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The World the Next Secretary-General Will Inherit
Explore the Latest Issue of Our Future Agenda Quarterly
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By Our Future Agenda
This article was first published in its original multimedia form on Our Future Agenda. To experience the full version with its original visual and interactive elements:
As the selection process for the next UN Secretary-General accelerates, much of the focus has been on who is running and who can win.
The first 2026 edition of Our Future Agenda Quarterly asks something different: What kind of world awaits the next Secretary-General? And what kind of leadership will that world demand?
Across six essays, the issue explores the wider context in which the next Secretary-General will take office on Jan. 1, 2027. It dives into the growing strain on global cooperation, the shift from rules to raw power, the challenge of rebuilding trust in institutions, and the mounting pressure to deliver results.
The UN’s Next Era Will Be Built in Disorder sets aside the notion that the Secretary-General’s role is to re-create a vanished order and explores the real task at hand: maintaining cooperative governance through rupture, fragmentation, and pressure. The Secretary-General’s effectiveness in doing so, as examined in From Rules to Raw Power, may depend as much on people’s trust in the office as on the formal powers it holds.
Show Me It Works asks whether multilateralism can deliver tangible results — a protected school, a prevented escalation, a community kept afloat — while Who Pays for the Future? looks at the deeper architecture underneath it all: debt, aid, finance, and the unequal costs of building resilience.
The Secretary-General’s First Test Is Post-2030 argues that the first real challenge may not be a single crisis at all, but whether the UN can begin the transition beyond 2030 with enough urgency, transparency, and discipline to make the next phase more credible than the last one. Finally, The First Interview Round takes readers inside the first interactive dialogues to see what the candidates’ answers revealed about how they understand the job itself.
About Our Future Agenda
Our Future Agenda is a United Nations Foundation program dedicated to putting young people — especially from young countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — at the heart of global decision-making and solving the world’s biggest challenges.
Learn more: www.ourfutureagenda.org