“What will the headlines say the day after the Summit of the Future?” This important event will take place this year on the 22 and 23 September, aiming to finalise the world’s Pact for the Future, with United Nations member states, local and regional governments and non-state actors expected to contribute throughout the year.
During the opening plenary of the UCLG Retreat 2024, Michèle Griffin, director of the Common Agenda/Summit of the Future Team in the office of Secretary-General António Guterres, expressed her hopes for the headlines and the information on the media on 24 September 2024: “We will at least have taken meaningful steps towards a world with a much more effective collective security system that can prevent, manage and resolve conflicts in traditional domains but also in many of the new domains where we see conflict beginning to take hold.
She argued that the outcome of the Pact “will achieve an equitable, effective financial system that reflects today’s needs and economic realities, and it will also change financing for development and climate action in particular. It will put in place systems to harness opportunities and manage the risks of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. It will kick start much stronger foresight and make concrete the commitments that we have made hundreds of times, including in the UN Charter, to future generations and ensure that our big decisions are never made without considering their future impact. Every decision we make will allow us to avoid the foreseeable harm we are currently doing to future generations. Mechanisms for expanded youth participation and opportunity at all local, national and global levels will be set up.”
The promise is paramount, and the world watches as local and regional representatives and delegations prepare to transform fundamental global governance mechanisms. Changes to the Security Council, the General Assembly and international financial institutions are long overdue. The latter holds great potential for aligning better with today’s world. And this is an opportunity for multilateral and local governance to play a much broader – and well-funded – role in future developments.
The action-oriented Pact for the Future will demonstrate global solidarity for current and future generations. It brings to mind the inspiring and striking climate fiction novel “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is set in the near future and explores a new subsidiary body that acts as an advocate for the world’s future generations. It assumes that their rights are as valid as the rights of the present generation, making the effects of climate change the most critical challenge to tackle together. While it is unlikely that we will wake up to headlines of a new Ministry being developed, we should aim to start on 24th September 2024, hoping that local and multilateral actions will have the opportunity to take centre stage they deserve and that the world – and future generations – need.
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