UNISPACE IV, is supposed to address threats that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. But is the multilateral system moving too slowly?

Aarti Holla-Maini: Launches are happening every week now instead of 12 times a year. Is the system slow? Sure. Multilateralism takes time because we don’t vote in Vienna; everything is by consensus. But every Member State sits on an equal footing — major space-faring nation or tiny island state. Same weight, no industry around the table, which means no money influencing the process.

But progress is happening on the strands where we need it to. Last year, the committee established an Expert Group on Space Situational Awareness to prevent collisions — the fastest decision it has ever made. We are also looking at the moon. It is one-sixth the size of Earth, so you’re going to have a space sustainability problem there far faster if multiple entities aren’t coordinating.

[Re]Group: There are currently six candidates running to be the next UN Secretary-General. If you had them around a table, what would you tell them you need from whomever takes office on January 1?

Aarti Holla-Maini: I need the next Secretary-General to understand that space is critical infrastructure. It is essential for achieving every single one of the SDGs. And they need to recognize that COPUOS is the only committee, and UNOOSA the only office, able to genuinely work to prevent space from becoming the next arena for conflict.

Our mandate is broad and growing organically. We’ve added 13 Member States to the committee in the last two and a half years. We are now being contacted by Member States who are having debris land on their territories, and we have to explain their rights and obligations and use it as an opportunity to reinforce the rule of law in space. On top of that, we have 65 countries waiting for space law missions from UNOOSA, many wanting to establish their own spaceports.

Space Diplomacy

Reading List

If Holla-Maini’s warnings have you looking up anxiously at the sky, here’s what to read on the rapidly diversifying ecosystem of space governance:

• The Coalition Era of Space Law: With the UN struggling to enforce a single global rulebook, space governance is fracturing into competing geopolitical "clubs." For a primer, check out this essay from Kármán Line.

• The Diplomacy of Manufacturing: With tens of thousands of new satellites expected by the early 2030s, this piece by Hamdullah Mohib for the World Economic Forum explores how countries are using joint-venture manufacturing and shared industrial standards as a backdoor form of space diplomacy.

• Substack in Space: Check out Neal Stephenson’s long-form thoughts on technology, space, and the future. Plus, Peter Hague’s Planetocracy on the space powers he believes “will dominate the rest of the 21st century — and beyond.”

The SG Roundup

With the UN Security Council’s straw polls scheduled to begin on July 30, candidates are flying around the world and shoring up support from Council members.

In parallel, the main upcoming opportunity for candidates to share their platforms publicly is at the UN Town Hall: The Next Secretary-General in the General Assembly Hall on Thursday, July 23 from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Read our guide to key public events

To secure Security Council votes, the 1 for 8 Billion campaign asks whether candidates will promise key spots in their senior team to nationals of certain countries.

Their recently published report, Backroom Deals: The Trade in Promises for Support Between Member States and Candidates for UN Secretary-General, presents evidence that “all five permanent members of the Security Council have unduly compromised the independence of candidates over the course of the UN’s history.”

The Improvisation Playbook

From the Archive

If Holla-Maini’s backdoor satellite diplomacy sounds familiar, it is because multilateral improvisation is a time-honored UN tradition.

In one of our launch [Re]Group essays, Elizabeth Cousens argued that the current geopolitical gridlock isn’t a crisis of demand for global cooperation — it’s a crisis of supply.

The next Secretary-General will need an innovator’s mindset — “spotting fleeting openings, building uncommon coalitions, and attracting the political, financial, and human resources to deliver results.”

Read The Multilateralist’s Paradox and Beyond the Wrecking Ball for more. If you want to know what a successful UN looks like in an age of turbulence, this is the playbook.

Related Reading

Eighty years on from its founding, the United Nations faces a paradox: The public demands international cooperation but doubts that the current system can deliver it. For the candidates pitching to lead the UN, the polling sends a clear message. People don’t need to be sold on ideals — they need to see results.

The candidates to be the next Secretary-General already perceive this sentiment. In a packed debate season, from the UNA-UK debate in London to the GWL Voices debate in Geneva to the Jeju Forum’s candidates’ session, and in the General Assembly’s Interactive Dialogues, every contender was pressed on how they would rebuild trust. Their answers often converged on a singular point: delivery.

Among their responses: In the Interactive Dialogues, María Fernanda Espinosa, a former Ecuadorean Minister of Foreign Affairs and former President of the UN General Assembly, told Member States that trust “is not declared, it’s earned;” at the Geneva debate, Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of UNCTAD, argued that “you will rebuild trust when you will deliver;” and at Jeju, Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, predicted that trust “is going to be rebuilt quite spontaneously the day they see that the UN is really solving issues.”

The gap between expectation and reality is where a new leader can deliver a fresh vision, new strategies, and improved performance. Under a new Secretary-General, the UN needs to demonstrate delivery in a way that creates support for the next phase of its mission.

To understand what the polls tell those running for the post, this analysis synthesizes recent global and national data from several leading research organizations.

The findings draw primarily on 2025 surveys: the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey (25 countries, fielded January–April 2025), the Rockefeller Foundation’s Demanding Results (46,405 adults in 34 countries, August–September 2025), the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report (28 markets, each fielded the preceding fall), Gallup (August 2025), and the 2025 Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Chicago Council Survey (July 2025). To track how public trust and expectations have shifted over time, we also incorporate World Values Survey data through 2022, compiled by Our World in Data, and the FES–YouGov Global Census Poll (2023).

