Vision

The 75th Anniversary of the United Nations under the banner “the future we want, the UN we need”, reflected on the complex challenges facing our world, including cross-border health pandemics, economic shocks, inequality, climate instability, and threats to peace and security, and bring forward a call to action. Our challenge was to engage stakeholders from within and outside the world body to co-create partnerships and pathways to the future we fervently desire and a United Nations that inspires and serves all humanity.

Our Basic Goal: In connection with the world body’s 75th anniversary, the UN75 Global Governance Forum promoted a more inclusive and effective United Nations through dialogue and recommendations that better harness the ideas, capabilities, and networks of both state and non-state actors for achieving the UN's commitment to peace, sustainable development, human rights, and a stable climate.

Action

On September 16 & 17, 2020, more than 3,000 people gathered virtually in two plenary sessions to honor the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations and highlight the just-released Roadmap for the Future We Want & UN We Need: A Vision 20/20 for UN75 and Beyond.

A cornerstone of international order since 1945, the United Nations must continue to adapt and innovate to respond to new threats, challenges, and opportunities in our current age of complexity. We convened more than 300 stakeholders from civil society (including youth), scholars, policy entrepreneurs, UN system bodies and Member States, the private sector, and philanthropic institutions to honor the principles of multilateral cooperation upon which the UN was founded.

In this spirit, participants sought collectively to raise the ambition of the UN75 Declaration by initiating new multi-stakeholder pilot projects toward the realization of “the future we want, the UN we need.” In an era of accelerated connectivity and advanced technology, the shared aspiration is to forge and realize a roadmap to bring a fresh, modern perspective to the UN Charter’s founding principles to update our vision and promote a truly “people-centered” architecture for global collective action.

Results

The UN75 Global Governance Forum surpassed expectations with 3,000 people participating across the globe. With over 250 speakers over two days on panels, reporting out, and breakout sessions, a new standard in remote convenings at the UN was established as a best practice. From the 20 initial partnerships discussions, 16 advanced to additional dialogues and convenings. This article from Stanford Social Innovation Review reflects the process used as the partnership convening modality for the UN75 Global Governance Forum.

Project Summary

Since its founding in 1945, governments have strived through the United Nations to create a system that addresses global challenges around the three main pillars: Peace & Security, Development, and Human Rights. Climate governance has now, in effect, become the world body’s fourth pillar. Though the emergence of global civil society and the business community have added new capabilities to our global governance system, the complexity of the modern world—including, for starters, the harmful spread of the COVID-19 virus and its devastating financial and economic consequences, the disruptive effects of new technologies, the threat of runaway climate change, rising violence in fragile states and regions, and record migration and refugee levels—is outpacing our collective ability to manage globalization for the benefit of all nations and peoples.

Today, learning from both failures and hard fought successes, we know much more about what an effective holistic process for progressive global change looks like—harnessing the thinking, resources, and connections among state and non-state actors across the UN system’s four pillars (i.e., building effective partnerships)—and the specific global norms, policies, and institutional reforms needed (i.e., promoting innovation), to achieve a new end state that better serves the shared aspirations of all humanity. The UN75 Global Governance Forum is premised on the idea that diverse stakeholders, working collaboratively and empowered by new technologies, represent the best way forward toward achieving both the future people worldwide are calling for and the new United Nations we so urgently need.

Maureen Connolly Management, Inc maintains the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, display and modify the Innovations in Partnership© work indefinitely. The content of this document, and the presentation of it, includes original ideas and concepts protected under U.S. intellectual property laws.