Multilateralism is straining at the seams: Is global cooperation in retreat?

2026-01-27 - 05:04

Over a decade ago, in a rare moment of global unity – rather difficult to fathom today – all members of the United Nations (UN) unanimously adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or Agenda 2030, at the 70th session of the General Assembly in New York City. This agreement marked the culmination of decades of global dialogue and ambition, beginning with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, followed by the Millennium Summit in 2000, the Johannesburg Declaration in 2002, and Rio+20 in 2012. Each of these milestones laid the foundation for a shared vision of forging a global partnership to advance peace, prosperity, and sustainable development for both the people and the planet. Importantly, the SDGs attempted to build on previous global efforts and address their shortcomings. The Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that preceded them and had shaped development priorities for 15 years prior, achieved notable progress but were viewed as being narrowly focused on anti-poverty and public health in developing countries, and driven by a paternalistic top-down approach from external actors (largely UN agencies and donors). The SDGs broadened the scope to ambitiously include decent work, climate action, affordable clean energy, peace and justice, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, among others. They evolved through a participatory bottom-up process and placed the responsibility for implementation on all countries, not just developing ones. The year 2015 was marked by two other significant events. The third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, underscored the importance of ramping up private and blended finance tools to achieve the SDGs. It highlighted that public flows alone would not be enough, popularising the phrase ‘from billions to trillions’. Additionally, donor countries reaffirmed their commitment to allocating 0.7 per cent of gross national income for official development assistance (ODA), an unlikely triumph given preliminary discussions a few years ago at the heels of the financial crisis had not been promising. The second was the Paris Agreement in December in France, a legally binding international treaty on climate change with an overarching goal to limit the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius. It was understood that the developed world would take the lead on providing financial assistance, technology and capacity building to support the less endowed and more vulnerable countries for emissions mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Fast forward to date, development practitioners reflect on 2015 with somewhat of a nostalgia. What was observed then, some argue, was the peak of multilateralism rather than a take-off for a new era of global cooperation – an apex, not a beginning. It may yet be early to say whether this pessimism is warranted and whether the development agenda has derailed or simply detoured for now. But warning signs are blaring: only 18pc of the SDGs are on track, the financing gap to achieving them has been estimated at a staggering $2.5 to $4.5 trillion annually till 2030, and the latest global warming projections imply that there is a two-third chance that the current mitigation policies will only keep warming below 2.8°C by the end of this century. How did we get here? For one, the designers of SDGs crafted a vision of a better world that fell short of the realities of politics, argues Professor Adam Tooze of Columbia University in the September cover essay for the Foreign Policy magazine. They, furthermore, failed to foresee how status quo powers would react when development eventually occurs. What would happen if, for instance, Mexico reached Canadian levels of GDP per capita, or Ethiopia and Nigeria achieved Turkish levels? Look no further than China, Tooze asserts, a remarkable development success story, which fostered neither greater trust nor reinforced the international rules-based order but has rather triggered a new Cold War. Development, he put forth, is fundamentally political and a more developed world is inherently more multipolar. The rise in public sentiment of inward-looking, nationalist ideologies across rich democracies is maybe then not a coincidence. Instead, it reflects the growing belief that supporting development elsewhere comes at the expense of prosperity at home. In March 2025, the US formally denounced the SDGs stating that such globalist agendas were incompatible with national sovereignty and had ‘lost at the ballot box’. Instead, the US called for ‘responsible’ development, emphasising that countries should take greater ownership of their national development priorities over compliance with global targets. When the US Agency for International Development became a casualty to this re-positioning, there was expectation that other donors and supporters of multilateralism (especially Europeans) would pick up the tab. Yet, it wasn’t the case. Indeed, aid budgets have been slashed across the board with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimating global aid to fall by 25pc by 2027. But politics aside, there are other critical factors that deserve attention. The past decade has been one of unprecedented polycrisis: global pandemic, increasing conflicts, mounting public debt burdens, and rising geo-economic fragmentation. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major setback to the SDGs, halting progress across multiple fronts. In 2020, an estimated 100 million children and youth slipped below minimum reading proficiency, more than 250 million livelihoods were lost, and over 100 million people had plunged back into poverty, reversing years of hard-won gains. More than 7 million COVID-19 deaths globally have been reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to date. In retrospect, the pandemic truly put the lofty claims of global cooperation to test, exposing just how fragile that cooperation really was. Higher-income countries rushed to hoard vaccines and personal protective gear and undermined efforts by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to temporarily waive patents for vaccine production. Consequently, many of these countries had administered their third and even fourth vaccine doses before even 20pc of the population in lower-income countries, mostly in Africa, had received a single shot. The head of WHO declaring this situation a ‘vaccine apartheid’. The last decade has seen the world become increasingly less peaceful. There are 59 active state-based conflicts – the most since World War II. Many of the leading indicators that typically precede major conflicts are at record levels, and this trajectory appears to be getting worse. We have already seen extraordinary escalations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen, the regime change in Venezuela with the raid and seizure of President Nicolás Maduro by the US, as well as the US posturing over Greenland that has shaken its European allies and put into question the future of the Western alliance. At the same time, the ability to resolve conflicts is at its lowest point in five decades. Between 1970s and 2010s, decisive victories fell significantly from 49pc to 9pc and conflict resolution through peace agreement declined from 23pc to only 4pc. One key reason is the growing internationalisation of conflicts — 78 countries are involved in conflicts beyond their own boundaries. This growing external involvement is fuelled by deepening geopolitical divisions and intensifying competition among major powers, alongside the expanding influence of middle powers that have become increasingly active within their regions. As a result, by the end of 2024, forced displacement had surged globally to over 123 million — including refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers, and people in need of international protection — nearly double the figure from a decade ago. Amid these crises, global public debt continues to rise, driven by ongoing shocks and the sluggish, uneven performance of the global economy. By the end of 2024, global public debt had climbed to $102 trillion, equivalent to 93pc of global GDP. Although, developing countries accounted for only about one-third of this total, their debts have grown twice as fast as developed economies over the past decade. Latest figures show 58 developing countries facing severe debt distress, with debt-to-GDP ratios exceeding 60pc (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) benchmark for elevated debt stress in emerging markets), placing acute strain on already stretched public budgets. Around 3.3 billion people – over 40pc of the world’s population – live in countries that spend more on servicing debt interest than on education and health. Systemic inequalities in the international financial architecture limit access to affordable finance, forcing developing countries to rely on expensive private sources. In 2023, 60pc of their external public debt was owed to private creditors, at borrowing rates that were two to four times higher than those for the US. This growing dependence on private creditors, combined with elevated global interest rates (since 2022) and low sovereign credit ratings complicates debt restructuring and refinancing, causing delays and driving up resolution costs. At their annual meeting in October last year, IMF warned that the global public debt is forecasted to rise above 100pc of global GDP by 2029, the highest level since 1948. Importantly, these trends are unfolding under a pervasive shadow of geo-economic fragmentation.