A Majority Invested, but Warning Signs Flashing

Globally, across the 25 countries surveyed by Pew, roughly 6 in 10 adults report a favorable view of the UN, while 32% hold an unfavorable view.

But a closer look at the data reveals where the institution’s support is strongest — and where it is being challenged:

• Africa leads the pack: Support is highest in sub-Saharan Africa, where Nigeria (80%) tops all 25 countries surveyed, and Kenya (74%) ranks among the five most favorable. In contrast, it is weakest in Turkey (32%) and Israel (16%) (Pew).

• A generational divide: Younger adults express higher trust. In Brazil, for example, 68% of adults under 35 hold a favorable view of the UN, compared with just 44% of those 50 and older (Pew).

• Fairness comes first: Support is conditional on equity. Approval jumps nearly 18 points when people believe international cooperation benefits the vulnerable, and it falls when gains are seen as captured by the wealthy or powerful (Rockefeller).

• The local link: Backing for the UN does not exist in a vacuum. It rises with economic optimism and trust in local institutions, and it fades when hope in the future declines (Rockefeller).

• A modest decline: Historical tracking among countries surveyed in both waves indicates that, while average global confidence slipped slightly, from 43% in 2014 to 40% in 2022, there is no collapse in overall support (Our World in Data, based on World Values Survey).

Ultimately, the core UN brand maintains the trust of 58% of the global public — trailing only the World Health Organization among the international institutions tested by Rockefeller. But the persistence of this support reflects a belief in the UN’s necessity, not an endorsement of its performance. While 55% of the global public backs international cooperation, that number jumps to over 75% when the public sees it delivering concrete results (Rockefeller).

A Crisis of Confidence: North and South

Some surveys paint a more pessimistic picture. Cumulative data from the Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report shows trust in the UN dropping in 23 of 27 surveyed countries between 2021 and 2024. In the 2025 report, the organization retains majority trust in just 10 of 28 markets. This tracks with a wider erosion of institutional trust reflected in Edelman’s Trust Barometer, with the UN under the same pressure as national governments and nongovernmental organizations.

In the Global North, trust fell by just over two percentage points between the 2022 and 2025 reports. While many populations remain neutral, Germany (45%) and Japan (39%) crossed into distrust in 2025 (Edelman). The core issue is relevance: In the 2023 FES–YouGov census, respondents in France (−23 points), Germany (−24), the United States (−24), and Japan (−18) disagreed on balance that the UN is “well prepared for the challenges of the next decade” — while publics in India, Brazil, and South Africa leaned the other way.

The Global South tells a more complicated story, with a steeper drop but from a higher baseline. While average trust fell by over five points — driven by a 17-point collapse in Saudi Arabia — Indonesia, Nigeria, and Colombia posted offsetting gains in the 2024–25 data. At present, nine of the 15 Global South markets surveyed still register majority trust, while others have drifted into the neutral range (Edelman).

The United States: Mission vs. Delivery

Despite the shift in U.S. foreign policy under the second Trump Administration, baseline public support for multilateralism holds steady. Rockefeller data finds that 61% of Americans support international cooperation, even if it requires compromising on national interests.

Just as in the rest of the world, however, the U.S. public affirms the UN’s mission while remaining skeptical of its ability to deliver. Two numbers capture the UN’s central paradox: 63% of Americans believe the organization is doing a poor job, yet 79% favor continued membership (Gallup).

Partisan differences are also clear.

• The partisan gulf: While half of Republicans back international cooperation and only a quarter explicitly reject it (Rockefeller), 75% of Republicans rate the UN’s performance as poor, compared with 48% of Democrats (Gallup).

• The MAGA factor: Half a century of polling shows partisan divides on international engagement at an all-time high, and the rift widens further when MAGA Republicans are separated from non-MAGA Republicans (Chicago Council Survey). The gap between Democrats and Republicans who call strengthening the UN “very important” now stands at 33 points (62% vs. 29%), the widest in the survey’s history dating to 1974.

Failure of Supply, Not Demand

The 2025 Rockefeller Foundation survey (polling over 36,000 adults across 34 countries) captures the opportunity for the UN to position itself as a platform for solving problems.

Three-quarters of the global public would support international collaboration if it was proven to solve global problems effectively, but only 58% currently trust the UN to lead it. As Elizabeth Cousens, the President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation, argues, “The crisis isn’t a lack of demand for global cooperation, but a failure of supply.”

When asked where the UN should focus that supply, the public points to the practical over the abstract. Issues that dictate daily life — food, jobs, health, and security — command the most urgency.

Bureaucratic and institutional concerns rank far lower. Even climate change reveals a disconnect: While respondents view it as personally important, they prioritize immediate, tangible risks when demanding global action.

The task awaiting the next Secretary-General goes far beyond better communications about the value of the UN. Global citizens understand that their fates are linked, but they need concrete evidence that multilateralism improves their lives at home and protects vulnerable populations.

A new UN leader needs to strengthen delivery, demonstrate effectiveness on the challenges people most care about, and make a case for the deeper reinvention that will equip the international system to tackle a new generation of global problems.

