This short paper summarises ways to think about the design of new institutions for global and transnational governance over the next decade, drawing on the work of TIAL. It argues that the world faces a growing number of glaring governance gaps — from the unregulated growth of AI and other transformative technologies to management of commons such as oceans, the atmosphere, or space, to accelerating decarbonisation, circularity, and other transitions. At the same time, there are many new tools that can help to bridge these gaps — for sensing, communication, knowledge synthesis, coordination and rapid mobilisation and re-allocation of resources. These can help with:
- steering technologies, managing risks and sharing the gains (AI, synthetic bio, etc.),
- managing interconnected commons (ocean, air, soil, space),
- accelerating large-scale, interconnected, system change/transition (energy, agriculture, circularity).
Much work is underway to accelerate this work – some within the UN system — the advocacy toward, and now the negotiation of, a legally binding treaty on plastics, for example, or the calls to use the 21st replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA) funds as an opportunity to rebuild trust in multilateral development finance.
Others are pushing for radically new institutions for tasks ranging from anticipating and responding to climate risk to managing global wealth taxes or migration. In between, others are using bricolage — recombining parts of today’s institutions for new tasks. The Loss and Damage Fund, for example, was set up as a Financial Intermediary Fund under the World Bank, and the recent UNEA resolution on global air quality governance proposes to build on regional and technical agreements.
Here we highlight institutional architecture principles and methods that can help both with repurposing existing institutions and designing new options. The principles include: a focus on assembling intelligence; ‘mesh’ structures that link multiple tiers of governance; hybrids combining different sectors; multiple accountabilities instead of reliance on governmental accountability; seeking political interest alignment; exploring new economic foundations in global public goods; and using upside-down thought and action.
Finally, we comment on the relative absence of centres doing work of this kind; there is a lot more diagnosis than prescription and description rather than design. This results in an absence of plausible options even as the needs grow more acute alongside growing awareness of just how much our future thriving depends on new planetary institutions.
