World: The Next UN Secretary-General Will Inherit a System Unfit for the Next Complex Global Shock

EXTRACTO DEL FEED · ATRIBUIDO AL MEDIO

Country: World

Source: International Peace Institute

On September 16th, the UN released its second Global Risk Report, asking 1,300 people across government, business, civil society, and the UN system what stands in the way of managing 28 global risks. The most common answer was weak governance or coordination mechanisms, ahead of a lack of political consensus and a lack of trust and accountability. The report concludes that weak coordination hampers the effective management of almost all global risks, with confidence in the multilateral system’s ability to reduce risks falling for 23 of 28 risks since 2024.

The multilateral system has no established procedure for dealing with shocks that affect multiple sectors, such as the impacts of pandemics and regional conflict. Such shocks can wipe out years of progress and contribute to the systemic underachievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed this. According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the pandemic reversed progress across nearly all 17 SDGs within months, undoing gains in health, poverty reduction, education, and gender equality. The toll landed hardest on SDG 3 (good health and well-being) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). Multilateral mechanisms such as COVAX were themselves improvised once the pandemic had already taken hold, and that ad hoc design could not overcome the resulting inequities: vaccination rates in high-income countries were nearly eight times higher than in low-income countries during the first year of distribution.

Shocks like pandemics do not pose a single, isolated vector of risk; they are complex global shocks. The 2024 Pact for the Future refers to complex global shocks as “events that have severely disruptive and adverse consequences for a significant proportion of countries and the global population, and that lead to impacts across multiple sectors, requiring a multidimensional and whole-of-government, whole-of-society response.” These sorts of events are likely to increase and remain highly difficult to predict, coordinate, and manage fairly among countries with very different capacities to respond. Almost one in five respondents to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 anticipated a “stormy” outlook over the next decade with looming “global catastrophic risks.”

Nonetheless, the UN still has no established mechanism for handling complex global shocks—a shortcoming highlighted in a new report from the Global Shield Institute. Rather than having a preexisting framework, the UN reacts only after a crisis has already spread. This situation results from four structural flaws. The first is a warning gap: risk monitoring is spread across different UN agencies, and no agency watches for signals outside the boundaries of its mandate. The second is a mandate gap: agencies’ mandates are both limited and overlapping, so a shock affecting several areas can create an institutional vacuum or fall into a disputed area of overlap. Third, there is a financial incentive gap because most humanitarian and development funding is allocated by individual donors to specific projects rather than pooled, which causes agencies to protect their own areas of work rather than to work together. Fourth, there is a capacity gap because national capacities vary, and outcomes are often determined by the country least able to respond rather than the one best prepared.

Whoever becomes the next secretary-general will need to develop new mechanisms to better manage complex global shocks, even if these gaps cannot be closed entirely. The candidate selected will likely face at least one major global shock during their term in office. New leadership presents a rare opportunity to prioritize cross-sectoral risk governance. The new secretary-general could make specific, practical commitments to demonstrate their ambition to address cascading risks. However, they will need to take a strategic approach, with clear demands, credible advocates, and careful timing.

Institutional Isolation and Ad Hoc Solutions

The secretary-general is in a difficult position because the UN is not a single, unified organization. It comprises many bodies, each with its own mandate, aims, and funding arrangements, which member states generally decide. Managing this network of conflicting interests is challenging even under ordinary conditions, and even more so during a complex global shock. This corresponds to the “mandate gap” the Global Shield Institute analysis identifies.

The UN has procedures for handling crises: under the UN Charter, it is committed to “taking effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace.” Because of its wide membership, legal authority, and capacity to convene meetings, it can coordinate global multilateral responses and has established arrangements for humanitarian, refugee, and health emergencies. However, each system was designed to address only one type of crisis. When a shock affects several sectors at the same time, the UN must set up new coordination arrangements from scratch.

Several cases show how the UN has responded to recent complex global shocks. After the outbreak of COVID-19, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) activated the UN Crisis Management Policy, the first time this policy was triggered in connection with a public health matter. A week later, a UN Crisis Management Team chaired by WHO met and drew up a strategy that included aspects of public health, human rights, socioeconomic policy, and travel and trade. Yet this team was limited to a coordinating role and had no authority over the many UN entities involved, limiting its ability to lead a multilateral response. This is the financial incentive gap in practice: the funds were linked to donor priorities rather than being pooled according to need.

Two years later, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine simultaneously disrupted global food, energy, and financial markets, the UN established an ad hoc body, the Global Crisis Response Group, which was chaired by the secretary-general. The group prepared policy briefs and helped negotiate the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which enabled commercial food exports from Ukrainian ports for one year before the deal collapsed.

In both cases, the UN improvised to different degrees once the crisis was underway. The Crisis Management Team drew on an existing procedure, but the UN’s Crisis Management Policy was not designed for a shock of that cross-sectoral scale, so it…