So many issues that impact daily lives like climate emergencies, vaccine access, the cost of living to name a few are heavily influenced by deliberations outside national decision-making. Yet transparency and accountability lag far behind.
An under-used but valuable opportunity for scrutiny exists. In less than a month’s time, over 80 Heads of State and Government (HSoG) from all regions of the world will meet at UN headquarters in New York in the annual high-level week that launches the new session – the 81st– of the UN General Assembly.
How are your government and leaders preparing for the UNGA 81? Are they closing the yawning accountability gap of global governance and governors so that people have agency to shape their lives and livelihoods? How does the media cover it? The speeches are not the end of the journey, but invaluable for work to close the accountability gap.
At this session, UN Member States will be enmeshed in multiple unresolved global challenges. It seems that all too often the principle- and rules-based cooperative approach that resulted in the UN Charter over 80 years ago has been abandoned in favour of short-term crisis management, economic pragmaticism and multi-dimensional conflict/violence without respect for “people and planet”.
While the ecosystem and architecture of international cooperation and multilateralism at the UN have evolved beyond recognition, the UN Charter has not been revised. As a result, it struggles through an out-dated, inadequate and unfair global decision-making process while other newer multilateral platforms and related institutions often ignore its fundamental values and evade compliance, resulting not in a “coalition of the willing” but in a “coalition of the winners”, be they public or private.
As the outgoing UN Secretary-General, António Guterres expressed in 2024:
“When the United Nations was established nearly 80 years ago, it had 51 Member States. Today there are 193. The global economy was less than one-twelfth of its current size. As a result, our peace and security tools and institutions, and our global financial architecture, reflect a bygone era. The United Nations Security Council is outdated, and its authority is eroding. Unless its composition and working methods are reformed, it will eventually lose all credibility.
The international financial architecture was established when many of today’s developing countries were under colonial rule. It does not represent the realities of today’s global economy, and it is no longer able to resolve global economic challenges: debt, climate action, sustainable development. It does not provide the global safety net that developing countries need. Meanwhile, technology, geopolitics and globalization have transformed power relations.”
Many HSoGs have reiterated and deepened this governance failing as illustrated by a couple of excerpts from last year’s high-level week in September 2025.
President Ruto of Kenya:
“Without affordable finance and without reform of the international financial architecture, the promise of climate action in Africa will remain constrained. In the aftermath of World War II, the Bretton Woods institutions were created to stabilize the global economy and rebuild war-torn Europe. At the time, their design reflected the power and interests of the victorious nations, who were also their primary shareholders and beneficiaries.
The IMF was tasked with upholding the gold standard exchange rate system, while the World Bank was established to finance Europe’s reconstruction. Both have since evolved into development finance institutions, but their structures, decision-making, and governance remain dominated by wealthy countries. Today, the global context is vastly different… Yet the governance of these institutions has not kept pace with the needs of a multipolar world, especially the needs of poor and developing countries.”
President Stubb of Finland:
“Power – hard and soft – is a luxury of bigger players. The power of a smaller country arises from its capacity to cooperate with others…. [T]here is a growing tension between those who promote multilateralism, an order based on the rule of law, and those that speak the language of multipolarity, or transactionalism… In essence, their aim is to diversify their relations with multiple actors rather than aligning with any one bloc…. This kind of foreign policy is based on a realistic understanding of power.
Power defines the limits of what is possible for each state. However, values should underpin everything we do. Even a transactional or multi-vectoral foreign policy should rest on a core of fundamental values.”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Member States fail to find consensus on quality and durable solutions with such diversity in size, resources and wealth that cannot fail to influence global decision-making. The formal and behind-closed-doors sessions of the UN and UNGA High-level week will not paper over the threats and challenges and will – inevitably – last year shy away from ambitious solutions.
Global Policy Forum tracks and reports on these sessions as well as providing alerts to upcoming deliberations in its commitment to closing the accountability gap.
Sign up for bulletins and briefings here and visit the website to explore GPF’s track record of tracking and to read more on previous sessions.
See previous Heard At High-Level Week briefings from GPF:
- Heard at 80th UN General Assembly High-Level Week 2025: A struggle between multilateralism and multipolarity?
- Heard at 80th UN General Assembly High-Level Week 2025: Digital Issues
- Heard at 79th UN General Assembly High-Level Week 2024: Summit of the Future (SOTF)
- UN General Assembly 2023: Shifting Dynamics of Global Governance
- 2022 UN General Assembly High-level Debate: perspectives from the Global South
- Heard at the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly High-level meetings
Contact the editors: Barbara Adams & Julie Kim
Copyright (C) 2026 Global Policy Forum. All rights reserved.