Giving Compass' Take:

• Elizabeth Cousens at the United Nations Foundation argues for the importance of multilateralism (collaboration among nations to solve big problems), citing past successes and growing threats to civil society.

• Cousens also advocates for a more innovative approach to the practice, which means that all stakeholders in the international community (including aid groups and the private sector) need to embrace collective action.

• Here's more on how multilateralism can help us meet the world's toughest challenges.

Madeleine Albright once famously said that people don’t like the word multilateralism because, “it has too many syllables and it ends with an ‘ism.’”

Whether or not you like the word, what it means — basically, that countries and their citizens will do better and go farther by working together than by going it alone — is vital to all of us.

There are three main points about multilateralism I shared this week [at the United Nations DPI/NGO Conference in New York] and want to share here.

First, let’s dispense with any illusion that we don’t need it.

Wherever we live, whatever community we call home — there is virtually no domain of our lives that is not made better by stronger multilateral action. It took multilateralism to defeat smallpox, close the hole in the ozone layer, and vaccinate record numbers of infants against preventable diseases after the world adopted the Millennium Development Goals ...

Second, let’s get creative about what multilateralism looks like in the 21st century.

Consider some of the ways new actors are organizing around climate change. Here in the U.S., an umbrella group of nearly 3,000 private and public sector leaders representing more than $6 trillion in U.S. Gross Domestic Product have come together as America’s Pledge to deliver on the U.S. Government’s international commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. A bipartisan group of U.S. governors, representing the equivalent of the world’s third largest economy after the United States and China, created the U.S. Climate Alliance to do the same thing.

 

Third, let’s not underestimate the threat.

We face rising skepticism about the value of multilateral institutions. We are seeing new questions about the global staying power of precisely the countries that built the international system in the first place. The global agenda is also immense, and that carries different risks — of dilution and distraction. And the space for civil society has been aggressively shrinking in exactly the places we need it the most.

Read the full article about why multilateralism should be embraced by Elizabeth Cousens at United Nations Foundation.