Can We Rebuild Global Governance?
From Gaza to Ukraine and Iran: a renewed multilateralism as the only solution
Can We Rebuild Global Governance?
From Gaza to Ukraine and Iran: a renewed multilateralism as the only solution
Pasquale Lucio Scandizzo
A Key Lack of “Intentional” Global Public Goods
In the past 30 years, globalization has powerfully advanced on the back of public goods which have been mostly side products of private sector expansion. Global public goods, defined as goods that are “globally” non rival and non excludable, have included digital networks like the internet, innovations and productivity boosts from technological change, and the web of connectivity between individuals, firms, governments, and civil societies across borders. These spillovers from private goods have all worked together to generate a largely informal architecture of globalization, unplanned, patchworked, and opportunistically exploited, but ineffably effective at generating economic vibrancy and interdependence.
But as easily predictable in the absence of global governance institutions and of any consensus around a global social contract, globalization has also progressed in reach and scope with a significant weakness: systemic under-provision of intentional global public goods. These are the goods requiring intentional governance, financing, and care for open and lasting benefit and sustainability. They are difficult to define and easy to confuse, since they include both fundamental objectives like peace, justice, climate stability, and global health, as well as, more critically, the instruments to pursue these goals and, in particular, the institutions necessary to create and protect them.
Institutional Deficit of Globalization
The majority of modern economic and political science literature underscores such an imbalance. Whereas market economies have delivered private goods on an international scale efficiently, institutions for coordinating joint international actions, and particularly for provision of public goods, have remained weak, fragmented, or politicized.
The provision of global public goods such as stable climate, pandemic preparedness, or cyber-security requires multilateral investment and cooperative institutions. However, the existing frameworks: the United Nations system, the World Health Organization, and the Bretton Woods institutions, have been persistently undermined by lack of funding, political capture, and contested legitimacy. For instance, the WHO’s role during the COVID-19 pandemic was both essential and severely constrained, highlighting the consequences of chronic underinvestment. More recently, the role of the United Nations and some of their more exposed and vulnerable humanitarian agencies has been hotly contested, and their legitimacy and effectiveness vehemently denied.
A political economy of neglect is thus at the root of the new global governing crisis. Failing to proactively pursue the delivery of global public goods such as peace, climatic stability, and conflict resolution is a politically systemic failure, based on underinvestment, lack of trust, the erosion of belief in multilateral institutions and the self-reinforcing dynamics of that erosion. Major states have been willfully prioritizing short-term national benefit over creating an orderly international world. Multilateral institutions such as the United Nations Security Council or UNESCO have been weakened both through underfunding and also through factional infighting over leadership, politicizing of missions, and an expanding tendency to utilize these fora instrumentally rather than cooperatively.
This cycle of abandonment is cause and effect. As multilateral institutions underperform, belief in their efficacy and legitimacy unravels—making collective action all the more unlikely and cementing reliance on unilateral or regional remedies. The onset of multipolar geopolitics and new national populism have done even more to erode shared principles and water down collective will to action. The result is an international system where the perspective of a global social contract has almost vanished, international institutions are nominally tasked to deliver peace, stability, and coordination but are simultaneously deprived of political consensus, resources, and power to deliver them.
Key, but normally undervalued, to this dynamic is the role of uncertainty—both as an end to be managed, and also as a consequence of such systemic underinvestment in governing. Inaction against world challenges is normally facilitated by lack of verifiable information and inability to create institutions capable of generating, concentrating, and utilizing knowledge under uncertainty. In the absence of verifiable mechanisms for conflict resolution and establishing trust, actor reliability diminishes and margin for collaborative behavior diminishes.
This institutional void comes at an actual cost. It breeds a vicious cycle: underinvestment against uncertainty begets risks of miscalculation and moral hazard. States are even more reluctant to enter collaborative remedies for fear others will freeload or exploit transparency for individual advantage. This begets risks in geostrategic competitions and turns deterrents- a war prevention measure against war- into a zero-sum game. Each side escalates spending on military or strategic posture, not because peace is certain, but because mistrust and credible signal render retreating too precarious. Under such circumstances, overstating one’s commitment, and various forms of public “bluffing” on one’s power and determination become commonplace, and actual deterrence shaky and volatile.
