Executive Summary
“The Pact for the Future is our blueprint for the actions we need to take in order to deliver a better future for humanity. Its implementation will be at the core of my Presidency, building upon the agenda set forth by my predecessors.”
—Annalena Baerbock, 80th President of the General Assembly
Though the World Health Assembly’s adoption, in May, of the first agreement to prevent and respond to future pandemics, alongside the International Maritime Organization’s legally binding commitment, in April, to cut greenhouse gas emissions, signal renewed hope in multilateral approaches to cooperation, the United Nations’ long-standing financial crisis has suddenly morphed into an extreme liquidity crisis. Annual budget shortfalls, as high as 30-40 percent in humanitarian and other UN bodies, could severely hamper the world body’s work with partners to confront the polycrisis of devastating wars, accelerating climate change, unregulated artificial intelligence, and other factors fueling acute inequality and injustice.
Paradoxically, as it nearly coincided with these unprecedented attacks, September 2024’s Summit of the Future in New York presented a moment to rebuild trust and renew the multilateral system to prepare for over-the-horizon challenges and opportunities. The summit’s adopted Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact, and Declaration on Future Generations can serve as a bulwark against forces seeking to dismantle the 1945 system of cooperative global governance.
Defending Multilateralism through the Pact for the Future
Against a backdrop of divisive politics and mistrust among major powers, Global Governance Innovation Report 2025 (GGIR’25) on “Advancing the Pact for the Future and Environmental Governance” demonstrates how efforts to deliver on the Pact and the promise of COP30 in Belém equally address the broader, urgent need to defend multilateral institutions and the international legal order. They provide both a positive narrative and a practical focus on near-term potential global governance breakthroughs in response to catastrophic risks, including the triple planetary environmental crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
In particular, the Pact’s Chapter Five on “Transforming global governance” offers a roadmap for long overdue, system-wide structural changes, including in the areas of international financial architecture reform, enlarging the Security Council, strengthening the Peacebuilding Commission, redefining how national progress is assessed, and enhancing how the international community responds to global shocks. The full realization of the Pact means a United Nations system capable of keeping pace—and empowering people and nations to better grapple—with the pivotal challenges and opportunities of the present era.
In response to the UN’s acute liquidity crisis, Secretary-General António Guterres unveiled, in March 2025, his UN80 Initiative to modernize the UN’s structure, priorities, and operations for the 21st century. It wields the potential to reinforce the Pact for the Future by focusing on the UN’s core strengths, fostering system-wide efficiencies, relocating staff to where needs are greatest, and encouraging a new Grand Bargain to underpin the multilateral system—reflecting renewed concerns about another Cold War and even Third World War, but also environmental destruction, population growth, and migration.
Monitoring the Pact for the Future (Year 1): A Logical Framework Approach
Given that data monitoring gaps were anticipated, GGIR’25 assessed process deliberations, existing official SDG indicators, and proxy indicators that speak to the essential meaning of select Pact Actions. Based on evaluation best practice, all indicators adhered to SMART (or Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) criteria for Pact measurement, alongside associated, credible, and relatively recent baseline data examples.
On the whole, our review of around one-half of the Pact’s Actions suggests that slow yet visible progress is observed across key elements of the Pact. For instance, steps toward strengthening the Peacebuilding Commission (speaking to Action 44) are underway, and the recent World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings and upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development are helping to sustain momentum on certain international financial architecture reforms (speaking to Pact Actions 47-52). We also note progress toward standing-up an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance (Pact Chapter Three and Global Digital Compact Objective 5).
At the same time, proposed steep funding cuts are anticipated to hurt Pact implementation across the board, as many countries begin to pull back from foreign aid and international organization financing. Leveraging the Secretary-General’s UN80 initiative may prove crucial in helping to advance, rather than detract from, the ambitious Pact for the Future, by creating a more agile, cost-effective, and impactful UN system.
