The United Nations Is Convening—and Spluttering

As the United Nations General Assembly gathers for its 78th session, it does so in the wake of a summer that has repeatedly shown the global dashboard to be flashing red. Climate records have been smashed, with the highest average temperatures in thousands of years and devastating flooding from India and China to Norway and Greece. The Black Sea grain deal, intended to alleviate high food prices in lower-income countries, has broken down. Military takeovers in Niger and now Gabon bring the number of coups in West and Central Africa since 2020 to eight.

Confirmation of that gloomy picture will come at the summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on Sept.18-19 . This was meant to be a midway progress review: the implementation period for the 17 interlinked objectives, which include ending extreme poverty and hunger, began in 2016 and is due to end in 2030. The world is far from the right track. Out of 140 metrics by which the SDGs are measured, half are not on the desired trajectory and about one-third have stalled or gone into reverse.

That makes the interinstitutional squabbles over the summit’s desired outcomes especially dismal. The U.S. administration and its allies reportedly objected to calls in its draft declaration to reform the international financial system. It is a familiar stumbling block: rich-world national governments and the Bretton Woods international financial institutions bridling at any moves by the United Nations to stray into “their” territory. But the United States and its friends are not the only ones resurrecting red lines better suited to the history books than the present crisis. India and its allies also reportedly clashed over whether to make reference to the G-20 in the draft declaration.

Old ghosts seem to dog the process and allow no one to raise their eyes to the looming crises. These disputes risk making this crucial SDGs summit a flop. That would be doubly disastrous: virtually dooming the goals to nonfulfillment and casting a heavy shadow over the U.N.’s Summit of the Future, billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew global governance but already postponed from this year to next. Whatever the historical rights and wrongs of these interinstitutional suspicions, they are utterly out of step with the moment. Time and trust are running out, both on the SDGs and the wider restoration and renewal of the multilateral system.

That very urgency, however, also makes this a window of opportunity. Governments and institutions are recognizing that in our age of “poly-crisis,” new ambition is needed. Dynamic coalitions and initiatives are coalescing, like the Bridgetown Initiative, launched by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley to create additional fiscal space for climate and development spending. The Paris summit on climate and development finance in June may not have generated commitments on the transformative scale needed, but it represented a newly open and, crucially, political conversation on those topics between the so-called global north and global south.

New ideas and proposals are percolating through the international system. Take the report published in June by the G-20 independent expert group on strengthening multilateral development banks. It called for bold action on three fronts: adding global public goods to the banks’ existing goals of eliminating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity; marshalling new financial firepower to triple their lending by 2030 to $300 billion annually; and establishing a new “global challenges” mechanism enabling coalitions of sovereign and nonsovereign entities to crowd in lending alongside the multilateral development banks. This “triple agenda” ought to represent the realm of the eminently possible.

These new realignments, coalitions, impetuses, and ideas would make the failure of the SDG summit all the more lamentable. History will not be kind to leaders too tangled up in the intrigues and rivalries of corridors of power in Washington and New York to seize the opportunities of the moment. International financial institutions and national governments, particularly Western ones whose standing in the global system is already under strain, should welcome the U.N.’s engagement.

For its part, the U.N. system needs to find the versatility and nimbleness needed to marshal a consensus. Its architecture is creaking, built for a postwar world very different from today’s permanently shifting multipolarity. This is a reality further underscored by the G-20 summit in New Delhi last weekend, both in its strong focus on global governance reform and its diplomatically tortuous declaration skirting around Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The old western powers backed down to accommodate their Indian hosts and their major developing country allies. That may not be a comfortable development, but it is a recognition that power is shifting globally and needs to do so at the United Nations, too.

Our collective priority must be restoring multilateralism and guiding the world onto a better course, including comprehensively meeting the SDGs by the goal of 2030. A new global polling report by Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy that I lead, ought to focus minds. Charting the attitudes of more than 36,000 respondents in a representative group of 30 countries, the Open Society Barometer documents a widespread appetite for greater ambition. Among those we surveyed, 65 percent agreed that lower-income countries should have a greater say on international financial decisions, 68 percent said that high-income countries should increase the World Bank’s funds, and 70 percent were anxious that climate change could have a negative impact on their lives in the next year.

Those figures and the expectations that they represent, not comparatively petty institutional squabbles, should be at the top of minds in Turtle Bay next week. There is not yet much sign that they will be. New Yorkers famously hate U.N. General Assembly for the traffic gridlock it produces. This year, they may have more grounds than ever for their impatience.