Is It Only Multiclatteralism?

Context: As the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) kicks off along with the two-day G20 summit in Rome, the efficacy of multilateralism in the world today hangs in the balance.

Successful stint of global multilateralism

• The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to prevent transboundary pollution.
• The 1997 Ottawa Treaty on banning landmines.
• The 1987 Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer and others are clear examples where they have worked.
• Establishment of peace and security: Peace and security are global public goods. In this context, Bretton Woods institutions were set up after World War 2, including the UN and the World Bank.

Challenges towards multilateralism

• Regulating trade and removing trade barriers
• Carbon pricing and climate change: A report of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change concluded that despite all efforts, it is inevitable that emissions in 2030 will increase by16% compared to 2010 levels.
• Ensuring food security
• Global vaccine distribution
• Data privacy
• Global instability, conflict and poverty remain
• Broken financing: Green bonds have grown and are far larger than international climate finance. This has occurred without a policing role from multilateral institutions.
  • The Green Climate Fund (GCF) continues to focus on goals of short-term leverage per investment rather than catalysing finance, investing in riskier markets, and innovating.

Way Forward: Rejuvenating multilateralism -

• Multilateral institutions must recognise all countries as equal in their governance.
  • For e.g., while the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has supported the multilateral agreements since the 1990s, GCF was created in 2010, treating developing and developed countries as equals and making the former be part of the solution when it comes to global goods.
• Multilateral institutions are better as nudgers than as rule-makers: They should set global standards that are voluntary but plan for local action.
  • Where there have been no binding constraints and where global agreements have required, say, additional data, technical expertise or support, multilateral institutions have managed to nudge global action in the right direction, for e.g. the World Health Organisation (WHO) and
• Multilateral institutions shouldn’t claim to be agile: In the context of Covid responses, national government social protection systems were able to deliver relief in less than nine weeks, while UN agencies took more than a year.
• Multilateral institutions are great to ‘signal’ direction and to get the world to pivot: Not unlike the Geneva Conventions regulating the conduct of armed conflict and seeking to reduce its effects, the Paris Agreement has become a beacon for a range of actors and climate actions.

Conclusion: As the world’s institutions meet at Glasgow, consensus-dependent multilateral institutions will need to reinvent themselves instead of reducing themselves as mere platforms. This is what is at stake today: setting standards, expert and multidisciplinary evidence, unbiased measurements, and thinking independently for the future while remaining impartial and technical at its core.