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Designing a Roadmap to The Future We Want, The UN We Need

As we mark the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations under the banner “the future we want, the UN we need”, we reflect on the complex challenges facing our world, including cross-border health pandemics, economic shocks, inequality, climate instability, and threats to peace and security, and bring forward a call to action.

Talking about what the UN system can do for us and the changes required is important. An even more critical challenge is to engage stakeholders from within and outside the world body to co-create partnerships and pathways to the future we fervently desire and a United Nations that inspires and serves all humanity. 

Our Basic Goal: In connection with the world body’s 75th anniversary, the UN75 Global Governance Forum seeks to promote a more inclusive and effective United Nations through dialogue and recommendations that better harness the ideas, capabilities, and networks of both state and non-state actors for achieving the UN's commitment to peace, sustainable development, human rights, and a stable climate.

On September 16 & 17, 2020, more than 3,000 people gathered virtually in two plenary sessions to honor the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations and highlight the just-released Roadmap for the Future We Want & UN We Need: A Vision 20/20 for UN75 and Beyond.

A cornerstone of international order since 1945, the United Nations must continue to adapt and innovate to respond to new threats, challenges, and opportunities in our current age of complexity. We convened more than 300 stakeholders from civil society (including youth), scholars, policy entrepreneurs, UN system bodies and Member States, the private sector, and philanthropic institutions to honor the principles of multilateral cooperation upon which the UN was founded.

In this spirit, participants sought collectively to raise the ambition of the UN75 Declaration by initiating new multi-stakeholder pilot projects toward the realization of “the future we want, the UN we need.” In an era of accelerated connectivity and advanced technology, the shared aspiration is to forge and realize a roadmap to bring a fresh, modern perspective to the UN Charter’s founding principles to update our vision and promote a truly “people-centered” architecture for global collective action. 

UN75 GLOBAL GOVERNANCE FORUM - September 16-17, 2020

Background

Since its founding in 1945, governments have strived through the United Nations to create a system that addresses global challenges around the three main pillars: Peace & Security, Development, and Human Rights. Climate governance has now, in effect, become the world body’s fourth pillar. Though the emergence of global civil society and the business community have added new capabilities to our global governance system, the complexity of the modern world—including, for starters, the harmful spread of the COVID-19 virus and its devastating financial and economic consequences, the disruptive effects of new technologies, the threat of runaway climate change, rising violence in fragile states and regions, and record migration and refugee levels—is outpacing our collective ability to manage globalization for the benefit of all nations and peoples. 

Today, learning from both failures and hard fought successes, we know much more about what an effective holistic process for progressive global change looks like—harnessing the thinking, resources, and connections among state and non-state actors across the UN system’s four pillars (i.e., building effective partnerships)—and the specific global norms, policies, and institutional reforms needed (i.e., promoting innovation), to achieve a new end state that better serves the shared aspirations of all humanity. The UN75 Global Governance Forum is premised on the idea that diverse stakeholders, working collaboratively and empowered by new technologies, represent the best way forward toward achieving both the future people worldwide are calling for and the new United Nations we so urgently need. 

APPROACH 

Event design will incorporate two tracks 

Track 1 (Partnerships)

Across the forum’s four pillars (peace and security, sustainable development, human rights and humanitarian action, and climate governance), partnership working groups will explore new kinds of multi-stakeholder partnerships composed of UN system departments/agencies, states, the private sector, philanthropists, and broader civil society groups from all regions. Each of the 20 partnership tables, composed of around 10 participants each, will meet in two sessions of 90 minutes each over July and August.   While the first session will focus on the formulation of pre-vetted partnerships to achieve specific outcomes, the second session will seek to nurture the development of new multi-stakeholder partnerships to advance the mission of the United Nations across its main pillars of action. The partnerships will be drawn from various stages of development. Each partnership will represent an opportunity to be scaled and replicated in the future. Each of the 20 partnership tables  will report out on their progress as part of  the closing session of the Global Governance Forum on September 17.  The outcome report and roadmap from the event will be presented to the UN 75 Leaders Summit, on September 21, as well as during virtual “UNGA week” side events. 

Examples of partnerships include: 

• Global Challenges Foundation - Climate Risk Governance Commission The Global Climate/Nature Emergency and the Governance Gap. The Commission aims to fill a crucial gap in confronting the global climate emergency, by innovating and proposing feasible high impact global governance solutions for urgent, exponential climate action, to limit global temperature rise to or below 1.5°C.

• Alliance for Multilateralism - Paris Call for Trust and Security in CyberspaceThe goal of the Paris Call is to constitute a community of supporters from all sectors – public sector, private sector, civil society – that unite around, promote and implement a common set of values and principles in order to increase trust and security in the cyber space. 

• One Earth Future - Secure FisheriesCold Catch - Developing a Cold Chain Infrastructure for the Somali Fishing Industry. This partnership will bring about an innovative multi-disciplinary solution in partnership with the Global Cold Chain Alliance, to cold chain infrastructure that can be piloted in Somalia and expanded to other LDCs.

• Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung New York Office - Wealth and Taxpayer Transparency for a Fair Post-Covid Global Economy. This partnership scales up to the global level and joins pilot projects for wealth registry and certifying corporate tax transparency.

Track 2 (Innovations)

Building on preceding online and in-person global and regional policy dialogues and a one-month e-consultation, four webinars, and commissioned policy briefs on the future of global governance (August 2020), this track will build consensus on and devise a reform strategy for a select number (i.e., no more than 15 to 20) of “Global Governance Institutional, Policy, and Normative Innovations for UN75 & Beyond” that both complement and improve the conditions for effective multi-stakeholder partnerships. The proposed innovations will also aim to further develop and go beyond official UN75 Declaration commitments (to be finalized in June in New York).

For Further Information:

un75globalforum.org

or contact

Maureen Connolly, Project Director, UN75 Global Governance Forum

mconnolly@onearthfuture.org

Founder: Innovation in Partnerships©

© 2020 Maureen Connolly Management, Inc., doing business as Partnerships for Social Change maintains the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, display and modify the Innovations in Partnership work indefinitely. The content of this document, and the presentation of it, includes original ideas and concepts protected under U.S. intellectual property laws. All rights reserved.

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