Enhancing the Effectiveness of the United Nations
Having most recently held a leadership position with the World Bank Group’s Global Indicators Group, Augusto Lopez-Claros has an extensive background in international economics. While on leave from the World Bank in 2018–19, Augusto Lopez-Claros was recognized by Sweden’s Global Challenges Foundation through the New Shape Prize. This award recognized his co-authorship of “Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century,” initially submitted as an entry for an international competition sponsored by the Foundation to stimulate innovative thinking about ways to address some of the global catastrophic risks facing humanity. The proposal was subsequently turned into a book with the same name, published by Cambridge University Press in early 2020.
Facing a complex set of global threats to our future, how do we find a way forward is perhaps the primary question raised in the book. It is clearly necessary to strengthen the capacity to enforce international law, to reform legal institutions and current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be largely inadequate to manage the challenges that we face. Indeed, the United Nations itself and the specialized agencies created to attend to a variety of global problems find themselves increasingly unable to respond to crises, partly due to the lack of appropriate jurisdiction or mandate to act, sometimes because they are inadequately endowed with resources or because, within the limits of existing conceptual frameworks, they simply do not know what to do.
A substantial and carefully-thought-through reform effort is needed to enhance dramatically the basic architecture of our global governance system, grounded on fundamental points of law already agreed by states worldwide, and upon foundational principles embedded in the current international order. Such efforts need to strike the right balance between proposals that are so ambitious as to have negligible chances of being seriously considered and proposals that are seen as more “politically feasible” but that fail to find meaningful solutions to urgent contemporary problems.
One of the reforms proposed in the book pertains to the creation of a World Parliamentary Assembly (WPA), a body intended to enhance the democratic character of the UN. Representing the interests of the global citizenry, a WPA could bring fresh perspectives on a broad array of unresolved global problems and become an effective catalyst for advancing processes of reform and transformation at the United Nations itself, playing a role in reinforcing democratic tendencies in the world, and fostering a new planetary ethos of an interdependent global community. Taking the evolution of the European Parliament as a model, several pathways to the setting up of a WPA are discussed, arguing that it would not be essential to have the consent of all states to get it launched. In time, as the WPA gained democratic legitimacy, it could be integrated into the international constitutional order, attached as an advisory body to the General Assembly. A WPA with extensive advisory powers would be a sensible preparatory step for the eventual emergence of a General Assembly with legislative powers.
