Flags hanging in a row outside of building

Promoting and Defending Multilateralism

This program was born out of the awareness that collective action is crucial to address twenty-first century challenges, from conflict and economic instability to global health and climate threats. It aims to provide deeper understanding, independent perspectives, and expert analysis to assist stakeholders and decision-makers seeking to strengthen the United Nations and other key multilateral institutions.

How Can Multilateralism Address Today’s Global Challenges

This program aims to defend and promote multilateralism in a period of growing tensions and polarization through three workstreams:

1. The Case for Action and Solutions, where we provide independent analysis on multilateral opportunities. Future pieces will prioritize and analyze risks and opportunities for multilateralism in line with the United Nation’s commitment to strengthen strategic foresight, along with identifying opportunities for action around the upcoming UN Summits and other international events. Previously, pieces focused on analysis related to ideas in Our Common Agenda and their implementation, supported cross-regional coalitions of member states and other partners in support of delivery of these actions—such as the joint statement by Pathfinders member states, held joint events with the Leaders Network for Reinventing Multilateralism together, and provided inputs on the Justice Action Coalition.
2. Strengthening UN-IFI Collaboration, which seeks to address the effectiveness and efficiency of the UN and international financial institutions (IFIs) to address challenges of fragile, conflict, and violence-affected contexts, an area that has grown in focus in the past two years. This program currently focuses on (i) the particular constraints experienced by the multilateral system in staying engaged in politically-charged situations such as Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other countries that have experienced unconstitutional changes in government; (ii) elevating cooperation in prevention and transitional situations on a strategic level.
3. Senior Appointments at Multilateral Institutions, where we support gender parity and other forms of inclusiveness among UN senior management through maintaining the senior appointments dashboard and publishing regular analysis of progress and remaining challenges.

Our Latest Resources

Subscribe to the CIC Newsletter

Get updates on our expert activists’ work and how you can support them.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.