Peace: The Ultimate Delivery Test

Across all surveys, peace and security emerge as the defining test for the next Secretary-General. The global public views conflict prevention and peacekeeping as essential to international cooperation (92%), nearly matching the priority placed on food and water security and other basic survival needs (93%) (Rockefeller).

The demand for action is only increasing. The FES–YouGov Global Census shows public support for a stronger UN role in promoting peace significantly rising in at least seven of 15 surveyed countries, likely driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, India, and South Korea registered the largest gains. Respondents in not a single country surveyed wanted the UN to scale back its peace efforts (FES-YouGov).

This surging demand comes in the area where the institution faces the most scrutiny. Peace is the issue cited most often in debates over UN reform: It drives public backing for Security Council reform (which FES publics also support) and fuels calls for the system to go “back to the basics.”

The opportunity for the incoming Secretary-General is clear. Rather than disengaging from a fractured world, the public wants the UN to step up and perform better on the core function that has always defined its legitimacy. Success will help bridge the delivery gap by proving the system can still execute on its foundational mandate.

A Leader Who Delivers

Underpinning this data is what happens if the UN cannot recover public confidence. In that case, the institution would not collapse. Instead, it would be bypassed. If populations continue to view the UN as necessary but ineffective, national leaders would look elsewhere, detouring around the system in favor of ad hoc coalitions and regional arrangements.

To prevent this drift into irrelevance, the next Secretary-General must identify and protect the so-called load-bearing parts of the system that deliver results that people and their governments care about most. These core functions are what sustain public trust.

That means a shift from documenting effort — goals set, resolutions passed, reports published — to measuring results and communicating them. It may also mean a greater focus on making the case not just directly to the public, but also to the trusted experts and commentators who influence the public.

The UN cannot rely on public relations to find its way out of a deficit of trust, because communications cannot substitute for action. Rebuilding confidence will require tangible performance, clear alignment with public priorities, and greater visibility for real-world successes.

In the end, the next Secretary-General may need to be less a visionary selling the ideals of cooperation, and more an operator who can deliver for a world in a crisis and prove that international cooperation, for all of its messiness, still works.

Related Reading

Embracing the Icarus Arc

Season one of World’s Toughest Job is a wrap. (Though we hope to be back for more.)

Has a podcast ever done more to live up to its title? Across eight episodes, we explored the crises awaiting the 10th UN Secretary-General. From the volatility of major power dynamics to AI and climate shocks, the series made you wonder why anyone would put themselves up for election.

But it was ever thus. Read on for more about that and for our interview with former UN Deputy Secretary-General and World’s Toughest Job co-host, Mark Malloch-Brown.

The Scapegoat

Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, called the job “a nightmare.” His successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, was mocked as a “useless lout.” U Thant viewed the UN as a “last-ditch, last-resort affair,” while Javier Pérez de Cuéllar complained about presiding over an institution on the verge of collapse.

But it was Boutros Boutros-Ghali who complained longest and loudest, in a memoir dedicated to settling scores.

Getting the job was an “agonizing and embittering experience.” Losing it — after a fierce battle to avoid a veto from his bitter foe, U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright — was worse.

The Clinton administration, he complained, “was doing more to get rid of me than to get rid of Radovan Karadžić, the Serb leader indicted as a war criminal.”

Messy Multipolarity

The UN is always deadlocked. Major powers are always at each other’s throats. The institution is perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy. And if there is unity, as Kofi Annan used to joke, it is when Member States are pretending that SG actually stands for “scapegoat.”

The 10th Secretary-General will inherit all of this, accelerated by a messy multipolarity. If they look at the careers of their predecessors, they will see that the SGs who succeed are the ones who don’t wait for permission. They’re drivers of change, not re-arrangers of deck chairs.

But as Mark Malloch-Brown said in our first episode, you have to burn political capital to get things done. Forcing change comes at a cost. His advice? Embrace the Icarus arc.

Mark Malloch-Brown

Five Minutes on the Transition

To find out more, we sat down with to talk through the Secretary-General’s transition playbook. His advice to the next SG? Skip the mega-reform packages. Build a “Marine Corps,” act fast, and force the system to follow your lead.

[Re]Group: If you were advising the candidates, how should they prepare for day one?

Mark Malloch-Brown: They need a 100-day sprint. As much as possible, you need a very strong team assembled before January 1. That team is tasked with a clearly identified set of early wins that cover the terrain — something on peace and security, on humanitarian response, on climate, probably on AI.

You bring open-ended peace processes to a conclusion and you launch new initiatives around problems like Sudan, which are probably much more open to dynamic mediation than people think.

First, get some early wins that will be seen and will have global impact, so people sit up and realize the UN is back in town. Only then should you get on with the inevitably murky, slow, and less visible process of sorting out the overlap and duplication of agencies.

[Re]Group: If we can’t rely on 193 Member States to agree, where does the support for change come from?

Mark Malloch-Brown: You want a dynamic minilateralism under the multilateralist umbrella, where groups of States work with the Secretary-General on challenges that are of consuming importance to them.

Take Kofi Annan and the HIV crisis. As the pandemic took hold, there were HIV units scattered all across the UN system, responding as much to funding opportunities as to human need.