Innovative Environmental Governance for a Post-1.5 °C World
In preparation for this November’s COP30 in Belém, the report analyzes and offers outside-the-box policy and institutional reform proposals for grappling with the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, including:
Enhance the Climate COPs: To overcome chronic deadlocks in climate negotiations, COP decision-making should adopt weighted or supermajority voting to mitigate obstruction by emitting minority countries. Brazil’s proposed high-level, influential country Climate Change Council, under the UN and sourcing non-state expertise, can further improve coordination by aggregating climate action efforts that are currently fragmented.
Finalize an Effective Global Plastics Treaty: The next round of Global Plastics Treaty negotiations this August in Geneva should focus on the prohibition of a wide range of chemicals of concern, the expansion of circularity both through enhanced recycling and ecological design, ambitious and legally-binding global and national production reduction targets, and effective financing mechanisms to ensure technology transfer and capacity-building. To increase buy-in for a strong treaty, an economically supportive transition away from plastics is vital.
Embed Responsibility Chains in global environmental governance: Complementing traditional accountability approaches, responsibility chains identify and connect governance actors across sectors and levels who share responsibility for environmental harms—and their solutions. Operating through a new Global Environment Organization (GEO), a Responsibility Chains Task Force would assess governance gaps, map chains of responsibility across public and private sectors, and identify institutional barriers to coordinated environmental action across the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
Taking the Pact for the Future Forward: A Multistakeholder Governance Approach
In examining pathways and pitfalls to advancing the Pact for the Future, GGIR’25 outlines ways to navigate around three chief sets obstacles: first, facilitating coordination and responsibility: address capacity constraints head on, while avoiding coordination gaps, institutional misalignment, and stakeholder ambiguities; second, maintaining Pact integrity: pursue Pact reforms in a balanced and comprehensive way across all five chapters, rather than as a simple menu of options to choose from; and third and finally, overcoming financing and other implementation barriers: circumventing short-term national economic and strategic interests requires concerted efforts to unlock new financial resources, streamline debt restructuring, and coordinate international financial architecture reforms, including through a new Biennial Summit for the global economy (Pact Action 48).
Initial evidence from the report’s mapping and monitoring exercises further suggests that specific Pact Actions can garner momentum when they are championed by even a small number of diverse and committed governments. Besides the seventeen intergovernmental fora overseen directly by the President of the General Assembly, other international fora can offer opportunities for creative and resourceful leadership, including the WTO, G20, Climate COPs, and regional organizations.
Additionally, some lessons for Pact follow-up, gleaned from recent Human Rights Council and Peacebuilding Architecture reform efforts, are: i) to ensure that innovative new global governance tools are carefully developed by experts and widely consulted among governments and other important stakeholders, learning from prior efforts to establish the Council’s Universal Periodic Review and the Architecture’s Peacebuilding Fund; and ii) to sustain political support for an innovation long after its initial adoption by forming and nurturing a smart coalition of champion governments, international civil servants, and like-minded partners across civil society whose ideas, networks, and capabilities are valued and employed in unison at key intervals.
Drawing on these and other lessons, while building on this year’s President of the General Assembly (PGA) Interactive Dialogue series, GGIR’25 recommends convening every May in New York an Annual PGA Dialogue on Pact for the Future Follow-up, as well as a proposed Ministerial Dialogue on the Pact Review Framework, in September 2026, at the mid-point on the road to the official high-level review in September 2028. Such high-level fora would encourage skillful multilateral diplomacy, sustained leadership across the UN system, active civil society engagement, and a robust, closely monitored follow-through effort to support the goals and commitments adopted at the September 2024 Summit of the Future.
The Pact for the Future is more than a set of Actions: It is an affirmation of cooperation over isolation and solidarity over self-interest. Serving as a proxy for the defense of multilateral institutions, the Pact’s full implementation would signal that global governance can evolve—not by inflating bureaucracy, but by embracing innovation, inclusivity, and accountability.
