Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addresses the UN Security Council at the UN headquarters. Sept., 2015. Kevin Hagen / Press Association. All right reserved.In the past two years governments have negotiated a new international structure for sustainable development that seeks to integrate social, economic, and environmental matters in a new fashion. The process resulted in replacing the Commission on Sustainable Development with a High-Level Political Forum and a reformed ECOSOC and inviting multi-stakeholder bodies to take the lead in implementing key areas of the new 2030 Agenda. The General Assembly has separately adopted three resolutions on global governance since 2012 [i]. Meanwhile complaints continue to multiply about the failures of the United Nations and more broadly the UN system.
In 2020 the UN will be 75 years old. Its birth, as it were, began seriously in 1943 well before the outcome of WWII was clear. The driving goals for the design of the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) were to prevent another war between major powers, to avoid another Depression and to not replicate the League of Nations.
By the time the UN Charter was adopted, these concerns were not equally important – only the Security Council dealing with war and peace was given mandatory authority. Over the decades, the major aspiration of the international community shifted. As new global aspirations were identified, new, largely autonomous institutions were built. And, there were regular reform efforts,[ii] as each generation recognized that the global governance system was not keeping up with the needs of the world. The agreements about the new institutional structures for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the frustrated efforts to ‘reform’ the Security Council and the Secretary General’s selection process, and the thwarted effort to fix the governance at the IMF/World Bank are all part of this tradition.