Kofi realized the response had to be consolidated and driven by clear metrics: The price of antiretrovirals needed to be brought down, and their availability dramatically increased.

He found a way of deploying a combination of governments, international institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry (in part through threats to pharma). He brought in George W. Bush, who was hugely skeptical of the UN in a classic Republican way, but PEPFAR happened in response to Kofi’s leadership.

What the UN has lost in the years since is a leader who defines the problem, determines who needs to be at the table to solve it, mobilizes that group, and drives them towards a time-bound solution.

[Re]Group: You mentioned that getting bogged down in reform can be a trap. How does a new SG get the system to change?

Mark Malloch-Brown: You’ve got to get the UN out of lots of things it currently does, but the way to do that is not to take it head-on.

If a new Secretary-General makes that mistake, they just spend the next five years in trench warfare. I suppose the analogy is: fight with drones, not like the First World War generals.

When you innovate and deliver external success, that builds momentum, and reform follows effective delivery.

Decoding the Candidates

Reading List

To figure out what the candidates intend to do if they win, 1 for 8 Billion has launched a live database of Policy Profiles.

As campaign coordinator Aditi Gorur tells [Re]Group, the value of these profiles is often found in “the space between the notes.” What a candidate omits is as telling as what they emphasize. (For instance, the profiles reveal that across the board, candidates have so far offered little depth on either climate or humanitarian response.)

Fifteen leading NGOs produced the profiles: prevention (CHRIPS and Saferworld), peacekeeping and peacebuilding (CCCPA and International Peace Institute); humanitarian action (ODI Global); development and inequality (Center for Policy Dialogue and Southern Voice); human rights and gender equality (CEJIL and GQUAL Campaign); gender, youth, and civil society inclusion (CIVICUS and TAP Network); climate (Plataforma CIPÓ and SHE Changes Climate); and UN reform (Article 109).

Take the profile on UN reform. Rebeca Grynspan insists the job is “more than stewardship,” calling for “ambitious structural reform,” while Macky Sall wants to “move the agenda” on political reform. On the other side, Rafael Grossi favors “technical right-sizing” as an “administrator and implementer,” and María Fernanda Espinosa commits to “shrinking the UN responsibly.” Meanwhile, candidates like Michelle Bachelet and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett frame the challenge largely around “efficiency” and “questions of implementation.”

SG Roundup: Regional Priorities

• Six candidates are running for UN Secretary-General, with the Security Council set to weigh in via straw polls in late July.

• As New York’s diplomats scatter for summer, speculation continues on whether new candidates will enter the race. At this point, they almost certainly will.

• Read our cheat sheet to understand how the process works.

Ideas for the next Secretary-General’s inbox are not in short supply, but what’s missing are concrete proposals that have Member State buy-in.

A new series of convenings aims to fill that gap, starting in Africa. On July 9 and 10, SAIIA, the UN Foundation, NYU CICI, and CEPEI co-hosted a dialogue in Johannesburg, bringing together African scholars, policymakers, and former diplomats to discuss actions the region would ask SG to prioritize.

Ambassador Mathu Joyini, former South African Permanent Representative, previewed the stakes on eNCA’s morning show with host Masego Rahlaga, arguing that the leadership qualities we look for in the next SG have to be grounded in regional priorities, not abstract criteria.

Next up: Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

The Complete Podcast

From the Archive

We have just launched the official World's Toughest Job series page — a one-stop shop for the entire first season.

It includes all eight episodes — in audio on your favorite podcast platform and in video on YouTube. For each episode, you will also find our editorial deep-dives on how past Secretaries-General confronted key challenges and takeaways from the expert roundtables.

This project has been an education in how much work goes into creating a series of this scale.

A huge thank you to our brilliant hosts, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host Mark Malloch-Brown for anchoring the series. And an enormous note of gratitude to our lead producer Karen Given, and the Foreign Policy team of Dan Ephron, Rob Sachs, Maria Ximena Aragon, Sara Stewart, Susanna Maize, and Jesse Willis. We couldn’t have asked for better partners.

A quick favor before you go:

If you found value in the podcast series, please take a moment to like, subscribe, and rate on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

And if you have colleagues who you think might want to listen, please forward this newsletter to them.

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1. What Kind of Leader Does the UN Need Right Now?

Leadership and Moral Authority

Can the next Secretary-General find the moral authority and political courage to lead an institution facing global gridlock?

• Scene Setter: Insights into the selection of a new UN leader from Nudhara Yusuf and Richard Gowan.

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2. The Scourge of War

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Can the next Secretary-General rebuild the UN's postwar role as the guarantor of international peace and security?

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• The Roundtable: Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Lynn Kuok, Ankit Panda.

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Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How U Thant’s backdoor diplomacy in the Cuban Missile Crisis generated enough value to fund the UN for decades. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to navigate a world where a $2,000 drone can take out a multimillion-dollar missile, and tech billionaires act as sovereign powers. Read here…

3. Young People and Young Countries

Development and Shared Prosperity

How can the next Secretary-General deliver for young people and young countries?

• History: Dag Hammarskjöld and the “Year of Africa” (1960), narrated by Kal Raustiala.

• Roundtable: Joe Studwell, Saru Duckworth, .

