When world leaders gather this month for the United Nations General Assembly, the crisis of global development will be front and center. On September 18–19, the leaders assembled in New York will attend a summit to assess global progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the seventeen ambitious objectives to dramatically improve economic progress, social welfare, and environmental stewardship by 2030 that were endorsed by UN member states in 2015. However, a series of systemic shocks—from the coronavirus pandemic to economic fallout from the war in Ukraine to the deepening climate catastrophe—have conspired to throw development into reverse. The SDG picture is grim. Roughly halfway to 2030, the SDGs “are disappearing in the rearview mirror,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Of the 140 SDG targets for which data is available, the world is on pace to meet only 15 percent. It is “moderately or severely off track” on nearly half and either standing still or regressing on another 37 percent.
For the first time in a generation, the number of people in extreme poverty has increased, as has the number facing hunger and food insecurity. In many developing nations, advances in health, education, gender equality, and access to water, sanitation, and reliable energy have slowed or in some cases ground to a halt. Thanks to violent conflict and natural disasters, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons is now the highest ever recorded. Meanwhile, humanity stands on the brink of a climate catastrophe, having failed to deliver on its Paris Agreement pledges or to end what Guterres calls our “war on nature.” “It is time to sound the alarm,” he declared.
While some of the SDGs—like the goal of eradicating extreme poverty everywhere by 2030—were always a stretch, others were within the world’s grasp until the successive blows of the past few years left countries reeling and staggering under mountains of debt. Senior officials in multilateral institutions and donor governments have taken note, and pressure is growing to adapt existing and design new multilateral institutions to deliver global public goods and mitigate global “bads.”
A public good is any commodity, service, or measure that is available to everyone. Its consumption by any one actor does not diminish its consumption by others, and its use today does not reduce its future availability. A “global” public good, by extension, is one that provides universal benefits to current and future generations across national boundaries, regardless of where it is produced or how much of it is consumed. A classic example would be a vaccine against a disease like smallpox, polio, or the coronavirus. Another would be removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, whether by planting trees or by building machines to capture it directly from the air.
Although there are few “pure” global public goods, scholars have identified multiple other candidates, ranging from world peace to nuclear nonproliferation, international financial stability, global public health, biodiversity, an intact ozone layer, a stable environment in orbital space, and even scientific and technical knowledge. (True global public goods can be distinguished from “club” goods, from which nonmembers can be excluded—the NATO alliance being an example—as well as “common” goods—such as high seas fisheries—whose exploitation diminishes their availability to others.)
For a variety of reasons, global public goods tend to be undersupplied. These factors include the well-known free-rider problem, which encourages countries to shirk responsibility for providing the relevant good in hopes that others will pick up the burden; sovereignty concerns, which can discourage nations from restricting their decisionmaking prerogatives; divergent priorities, which can undermine cooperation even when countries share interests; the possibility of defection, which allows even a single actor to sabotage the collective effort; and the failure to ensure momentum or compliance over the long term.
Despite these impediments, nations sometimes contribute to global public goods, both individually and collectively, out of enlightened self-interest. Nineteenth-century Britain famously used its Royal Navy to ensure the freedom of the seas. Likewise, some scholars argue, the United States during its post-1945 heyday provided global goods that included maintaining a stable, freely convertible currency; adopting open trade policies; serving as a lender of last resort; and preserving sea lanes for commerce. However, America’s capacity, willingness, and reliability to play this role has faded as its hegemony has declined and its citizens have turned inward.
Increasingly, the burden of providing global public goods falls, as it arguably should, to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Health Organization, and the many other specialized agencies and programs of the sprawling UN system. Guterres’s own blueprint for UN reform envisions a revitalized multilateral order capable of delivering global public health, an equitable and resilient world economy, a sustainable planet, and a secure outer space and cyberspace, among other goals. The World Bank, for its part, faces growing pressure to become “a full-fledged provider” of global public goods. Already, over the past several years, it has created a dedicated new funding window to support refugees, expanded its expertise and financing for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, and agreed to host a new Pandemic Fund to support prevention, preparedness, and response efforts worldwide. The bank’s proposed evolution roadmap for reform would reinforce this trend.
The IMF faces similar pressures. In September 2022, the government of Barbados unveiled the Bridgetown Initiative, which calls for a sweeping “reform of the global financial architecture” to better address the development and debt crises resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, accelerating climate change, and economic upheavals from the war in Ukraine. Beyond an immediate increase in global liquidity, it envisions a long-term expansion of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, a new “global mechanism” to provide funds to countries “imperilled by. . . climate disaster,” and a new “multilateral agency that accelerates private investment in the low carbon transition.”
These multilateral initiatives parallel trends within the broader donor community, particularly among the advanced market democracies that comprise the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the proportion of all bilateral assistance its members spent on what might be considered global public goods rose from 37 percent in 2007–2011 to a whopping 60 precent in 2017–2021, thanks to surging expenses related to infectious disease, climate challenges, food insecurity, and the care of refugees in OECD countries.
The risk, of course, is that increased financing for global public goods will not represent additional overall resources but displace funding for traditional development cooperation that reflects the priorities of partner nations. This is particularly true at a moment when many aid donors, such as the United Kingdom, are retrenching. Already, the OECD warns, “global public goods are putting development assistance under pressure” as the world seeks to respond to cascading cross-border disruptions and risks. The world faces “a growing dilemma: how to balance country-driven demands for assistance with increasing pressures on aid budgets to deal with development-related global challenges.”
There is also the tricky question of how donors should classify the resources they devote to global public goods, particularly when the responsibility for providing them, as well as the net benefits obtained from them, is unequally shared. “Is research into a COVID-19 vaccine a suitable use of Official Development Assistance (ODA)?” wonders Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development. “What about finance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?” Both are worthwhile expenditures with salutary impacts on low-income countries. Kenny’s reasonable conclusion is that whatever its benefits, such global public goods spending does not qualify as ODA—a category that should be restricted to expenditures with “the underlying motivation of promoting the welfare of people in developing countries.”
As a rule of thumb, the more that spending on a global public good delivers a high relative benefit to developing countries, the more it merits being classified as ODA. By this logic, the delivery of a vaccine to developing countries would count as development aid, but funding for vaccine research and development would not. Similarly, with respect to climate change, funding to assist adaptation in low-income countries would presumably count, whereas investments in domestic carbon capture and storage would not. Making fine-grained distinctions may seem pedantic, but it is critical to preventing the diversion of resources away from development—and reviving progress on the SDGs.
At the same time, of course, all wealthy nations should be encouraged to invest as much as possible in global public goods, regardless of whether these qualify as ODA. One welcome innovation, Kenny suggests, would be to create a new, collectively agreed measurement of a country’s contributions to global public goods. This is an idea whose time has come. In principle, it would permit observers to compare the (per capita) resources each nation devotes to funding international organizations, as well to goods such as climate mitigation, pandemic surveillance, peace operations, humanitarian response, ocean conservancy, and myriad other services whose benefits are available to all.
As a partial step in this direction, the OECD has developed a new international standard, Total Official Support for Sustainable Development, to monitor not only ODA but also broader support for development, whether in the form of contributions to global public goods, other official flows, cooperation among developing countries, or private resources mobilized through official means. This standard is a useful innovation, but it would also make sense to develop a standalone index of national contributions to global public goods as a measure of each country’s willingness to shoulder burdens in the interest of all. Call it a ranking of good global citizenship.