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The UN and Global Public Goods
Four Takeaways from Episode 8 of our podcast, 'World’s Toughest Job'
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 Mark Malloch-Brown 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.