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: Lessons in independence from Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to help young people and young countries navigate a world of unchecked geoeconomic competition. Read here…

4. Who Rules the Code?

AI and Frontier Technologies

Can the next Secretary-General invent a form of diplomacy that brings tech CEOs directly to the table?

• History: Trygve Lie, the Baruch Plan, and the failure to govern atomic energy, narrated by Kai Bird.

• Roundtable: Nur Laiq, Philip Thigo, Maxime Stauffer.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How to survive an arms race, from the atom to the algorithm. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the UN can mobilize the world to ensure that global governance isn’t captured by Silicon Valley lobbying or superpower rivalry. Read here…

5. Shelter from the Storm

The Global Economy

How can the next Secretary-General help forge a new economic consensus?

• History: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Agenda for Development, and the pushback against the IMF’s Washington Consensus, narrated by .

• Roundtable: Carlos Lopes, Homi Kharas, Attiya Waris.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: Boutros Boutros-Ghali versus the Washington Consensus. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How developing nations can build their own financial power. Read here…

6. Physical and Virtual Choke Points

Critical Global Infrastructure

As the world grows increasingly connected, how can the next Secretary-General protect the infrastructure we all depend on?

• History: Kofi Annan, the digital divide, and the story of the SEACOM cable, narrated by .

• Roundtable: Parag Khanna, Salvatore R. Mercogliano, Elisabeth Braw

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How global networks create new vulnerabilities. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to defend the networks on which global commerce and communication rely. Read here…

7. The UN as a Platform in Emergencies

Complex Crises

How can the next Secretary-General prepare the UN for the next complex global shock?

• History: Ban Ki-moon, David Nabarro, and the High-level Task Force on the global food security crisis, narrated by Ambassador Josette Sheeran.

• Roundtable: Sigrid Kaag, Aarathi Krishnan, Martin Griffiths.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: The octopus theory of how multilateral institutions evolve. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the UN can manage emergencies when 21st-century crises don’t respect sectoral boundaries. Read here…

8. Freeloading on the Future

Climate, Nature, and Global Public Goods

Can the next Secretary-General turn the UN from a place where the future gets talked about into a place where it gets protected?

• History: Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Mostafa Tolba, and the Montreal Protocol, narrated by Megumi Seki.

• Roundtable: Arunabha Ghosh, Ana Toni, Jacob Ellis.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: From a hole in the ozone layer to the end of the space age. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the next UN Secretary-General can rebuild the multilateral operating system needed to protect global public goods. Read here…

This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: Can the next Secretary-General turn the UN from a place where the future gets talked about into a platform for its protection?

The future is the ultimate global public good. Yet with the world consumed by immediate crises and geopolitical conflict, the international system’s capacity to think, act, and plan for the long term is being deeply undermined.

From a stable climate and global health to the sustainability of our oceans and the governance of artificial intelligence, humanity is failing to steward our shared resources and is leaving a compounding bill for tomorrow’s generations to pay.

The episode begins with the unlikely triumph of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, signed after scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were tearing a hole in Earth’s ozone layer and threatening to trigger a global ecological collapse. That breakthrough marked the dawn of a new era of environmental diplomacy, establishing a template for collective action that paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Read about that history here.

Today, however, the political consensus needed to protect the global commons has frayed. The multilateral frameworks we rely on are buckling under the weight of their own complexity, caught between escalating geopolitical rivalries and rapid technological change.

In this episode, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host are joined by an expert panel to discuss how the next UN Secretary-General can rebuild the multilateral operating system needed to protect global public goods, and how they can build the farsighted political coalitions required to safeguard the global community tomorrow.

Here’s what Jacob Ellis, a Welsh policymaker and leader for the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales; Arunabha Ghosh, Founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water; and Ana Toni, National Secretary for Climate Change at Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, had to say.

1. We can’t solve planetary crises with a 1945 operating system.

A central debate was whether the UN’s institutional architecture is fundamentally flawed or simply ill-equipped to handle modern, interconnected crises.

Arunabha Ghosh argued that 20th-century treaties were built to address environmental issues in isolated buckets. But as climate change triggers domino effects across the globe, that siloed approach has become a liability.

“These are planetary scale crises,” Ghosh argued, describing the UN’s current structure as “a design failure. It’s not a lack of desire; it’s a lack of design.”

Ana Toni argued that the international system was suited for both the problems and the optimism of 1945. Today, however, the UN has too much on its plate. It has trouble separating truly existential global crises from problems that can be better solved nationally. Because the UN mixes almost every issue “at the same scale” in the same buckets, she said, the system ultimately struggles to “deliver to real people.”

Co-host Mark Malloch-Brown agreed. He believes the UN is still operating on a 1945 blueprint, with machinery “largely dysfunctional,” paralyzed by “so many pulls and pushes in different directions.”

But Jacob Ellis, drawing on the Welsh experience of offering legal protections to future generations, argued for a more farsighted multilateral model. As he pointed out, “It is still possible to make the right decisions by current generations, as well as keeping in mind the impact and the needs of the generations yet to be born.”

2. Progress requires ‘coalitions of the doing,’ not just universal agreement.

A recurring theme was the tension between the UN’s traditional reliance on consensus and the pragmatic need to move forward through targeted alliances.

Ghosh defended universality as a safeguard, designed “to make sure that the strong did not overpower the weak.” But with global trust eroding, he warned that progress on priority challenges was now too slow.