Ultimately, this volatile equation itself betrays an underlying strategic paradox: uncertainty is both why states invest in deterrents and the very same force that makes deterrents unreliable. Without institutions capable of collectively managing risk, competitive escalation is the natural return of the international system. This only validates the underlying cause: institutional and public good neglect, producing an increasingly uncooperative world, even to commonly exogenously produced existential challenges. Resolving this contradiction thus can only hinge on a fundamental reevaluation of world institutions' worth and purpose. The world must invest again, not only financially but politically and morally, in institutions capable of generating trust, reducing uncertainty, and promoting collective effort. Short of that, the world order is mired in a high-stakes game where there will increasingly be no rules, costs will be rising, and there will be no victory to be sure of.
The persistence and escalation of global conflicts that remain unresolved reflect not only regional conflicts or a system of geopolitical tensions, but a system failure to make investments within structural instruments for peace. This failure may reflect a more general global tendency to underinvest, perhaps at the root of a creeping phenomenon of global stagnation. In the geopolitical case, it includes a critical lack of commitment to create and support resilient multinational arrangements, global commons, development cooperation, and sound defense alliances. When such investments get put on the back burner or abandoned outright, what we end up getting instead is a volatile cycle: suspended or unresolved conflicts foster flourishing forms of uncertainty that beget further geopolitical volatility and undercut the benefits for cooperative global action.
Suspension of a dispute, by ceasefire, fragile peace agreement, or delayed military action, often appears stable. Yet suspension of the fundamental causes of a dispute does not occur; it yields instead a type of dynamic uncertainty: a condition where the resolution or escalation of a dispute can only arise gradually and through contingent events. What is worse, it is not a lack of information but ingrained within political, institutional, and economic arrangements, and cannot be assuaged through improved forecast or risk modeling. As the political economist Frank Knight once famously distinguished, it's not measurable risk but the uncertainty at its core: fueled by inaction.
Peace agreements have often failed due to superficial or piecemeal implementation. The Arusha Peace Accord signed in Rwanda during the early 1990s was a classic case. It had appeared to have suspended the fighting, but its weakly designed construction and inability to establish stakeholder buy-in created the “implementation gap” that ultimately triggered the genocide in 1994. It illustrates how superficial suspension of a struggle—rather than structural resolution—actually raises tensions rather than reduces them.
From a purely economic perspective, uncertainty on the dynamic side creates a powerful chilling effect. It discourages long-term investment and joint planning across the private and public sector. Real option theory, often applied within financial and strategic decisions, holds that when uncertainty and irreversible impact arise, agents have a preference for delaying choices until the absolute final moment feasible: on turning points or under pressure from exogenous shocks. On its own, the theory can explain the reactive approach taken within many recent geopolitics’ crises, such as U.S. reactions under the leadership of Trump with Iran, where situational uncertainty and eleventh-hour responses became the norm rather than the exception.
This habit of waiting is strengthened still further through the declining effectiveness of international institutions and global public goods. Peacekeeping initiatives, although valuable, have themselves been fragmented and underfunded. The experience of the United Nations in peacebuilding illustrates the tendency for aspirations always to outrun capacity, especially where global powers refuse politically or financially to commit to enduring interventions. Against all the efforts to reach comprehensive peace agreements, the increase in conflicts during the last 30 years reveals a distinct loss of structural peace mechanisms.
At the macro level, uncertainty contributes to a broader breakdown of multilateralism. States under uncertainty behave more cautiously and find difficult to commit themselves unambiguously to international norms, and commercial, or defense agreements. This further erodes their ability to anticipate or avert increasing conflicts, generating a feedback loop of disinvestment, instability, and increasing conflict potential. In sum, the inability to build structural peace feeds suspended conflicts that brew dynamic, self-sustaining uncertainty. It dissuades premature action and cooperation, encourages strategic delay, and erodes the institutional and economic architecture for peace. It is not only conflict, but the limbo of unresolved tensions which is becoming the most destabilizing factor within the world order.
Conclusions: why we need a different model
The inability to provide for global public goods is increasingly translating into global crises. Climate disasters, unmanageable technological risks (e.g. regulation of AI, cyber risk), geopolitical fluctuations, and renewed pandemics are manifestations of systemic risk from institutional under-development. Anti-globalization responses from trade to regional wars can be framed as responses to these unresolved failures.
A new consensus should be sought for a rebalancing of globalization—one that recognizes the need to intentionally produce and protect global public goods through new financing mechanisms (such as global taxes or green bonds), reinforced multilateralism, and a commitment to building equitable and accountable global institutions. This requires an entirely new world of global governance: not only regulating markets but indeed constructing and actively supporting the institutional infrastructure necessary to sustain globalization itself.