Global Governance in a Not-So-Global World: Power Has Shifted, But The Global System Hasn’t Kept Pace

The problem facing global governance today is not simply that its institutions are outdated as much as it is that the world has changed faster than our ability to respond to it. New centres of economic and political power have emerged, developing countries are demanding greater representation, and the interests of major powers have become harder to reconcile. Yet the institutions through which these competing interests are meant to be negotiated remain tied to an earlier distribution of power. The result is a widening gap between what the global system can recognise symbolically and what it can actually change in practice.

Illustration by The Geostrata

On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly did something that, at first glance, seemed almost too modest to matter. It adopted the “Correct the Map” resolution, calling for more geographically accurate representations of the world, particularly of Africa. The resolution received 164 votes in favour, with six abstentions and only the United States voting against it. It was, in many ways, a symbolic correction: a recognition that the way we have been accustomed to seeing the world does not always correspond to the world as it actually is.

The irony is difficult to miss. The international community can come together with overwhelming agreement to correct how Africa is represented on a map. Yet the same countries remain deeply divided over how Africa, and the wider developing world, should actually be represented in the decisions that shape their future

For Africa, there is something deeply unsatisfying about celebrating a more accurate map while the continent continues to struggle for greater political representation, access to finance, technology, development opportunities and a stronger voice in the institutions that govern the global economy. The cartographic correction may be welcome, but on its own it risks becoming a bandage over a much deeper wound. Instead of giving African states more of the political and economic space they need to shape their own futures, the international system risks offering them a symbolic gesture and asking them to be satisfied with it for a little longer. A better map can correct how Africa is seen. It cannot, by itself, change how much power Africa has.

That contrast says something larger about the state of multilateralism today. The problem is not that the United Nations has become irrelevant, nor that international institutions have stopped functioning altogether. The deeper problem is that the political conditions that once allowed these institutions to function with a degree of collective purpose are weakening.

THE PROBLEM IS VISIBLE IN THE NUMBERS

The clearest evidence comes from the institution at the centre of the UN system of collective security. In 2025, only 27 of the Security Council’s 44 resolutions were adopted unanimously, a 61% unanimity rate compared with an 80% average between 2015 and 2024. Over the decade from 2016 to 2025, the permanent members cast 49 vetoes, compared with just 19 in the previous ten years.

The individual crises behind those numbers matter. Russia’s position as both a permanent Council member and a party to the war in Ukraine has constrained collective action, while the United States has repeatedly vetoed resolutions concerning Gaza. China has also used its position to bring the Kashmir question before the Council at Pakistan’s request, including discussions in 2019 and 2020. For years, Beijing also blocked or delayed attempts to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar under the UN terrorism sanctions regime before the listing was finally approved in 2019.

These cases are different in substance, but they demonstrate the same structural problem: the Council’s ability to act ultimately depends on the strategic interests of the powers that control it.

The problem is not limited to security. The UN’s 2026 assessment of the Sustainable Development Goals found that only 36 % of the 139 assessable targets are on track or making moderate progress, while 49% are moving too slowly and 15 % have regressed from their 2015 baselines. There has been genuine progress, but the figures also expose the growing distance between what the international community promises collectively and what it can deliver collectively.

Then there is representation itself. At the IMF, Japan’s quota remains 6.47%, marginally above China’s 6.4%, even though China’s economy is now vastly larger. Quotas determine voting power as well as financial contributions and access to IMF resources.

Taken together, these examples reveal three different weaknesses: the difficulty of making collective security decisions, the difficulty of translating global commitments into implementation, and the difficulty of adjusting institutions to a changing distribution of power.

THE DEEPER PROBLEM IS POLITICAL

It is tempting to treat this as an institutional design problem. Reform the Security Council, give emerging economies greater representation, change the voting structures of international financial institutions or make the UN more representative. These reforms are necessary, but they do not address the entire problem.

The central challenge is not simply that institutions are outdated as it is that the major powers increasingly disagree about what the international system itself should look like.

The post 1945 order was built around institutions that assumed a certain degree of convergence among the major powers and that assumption has become much harder to sustain.

The United States and its allies increasingly see international security through the lens of strategic competition with China and Russia. China argues for a more representative international system while simultaneously seeking greater influence within it. Russia has increasingly challenged the political and security arrangements established after the Cold War. India and other emerging powers want a greater voice without necessarily wanting to inherit the strategic divisions of either Washington or Beijing.

The result is an international system in which almost everyone agrees that the existing architecture needs reform, but far fewer agree on what should replace it. Even the language of multipolarity reveals this tension. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has acknowledged that the existing structures still reflect the economic and power arrangements of eight decades ago. He has argued for a “networked” form of multipolarity rather than a world dominated by either one power or two rival blocs.

