There is a rich history of attempts to reform and democratize global governance.
In the aftermath of World War 2, the World Federalist movement surged to prominence, calling for a federation of countries under a global government in order to prevent future wars. Winston Churchill spoke in favor of it at least twice, and the movement was so widely supported that future US presidents Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy were among more than 100 members of the US Congress who co-sponsored legislation in 1949 declaring:
“It should be a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation, open to all nations, with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law.”
The World Federalist movement was also endorsed by leading public intellectuals and personalities of the day including Albert Einstein, Walter Cronkite, Albert Camus, and Bertrand Russell.
The Campaign for a More Democratic United Nations, active in the 1990s, was part of a broader movement to reform global governance and democratize the United Nations. It brought together activists, scholars, and organizations who believed that the UN should better represent the world’s citizens, not just its member states.
In 2007, the ongoing Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly launched to advocate for a UN body, made up of elected representatives, to increase democratic legitimacy of the UN and thus its accountability and efficiency. Advocates suggest that a UN Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) would be the first step toward developing a world parliament. Since 2021, the campaign for a UNPA has been part of the We The Peoples campaign for inclusive global governance: endorsed by over 300 organizations, the campaign advocates for a UN World Citizens’ Initiative and a UN Civil Society Envoy. Proponents emphasize that legitimacy of any global governance system is a cross-cutting need, and a way to help overcome institutional, legal and issue-related fragmentation.
The One for Eight Billion campaign, launched in 2014, calls for an inclusive and transparent process for selecting UN Secretaries General. The Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. Launched in 2000 and endorsed by thousands of NGOs, religious groups, and dignitaries, the Earth Charter continues to inspire many to promote its principles and serves as a reference document for the global community to transition toward sustainable development. Launched in 2018, Together First is a global movement to transform global governance structures to be more inclusive and effective in tackling the world’s most urgent issues. The initiative aims to make the conversation on global governance more accessible and inclusive, striving for a more democratic, transparent, and accountable international system. The Campaign for an IACC, launched in 2021, led by Integrity Initiatives International and Integrity Initiatives International Europe, is an initiative tackling widespread impunity for grand corruption.
The UN Charter Reform Coalition, founded in 2024, advocates for UN member states to invoke Article 109 of the UN Charter to call a general conference to review and update the Charter. Established in 2020, the Climate Governance Commission (CGC) brings together leading experts from academia, business, politics, science, and civil society to advance global governance solutions for climate action. Its 2023 flagship report, Governing Our Planetary Emergency presents a set of ambitious, equitable, and practical near- and medium-term proposals to reform the global environmental governance system in response to the planetary emergency. The CGC, Citizens for Global Solutions, and the World Federalist Movement launched the Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance (MEGA) in 2024. MEGA is a global coalition of civil society organizations and allies committed to strengthening existing environmental governance mechanisms and establishing new ones.
Many of these campaigns highlight a critical flaw in our current structures: there are no channels today through which individuals or civil society groups can directly express their values and concerns with real voting power at the global level. The UN is an association of member states, no one else has a vote.
As part of the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly in 2024, the UN convened the Summit of the Future to strengthen multilateralism and improve global cooperation in addressing current and future challenges. It was meant to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how global cooperation works—and make it more inclusive, effective, and future-ready.
As high-level and ambitious as all these efforts are, these proposals for structural reform continue to remain proposals. A reluctance by less powerful countries to champion some of the proposed reforms largely stems from an understanding that they might require ratification by the P5, which are unlikely to support changes that diminish their privileges. Other proposals, such as the UN Parliamentary Assembly, do not initially require P5 approval.
New structural change proposals are not needed so much as proposals for systemic innovation and constituency-building to drive the necessary progress forward.