His proposed bridge: “coalitions of the doing” such as the International Solar Alliance, where countries unite over shared interests without stripping anyone of their right to a seat at the table.

Malloch-Brown agreed. While the universal Conference of the Parties (COP) mechanism is “admirable,” he said, it has stalled over contentious issues. Toni drew on her experience leading COP30 in 2025, saying she secured consensus when possible, but otherwise empowered coalitions of the willing to move ahead of the formal negotiations.

Ellis pointed to the “impact coalition for future generations” that he co-leads as an example of this decentralized approach. Global civil society, the private sector, and Member States are forming creative new alliances to bypass the gridlock, he said.

3. Trust is earned through implementation, new incentives, and broader ownership.

A running thread throughout the discussion was the erosion of trust in the multilateral system and how the next Secretary-General can rebuild it through accountability, redesigned incentives, and structural shifts.

Ghosh described trust in the UN as a stock that degrades when countries fail to demonstrate that trust through collective action. “The general who was supposed to lead from the front has fled the battlefield,” he said, pointing to the recent U.S. exit from its climate pledges. As a result, the burden falls heavily on the remaining nations to hold up a “shield of resilience” and keep pushing forward.

For Toni, restoring trust is dependent on delivery. “If we don’t implement what has been agreed by politicians and leaders,” she said, “we are not going to be able to gain the trust again that we need in multilateralism.” To drive implementation, Toni said that the UN must move away from its traditional “system of penalty.” Instead, she advocated for creating a framework that actively rewards countries that lead by example.

Malloch-Brown argued that rebuilding this trust also requires a fundamental recalibration of UN power. Citing the “complete ... corruption of the Security Council” by superpowers that have “betrayed the Charter,” he took note of a necessary and ongoing shift toward a more General Assembly–led organization.

The next Secretary-General’s most vital political task, Malloch-Brown said, will be navigating the UN away from its “original owners” — who dominate the Security Council — “to a new, more dispersed ownership” capable of standing up for universal values.

4. Protecting the future requires a new vocabulary and ‘anticipatory governance.’

An underlying challenge throughout the episode was how to force short-term political systems to incorporate long-term strategic planning at a time when, as Malloch-Brown highlighted, politicians are increasingly driven by chaotic and short-term news cycles.

To overcome this challenge, Ghosh called on the next Secretary-General to develop a new vocabulary. Rather than just talking about climate change, for example, they must speak a combined language of “ecology, economy, and equity” and frame the green transition as a multitrillion-dollar investment opportunity.

Malloch-Brown suggested going further by adding the “less comfortable language” of security to underline the importance of the environment to national interests.

Tying together long-term and more immediate threats makes this “anticipatory governance” approach an easier political sell, Ghosh said. Toni agreed, arguing that pitting “now problems” against “future problems” is a false dichotomy. Solving today’s resource issues responsibly, she noted, is the start of building for the future.

Ultimately, the next Secretary-General must be a champion capable of looking beyond a standard five-year mandate. Ellis urged the next leader to keep their eyes fixed on the “far horizon,” taking responsibility for injecting “systemic hope” into global systems when the world needs it most.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

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To borrow from Hemingway, this is a disaster that unfolds “gradually and then suddenly.”

A decommissioned weather satellite drifts 800 kilometers above the Earth, launched decades ago to map sea ice. A ruptured pressure tank, a micrometeoroid impact, perhaps a missile strike. One instant the satellite is there, and the next it explodes.

A 1,000-kilogram cylinder of aluminum and dead solar panels is now an expanding cloud of shrapnel. For a time, nothing happens. But then another satellite is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a fist-sized chunk of a fuel valve tears through its aluminum hull.

A couple of its fragments soon take out an Earth observation platform and a navigation beacon. And so it goes. Collisions breed more collisions, until the space around us is as inhospitable as an asteroid field in a Star Wars film.

The space age is over before it has really begun.

Art Imitates Life

If this sounds like science fiction, it is.

In Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity, the Russian government destroys one of its own satellites, creating a cloud of fragments that shreds nearby communications networks. Life gets complicated for astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, out on a routine spacewalk to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. Spoiler alert: Bullock survives. Clooney does not.

Or maybe you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel, Seveneves, where the moon splits into seven chunks, which collide and splinter into fragments at an exponential rate.

“The good news is that the Earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn,” the U.S. President is told in a briefing. “The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.”

“Messy” means meteorites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere over thousands of years, boiling the oceans and sterilizing the surface of the planet.

Not ideal, in other words.

The Deadly Toolbag

The truth unfolds on a longer timeline — less Hollywood apocalypse and more a slow throttling of our orbital highways — but the underlying science is the same.

On Nov. 1, 2023, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli was on a spacewalk to perform maintenance on the International Space Station’s solar arrays. You can watch as she loses control of a tool bag, and it drifts slowly away into space.

Slowly, however, is relative to the velocity of the space station itself. In absolute terms, that lost bag of tools was traveling at around 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h) — fast enough to obliterate any spacecraft that crossed its path. That impact would create thousands of new pieces of deadly shrapnel. Which would, in turn … Well, you get the idea.

Moghbeli’s tool bag was tracked by U.S. Space Force, which cataloged it as debris object #58229, until it safely burned up upon atmospheric reentry the following year.

