In his follow up from the Our Common Agenda, UN Secretary-General António Guterres published a policy brief elaborating on a proposal for an Emergency Platform to strengthen the international response to complex global shocks. This comes at a time where Joyce Msuysa, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Relief Coordinator, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), reminds us “the idea that we have entered an age of permanent crisis, that humanity is lurching from one global disaster to another without drawing breath, is rapidly gaining ground.” COVID-19, the global food crisis, and the earthquakes in Syria and Türkiye are a few recent examples of such complex shocks.
Per the Secretary-General, the Emergency Platform would not be an institution, but rather an intergovernmentally agreed mechanism to launch a set of protocols during a global shock to provide swift, agile, and coordinated responses by convening relevant stakeholders. This coordination mechanisms that leverages the convening power of the Secretary-General seems to be a necessary addition to the UN’s response architecture, but it does raise several questions, including how this fits into the wider UN and humanitarian systems, and even what constitutes “global,” “shock,” or “complex,” in a world that calls for a “next generation” response capacity.
Fifteen months out from the 2024 Summit of the Future, the Stimson Center’s inaugural Global Governance Innovation Report (GGIR 2023) sheds light on intersecting complexities in the global governance architecture. It offers a comprehensive roadmap for course correction in a divided world embattled by violent conflict, fragility, hyper-nationalism, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), pandemics, climate change-fueled crises, unchecked proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), and growing tools of cyber-warfare.
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