A decade after its high-water mark, multilateralism finds itself at an inflection point — battered by crises, political retrenchment, and a waning collective will.
Just over ten years ago, in a moment of unity that feels almost unimaginable today, all 193 members of the United Nations unanimously adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as Agenda 2030, at the UN General Assembly’s 70th session in New York.
The agreement crowned decades of international effort to forge a shared development vision. From the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 to the Millennium Summit in 2000, the Johannesburg Declaration in 2002 and Rio+20 in 2012, the global community had steadily articulated an ambition to advance peace, prosperity, and sustainability for people and planet alike.
The SDGs sought to correct the limitations of their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While the MDGs delivered important gains, particularly in poverty reduction and public health, they were widely criticised for their narrow scope, donor-driven design, and focus on developing countries alone.
By contrast, the SDGs were expansive and universal. They embraced issues ranging from decent work and clean energy to climate action, peace, justice, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Developed through a participatory, bottom-up process, they placed responsibility on all countries — not just poorer ones — to act.
The year 2015 was pivotal in other ways as well.
In July, the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa underscored the need to mobilise private and blended finance to close the SDG funding gap, popularising the mantra of moving “from billions to trillions”. Donor countries also reaffirmed their long-standing — and rarely fulfilled — pledge to allocate 0.7 per cent of gross national income to official development assistance.
Then, in December, the Paris Agreement was adopted: a legally binding treaty committing the world to limit global warming to well below 2°C. Developed countries were expected to lead — not only in cutting emissions, but in financing, technology transfer, and capacity building for more vulnerable nations.
Today, many development practitioners look back at 2015 with a sense of nostalgia. What once appeared to be the dawn of a new era now looks more like the apex of multilateral cooperation. Whether this pessimism is premature remains open to debate, but the warning signs are unmistakable.
Only 18 per cent of the SDGs are on track. The annual financing gap is estimated at $2.5–4.5 trillion through 2030. Current climate policies leave a two-thirds chance that global temperatures will rise to nearly 2.8°C by century’s end.
What went wrong?
One explanation, argues Columbia University’s Adam Tooze, is that the SDGs were conceived in a political vacuum. They failed to anticipate how existing powers would respond when development actually succeeded. What happens, he asks, if countries like Mexico or Ethiopia reach income levels comparable to Canada or Turkey?
China offers a cautionary tale. Its extraordinary development has not strengthened trust in the international order but instead intensified strategic rivalry, ushering in what many describe as a new Cold War. Development, Tooze reminds us, is inherently political — and a more prosperous world is inevitably more multipolar.
Against this backdrop, the rise of nationalist, inward-looking politics across advanced democracies is hardly accidental. Support for development abroad is increasingly framed as coming at the expense of prosperity at home.
In March 2025, the United States formally denounced the SDGs, dismissing them as incompatible with national sovereignty and claiming they had “lost at the ballot box”. Aid priorities were rebranded as “responsible development”, and USAID soon followed as a casualty of this shift. Hopes that Europe would fill the void proved misplaced. OECD estimates suggest global aid will fall by 25 per cent by 2027.
Politics alone, however, does not tell the full story. The past decade has been defined by overlapping crises: a global pandemic, escalating conflicts, surging debt, and deepening geo-economic fragmentation.
COVID-19 alone derailed progress across nearly every SDG. In 2020, over 100 million children fell below minimum reading proficiency, 250 million jobs were lost, and more than 100 million people were pushed back into poverty. Over seven million deaths have been recorded worldwide.
The pandemic also laid bare the fragility of global solidarity. Wealthier nations hoarded vaccines and blocked efforts to waive intellectual property protections, leaving many low-income countries far behind. The World Health Organisation’s description of this imbalance as “vaccine apartheid” was hard to contest.
Meanwhile, global peace has continued to erode. There are now 59 active state-based conflicts — the highest number since World War II — while mechanisms for resolving them have weakened dramatically. Conflicts are increasingly internationalised, with 78 countries involved beyond their borders, driven by great-power rivalry and the assertiveness of regional powers.
By the end of 2024, forced displacement had reached over 123 million people, nearly double the figure a decade earlier.
Debt is compounding the crisis. Global public debt stood at $102 trillion — 93 per cent of global GDP — by the end of 2024. Developing countries, though responsible for only a third of this total, have seen their debt grow twice as fast. Fifty-eight now face severe debt distress, and over 40 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries spending more on debt servicing than on health and education.
These pressures are unfolding alongside a shift away from the hyper-globalisation of the post-Cold War era. Trade, capital flows, migration, and technology diffusion once lifted 1.5 billion people out of extreme poverty. Today, strategic rivalry — particularly between the US and China — threatens to reverse these gains.
With global trade equivalent to 60 per cent of GDP and supply chains deeply intertwined, severe fragmentation could cost up to 7 per cent of global output. As ever, the poorest economies stand to lose the most.
So where does this leave multilateralism?
Earlier this month, Washington announced its withdrawal from 66 international organisations, including dozens of UN bodies. The move echoed a familiar scepticism — one famously summed up when President Donald Trump once asked the General Assembly, “What is the purpose of the UN?”
The question is not without merit. The UN is imperfect, bureaucratic, and often paralysed by veto politics. Yet its relevance persists.
It remains the only universal forum where every country has a seat. It gives small states a voice equal, at least formally, to that of global powers. It underpins essential regulatory regimes — from aviation and maritime safety to telecommunications and public health. And it has been central to the provision of global public goods that markets and nation-states alone cannot supply.
History also shows that global cooperation can advance without US leadership. Many widely ratified treaties lack US participation, and yet endure. Just last year, despite Washington’s absence, UN members adopted the Compromiso de Sevilla as a framework for financing sustainable development.
When universal consensus falters, alternative models emerge. Coalitions of the willing, plurilateral agreements, and minilateral groupings have all offered ways to bypass gridlock — imperfectly, but pragmatically.
Critics fear these approaches fragment the system and sideline smaller states. Yet they reflect the realities of a transactional, multipolar world grappling with new challenges — from artificial intelligence to the energy transition.
As The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes observed, “In global politics, 2025 was the year when an old order ended.” What replaces it remains uncertain.
The human thread
Years ago, as an intern at UN headquarters, I witnessed the institution’s human side — chance encounters in elevators, fleeting moments with world leaders, and conversations with staff who quietly kept the machinery running.
Those moments made multilateralism feel tangible, not abstract. Perhaps it is familiarity, or fear of what comes next, that keeps us attached to the idea of collective action for the global good — however frayed that ideal may now appear.
I will mourn its decline. But as Canada’s prime minister reminded the world in Davos this week, nostalgia is not a strategy.
The question is whether today’s leaders are listening.