That five-digit tracking system is fast running out of numbers. At any one time, thousands of larger objects are being actively monitored, while 1.2 million are too small to be tracked at all but are still deemed potentially lethal.

And even the small stuff — 140 million or so tiny fragments — can do serious damage. In 2016, a sliver of metal or a paint flake left a gouge in the space station’s quadruple-glazed windows. The culprit was about the size of a single particle of smoke.

The Godfather

The godfather of space debris is Donald J. Kessler, a former NASA scientist, now in his 80s.

In 1978, Kessler and a colleague published a blockbuster paper challenging the NASA consensus that space was large enough to be self-cleaning. They called it: “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt.”

Kessler hypothesized a tipping point. When there is not much space traffic, collisions are rare and debris decays before it becomes a problem. But at a certain point, random collisions create dangerous objects faster than the atmosphere can drag them down.

That leads to a chain reaction. Even then, Kessler warned that some orbits could be past the point of no return, even if no new debris was added. It was, he said, much like the formation of an asteroid belt, just on a much shorter timeline.

The aerospace community picked up on the theory. Soon, they were calling it Kessler Syndrome.

Hole in the Sky

I was thinking about Kessler Syndrome as we made the eighth and final episode of World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation. It also starts with an unfamiliar danger in the skies far above our heads.

In 1974, chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina warned that a class of “miracle” chemicals, used for everything from air conditioning to consumer aerosols, was releasing chlorine atoms that would strip out the Earth’s ozone layer. In 1995, this discovery won them a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Chlorofluorocarbons were soon the target of a grassroots boycott, while the U.S. government banned “non-essential” CFCs in an early application of what we now call the precautionary principle.

But the chemical industry and some governments remained skeptical, until British scientists published an observational study showing a massive depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer over the Antarctic.

For centuries, humanity had believed the atmosphere was too vast for us to alter. We dumped chemicals with impunity, assuming the sheer scale of the planet would dilute our impact. That illusion died in a 1985 paper entitled: “Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClOx/NOx interaction.”

“There was literally a hole in the sky,” recalled Brian Mulroney, then prime minister of Canada. “It caught the public imagination in a way few discoveries do. The truth of the matter is that it scared the hell out of anybody with a brain in his head — and that applied to all governments.”

The Ray-Ban Plan

“All governments” is a bit of a stretch, but the danger spurred some unusual suspects into action.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan supported the control of ozone, based on his own experience of skin cancer. He faced down opposition from those in his own cabinet who thought Americans should instead wear hats and sunglasses. Campaigners mocked it as the “Ray-Ban plan.”

Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher approached the problem like the research chemist she had been before entering politics. She too supported global regulation and found herself battling European nations that were citing “scientific uncertainty” to protect national chemical lobbies.

In New York, the fifth UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, wanted the United Nations to do more on the environment, not a traditional multilateral priority. He was increasingly attentive to the views of the emerging “global citizen” and also saw an issue with potential to bridge Cold War divides.

Pérez de Cuéllar left the heavy lifting to Dr. Mostafa Tolba, the Egyptian microbiologist who ran the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) from its headquarters in Nairobi. Tolba denied he was an autocrat. He just wouldn’t let governments push him around, he said.

These and other leaders invented a playbook that the UN has brought to every subsequent environmental threat.

The Ozone Playbook

The playbook did the easy things first and the hard things later.

Step one was establishing a single source of truth. Tolba spent years forcing rival scientific groups toward consensus. “Only six months after the scientists spoke with one voice,” he recalled, “we managed to get a legally binding treaty.”

Step two was creating a framework to get governments talking. The 1985 Vienna Convention had no binding targets for replacing CFCs, but it built trust. Keep the same negotiators in the same room, Tolba believed, and eventually they will stop shouting and start listening.

Step three was making the negotiations “intergovernmental plus.” You couldn’t solve a chemical crisis without the chemical companies. The Americans, in particular, wanted to signal to the market that profits awaited whoever led the charge on CFC replacements.

Step four was setting binding targets that didn’t scare the horses. Tolba saw that a ban on CFCs would collapse the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which was bolted onto the Vienna framework. The compromise was a 50% cut but with a “ratchet mechanism” to tighten targets if the science worsened.

The final step was forming a North-South Grand Bargain. As an Egyptian public servant, Tolba had believed the environment was a luxury for poorer countries. Leading UNEP had changed his mind, but only if the polluter paid up. So three years after the Montreal Protocol was signed, an agreement was reached to create a fund to support the transition from CFCs.

After that the Montreal Protocol accelerated towards universal ratification (the only UN treaty to cross that benchmark). 99% of CFCs have now been phased out.

It Was Only Ozone

Ask a diplomat in New York about Montreal, and you’ll be told that the treaty was an important achievement. But it was “only ozone” — rather a niche threat compared with the complex crises we face today.

This reflects multilateralists’ tendency to obsess over failure and discount success, to the point where we have lost any collective understanding of what value the international system adds, and how.

In the case of ozone, that value was colossal. Almost unimaginable.

If CFCs were still in widespread use today, skin cancer would be the least of our problems. The world would be facing the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, with damage to food and fisheries alone far exceeding the global cost of a phaseout.

