Global Cooperation Update: Reasons to be cheerful in 2024
By Jonathan Glennie, co-founder of Global Nation
You can listen to an audio version of this medium here or watch the video here.
If you are an interested citizen of the world, you will already have listened to, read or watched a couple of thousand analyses of what we can all expect from 2024. And it is unlikely to have filled you with joy and excitement. Ongoing conflicts, worrying elections, instability.
As we begin a new year, and I begin this new video and podcast, I want to share with you my secret anti-depressant for when I start to worry about the world around me and the state of global cooperation. And it’s not a drug, and it’s not read a poem or look at a nice view, it’s solid analysis.
It’s this. Much of the upheaval and instability we see internationally and nationally is a fairly direct consequence of geopolitical shifts in narrative and power that are precisely what many of us have been campaigning for, loosely called “development”. These shifts in narrative and power are also the reason why transformational progress is on the cards today, this year and next, in a way I have not seen in my professional career.
Is 2024 going to be awful? Well, for a lot of people, yes. There is an ongoing debt crisis, forcing many governments to pay huge amounts in interest when they should be financing basic health and education. There’s ongoing climate change — 2023 was the hottest year on record and 2024 might be worse. There are ongoing conflicts, in Israel/Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan, with an inevitable surge in humanitarian need from its already high levels. My organisation Global Nation launched a Global Solidarity scorecard late last year that showed international cooperation has reduced, a conclusion also drawn by the World Economic Forum last week as they released a Global Cooperation Barometer to leaders gathering at Davos.
The fragility of democracy is a growing theme across the world, especially in Latin America world where I live and of course just north of here in the United States where we face the very real possibility that an anti-democratic demagogue could retake power, with all the implications that would have for democracy and decency in the US and across the world.
The Doomsday Clock chimed again on Tuesday, and unsurprisingly announced that we are nearer doom then we were last year or have been for a long time.
But many of the most difficult crises we are facing as a world are probably inevitable consequences of the huge global progress we have made.
The rise of the populist right in Europe and the US is scary, yes but would not be happening were it not for the great progress in living standards and economic power that has taken place over the last few decades. Rising incomes across the world have reduced US and European predominance, politically, economically and militarily. This is most obvious in the stratospheric growth of China, but also in other parts of Asia, in Latin America, and in Africa. Poverty persists, of course, but the economic balance is shifting, and that means the power balance is too.
The thing is that power is zero sum. As other parts of the world become more powerful by virtue of their progress, previous empires become less so. And the reaction of many to turn to the nativist right is quite predictable.
Now, we need to manage this backlash and challenge, and it won’t be easy, but our situation today brings opportunities that, if we play our cards right, could see what feels like imminent self-destruction become a pivotal moment in propelling a new and better stage of human progress.
And this progress that is causing so much stress in geopolitics is also the reason why transformational progress is on cards this year and next in a way I have not seen in my professional career.
When I started working in international campaigns it was starkly clear that only tweaks were on the table. Aid yes, but only under conditions set by Washington-based institutions. Fair trade a bit, but no significant shift in global rules to govern trade. Debt cancellation, yes fine, a bit for the very poorest countries, but no change in how decisions about debt are made. Why not? Because the West had the power still, at the turn of the century, to simply say no to rule changes.
But there has been a shift in our world. Not just in narrative — important as that is, with anti-racism, decolonization and post-neoliberalism at the heart of the debate in way that would not have been thinkable a few years ago — but in voice and power.
As we look at the year ahead, the constellation of power is different; nothing about us without us. The G21 meeting in Brazil (with the Global South insisting on having the African Union not just the European Union at that particular table), with the 16th COP on biodiversity in Colombia, with the Summit of the Future in September, with the beginnings of discussions around the Financing for Development process, with the IDA and other replenishments — in all of these settings for global cooperation, actual structural change is on the cards.
Global South actors are more insistent than ever on fairness in both process and outcome. Will this come with instability? Yes. Will the narrative of post-colonial justice and an end to wealthy countries getting their own way lead to a backlash? Absolutely. But that is an inevitable consequence of the progress we seek — it is impossible to imagine such rebalancing of narrative and power without such a backlash. The fact that we are so unsatisfied with the Covid response is a sign that our expectations for global cooperation are so much higher than they were in previous eras.
Even the most egregious current failure of the old order — the ongoing massacre in Gaza being carried out by a Western-backed Israeli government, contains signs that the sands are shifting, with previously colonized countries (South Africa, Indonesia and others) taking Israel to court.
I don’t want to minimize the problems the world faces. Of course, we are impatient for changes in power structures to happen faster and impatient for justice now. My point is that there are huge transformational changes afoot, and many of the upheavals we are seeing are simply proof of that. Maybe, slowly, we are winning.
I said I’d give you my reason to be cheerful my secret antidote to pessimism and depression, and I did. It doesn’t mean there aren’t also reasons to be worried — we are all well aware of them. Nothing is certain, triumph or tragedy. The point is to influence things in the right direction.
That’s why I am neither an optimist, a pessimist or a fatalist. I’m an activist. See you next time.
About Jonathan Glennie
Glennie is the co-founder of think and do tank Global Nation and an established author and thinker on international cooperation. He is the Author of The Future of Aid (Routledge 2021), which first introduced the concept of Global Public Investment as a framework for reimagining development finance, and The Trouble with Aid (Zed 2008). Jonathan has held a range of senior posts including Director of Policy at Save the Children, Director of the Ipsos Sustainable Development Research Centre and Colombia Country Director at Christian Aid. He also led the work on the future of aid at ODI. He has been a regular columnist in the Guardian and other outlets.