But a multipolar world does not automatically become a more cooperative world, in fact, it can become more difficult to govern. The more centres of power there are, the more interests have to be reconciled. The problem becomes especially acute when the major powers disagree not only on individual conflicts but on the rules through which those conflicts should be managed.

This is why the paralysis of multilateral institutions cannot simply be explained by the personalities of individual leaders or the failures of particular organisations. The deeper change is in the distribution of power itself. The world of 2026 is economically, politically and strategically different from the world in which much of the current institutional architecture was created.

COOPERATION IS ALREADY MOVING ELSEWHERE

The consequence is not that countries have stopped cooperating but quite the opposite. Cooperation is increasingly taking place through a wider range of institutions, coalitions and smaller groupings.

There is another important sign of this shift: the United States, which helped build and sustain much of the post 1945 institutional order, is itself becoming more selective about participation in it. In January 2026, Washington ordered its withdrawal from 66 international organisations, including 31 UN entities. The US also completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization in January 2026 and is set to leave UNESCO at the end of 2026. The stated rationale is that these institutions no longer sufficiently serve American interests.

That matters beyond the individual organisations involved. When the country that has historically been one of the principal financial and political pillars of the multilateral system increasingly chooses bilateral arrangements, smaller coalitions or national mechanisms over universal institutions, it sends a wider signal: international cooperation is becoming more conditional on national interest.

And that is precisely where the erosion of trust becomes visible. Developing countries have long argued that global institutions do not adequately reflect their interests. Now even the leading power that helped shape those institutions is questioning whether they remain useful enough to justify continued participation.

BRICS is now an 11-member grouping, following Indonesia’s entry in 2025, with 10 partner countries alongside it. Its agenda has expanded well beyond its original economic focus to include trade, finance, technology, climate and reform of global governance. India’s current BRICS agenda offers a particularly telling example. Ahead of the September 2026 summit, New Delhi is pushing for greater interoperability between members’ digital payment systems and central bank digital currencies to make cross border transactions faster and less dependent on existing financial channels.

India has been careful to frame this not as an attempt to replace the dollar, but as an effort to give countries more options in how they conduct international transactions. That distinction matters: the emerging order is not necessarily trying to destroy the existing system. It is increasingly trying to build alternatives around it.

But BRICS also illustrates the limits of this emerging model. Its members have sharply different political systems, economic interests and strategic relationships. The current divisions surrounding the Iran conflict demonstrate how difficult it is for an expanded coalition to translate a shared desire for a more representative global order into a unified political position.

The emerging world is therefore not necessarily building a replacement for the UN as it is building additional layers around it.

Regional organisations are becoming more important with Minilateral groupings proliferating, with countries forming coalitions around specific technologies, supply chains, defence arrangements, energy corridors and financial systems. The G20 remains important precisely because it brings together countries that would struggle to reach agreement within narrower alliances. At the same time, smaller groupings can often move faster because they do not require universal consensus.

This is perhaps the clearest indication of where global governance is heading: not towards one new institution replacing the old one, but towards a more fragmented landscape of overlapping institutions.

That creates opportunities as a smaller group can sometimes achieve what a universal institution cannot. Regional organisations understand local realities better, while emerging economies can create mechanisms that reflect their own priorities rather than waiting indefinitely for reform elsewhere.

But there is also a serious cost as a fragmented system may become better at producing cooperation among willing states while becoming worse at producing rules that apply consistently across the international system.

FROM CONSENSUS TO REALISM

The direction of travel is already visible in what states are doing as global military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, according to SIPRI, marking the eleventh consecutive year of growth and a 41% increase over the 2016-25 period. The United States, China and Russia alone accounted for 51% of global military spending. Governments are not waiting for the international system to guarantee their security; they are investing in their own.

The same logic is visible elsewhere. Countries are pursuing strategic autonomy in critical supply chains, developing alternative payment mechanisms and strengthening regional partnerships. BRICS is exploring financial cooperation, while smaller coalitions are increasingly being used to work around the slow pace of universal institutions. These are not merely diplomatic experiments as they are practical responses to a system that states increasingly see as unreliable when their core interests are at stake.

This is where the erosion of trust becomes visible with states not abandoning international cooperation; they are changing where and how they cooperate. They are choosing institutions that they believe can deliver, coalitions that protect their interests and national capabilities that do not depend entirely on someone else’s political commitment.

What we are witnessing is therefore a more realism-grounded international politics. Power matters. National interests matter. Strategic autonomy matters. Institutions still matter, but states are increasingly judging them by what they can actually deliver rather than by the authority they were once assumed to possess.

The world has already recognised that the old institutional order no longer fully reflects the distribution of power that exists today. What remains uncertain is whether global governance can adapt to that reality or whether states will continue building around institutions they no longer fully trust.

---

BY GUNJAN

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com