But the real kicker is the climate impact. The Montreal Protocol will prevent roughly 2.5°C of global warming over preindustrial levels by the end of this century. It’s a staggering number, given that recent macroeconomic research suggests that a temperature rise of that magnitude would cut global economic output in 2100 by a quarter to a half.

So that is an international treaty that cost tens of billions of dollars and will save trillions (probably even tens of trillions) across the rest of this century. Few investments deliver that sort of bang for the buck.

But it was “only ozone,” wasn’t it?

The Final Frontier

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher told the UN General Assembly it should use the ozone playbook to start tackling climate change. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreed binding targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

During the long struggle to get enough ratifications to bring the Kyoto Protocol into force, I was part of an effort to set up the world’s first network of environmental diplomats.

Naively, I assumed that foreign policy was basically about preventing war and creating global public goods, until I realized that many old-school ambassadors considered environmental diplomacy a bit of a passing fad.

Now a New Space Age — driven not just by superpower governments, but by private corporations launching commercial megaconstellations — is permanently altering another planetary domain.

Once it took time and patience to spot a satellite, even though they can be seen with the naked eye. Now it is child’s play.

A thousand satellites orbited the Earth in 2010. We passed the 10,000 threshold in 2024, and more than 5,000 more have launched since then. By 2030, there could be 100,000 or more satellites orbiting above our heads.

As space becomes dangerously crowded, many diplomats remain unsure whether this is a premier league issue or not. But they may need to update their priorities — or they will be forced to when the collisions begin.

Kessler in SloMo

Space debris is already more than a theoretical threat. It is projected to cost upward of $40 billion over the next 10 years.

Just four incidents have created 8,000 large pieces of debris in less than 20 years. Three of them were Chinese, Russian, and Indian missile strikes on their own satellites. The fourth was an accidental collision between an American communications satellite and a Russian military satellite.

Each year, the risk of another collision is around 10%, with some orbits having already breached the threshold for Kessler Syndrome. It’s a slow-motion disaster that will play out over decades or centuries, mitigated as satellites get better at dodging danger.

Unless something highly unlikely happens — something as improbable as an eruption of an Icelandic volcano closing European airspace or a novel coronavirus locking down the world.

Space, you see, is now what’s known as an actively safe environment. You don’t launch a satellite and forget about it; you need software algorithms executing thousands of collision-avoidance maneuvers every day.

And if those algorithms fail, things go wrong. In a “gradually, then suddenly” sort of way.

It Won’t Happen

Here are three ways that could push SloMo Kessler onto fast forward.

Scenario one: An extreme solar storm throws satellites onto unpredictable trajectories, while severing radio communications with them. Chances: somewhere between 1% and 10% in a decade. Predicted time to the first collision: a couple of days.

Scenario two: A cyberattack on the U.S. Space Surveillance Network leaves satellites flying blind. Or a bad firmware update strips a privately-owned megaconstellation like Starlink of the systems it uses for collision avoidance. Put this one in a basket labeled “it won’t happen … until it does.”

Scenario three: An anti-satellite missile strike, or the use of “soft-kill” weapons that blind satellites to the dangers approaching them, occurs. This is comfortably within the capabilities of scores of states and, possibly, some non-state actors, too. Fortunately, though, we live in peaceful times.

These “improbable” scenarios would destroy trillions of dollars in hardware, collapse the space insurance market, and degrade GPS, global weather forecasting, and other terrestrial necessities.

Even without a sudden catastrophe, launch windows for deep-space missions to the moon or Mars may narrow. And, at its worst, humanity could find itself effectively shut out of space.

In other words, it would be safe enough to launch a rocket, too risky to put a human in it.

Rules in Space

In 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed by 12 nations, banning military bases and territorial claims over the continent. By dedicating Antarctica to science, it paved the way for the discovery of the ozone hole.

Space also got a Cold War treaty. It was agreed through the UN in 1967, as the superpowers — shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis — decided the last thing they needed was an arms race above their heads.

Some believe this treaty is moribund, elbowed aside by a teeming ecosystem of unilateral rulemaking and minilateral cooperation.

To control space debris, major spacefaring nations are dictating de facto global standards, such as mandates to deorbit satellites within five years of the end of their useful life. Informal coalitions are also on the rise, as decentralized networks pool research, agree on mitigation guidelines, and champion zero debris pledges.

But this scattered innovation needs a center of gravity, and geopolitical adversaries need a baseline for cooperation. Will the UN provide it? That may depend on whether it seizes the opportunity posed by the space summit, UNISPACE IV, which is proposed for July 2027 (Member States are still arguing about whether to let it happen).

Space debris would not be the only issue on the summit’s agenda, but it may be the most tractable. Major powers seem closer to a confrontation over space than at any time since the Outer Space Treaty was agreed sixty years ago. Meanwhile, the private sector is as assertive, and as lightly regulated, as chemical companies were in the 1970s.

But cleaning up space offers common ground. To seize it, the multilateral system won’t need to start from scratch. It just needs to update the ozone playbook, translating a messy patchwork into a governance architecture without crowding out efforts that private companies, national space agencies, and scientific networks are already making.

And if it works, tomorrow’s diplomats will be able to gaze up into safe skies, shake their heads, and say, “It was only space debris, wasn’t it?”

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