New multilateralism: The United Nations and governance in the era of nonstate actors

Abstract

Nonstate actors, particularly international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), helped found the United Nations and have been working with and through the UN ever since. The increasing variety and activities of nonstate actors, including innovative hybrids, has produced a new multilateralism in global governance to which the United Nations must adapt. This chapter examines three features of this new multilateralism and the resulting effects upon both the United Nations and global governance. New multilateralism is characterized by participation from groups from the very local to the global, as well as the diversification of power from the North to the South. Emerging BRICS powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) demand that their issues and interests be part of multilateral negotiations, as the world seeks to grapple with increasingly severe and numerous transnational problems including terrorism, climate change, economic crises, food security, migration and weapons proliferation. In addition, new multilateralism includes calls for change by the UN (and other multilateral organizations) in response to failures of implementation, accountability and legitimacy. In response to the accountability and legitimacy failures of large bureaucracies, nonstate actors are increasingly taking more innovative forms, including digital advocacy organizations and public-private partnerships. In the future, scholars expect to see more regionalism, a larger role for orchestration by the UN, more delegation to specialized actors and increasing diversity as well as dynamic density of international exchanges. The great promise of new multilateralism is the democratization of international policymaking and the increasingly innovative institutions and policy solutions. The recent shock of the global COVID-19 pandemic poses the risk of setting new multilateralism back in many areas, which is worth considering proactively, including shifts in issue focus and funding flows and necessary localization and digitalization.