The political climate was the biggest warning sign. This was one of the weakest moments for multilateral political will I have seen, held back by stalled progress on the SDGs and other setbacks. One is UN80, the UN’s current reform and cost-cutting drive to mark its 80th anniversary, which is going ahead with no clear assessment of how it will affect the UN’s capacity to deliver or whether it addresses the broader liquidity crisis. Another is the worrying implementation of the Pact for the Future, seen in the continued failure to reform the international financial architecture. We had hoped for stronger multilateral leadership and political will to operationalise these reforms at the Forum, but what we saw instead was fragmentation amidst multidimensional crises.

On a more positive note, civil society adopted unified positions on shared issues. We’ve often worked in silos with a narrow focus, so seeing civil society converge was a breath of fresh air. One example was a workshop we ran through the Major Groups and other Stakeholders Coordination Mechanism, the UN’s main channel for civil society input into sustainable development processes, where we brought together allies, partners and others to converge on collective concerns. We also engaged with them across other events in New York. This is exactly what’s needed in the current environment.

Multilateralism is in a precarious state. It has always rested on principles such as sovereign equality among states, shared values and diffuse reciprocity – the expectation that cooperation is repaid over time rather than immediately – so that states prioritise collective interests over individual foreign policy goals. These principles now seem to be going out of the window.

The global south bears the brunt of multilateral failures of ambition, imagination and political will. We can see it in global frameworks such as the SDGs, where progress has been lacklustre. Of the 139 targets for which there is enough data to assess progress, only 15 per cent are on track to be met by 2030, while systemic barriers continue to exacerbate emerging crises.

The UN sits at the heart of multilateralism, but some of the reforms needed lie outside its reach. Reform of the international financial architecture would require the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to act in line with the UN’s principles and purposes rather than against them, as the evidence suggests they currently do.

Cases like Pakistan’s show what’s wrong with the system. Each year the country has to ask the IMF for a couple of billion dollars just to cover its budget gap. It has to pay more in return, compared to a global north country, due to the creditor-centric focus of international lending that prioritises risk and capacity to repay over vulnerability. Meanwhile, multinational companies can sue governments for billions of dollars through neoliberal instruments such as investor-state dispute settlement systems, undemocratic arbitration processes written into investment and trade treaties.

So countries like Pakistan end up with no room, financially or politically, to pursue their development goals or prevent underdevelopment as a consequence of growth-fanatic trade regimes. Global north countries call the shots at the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, reinforcing colonial forms of power, with little to no agency for the global south. Nothing will change until global governance is reformed at a fundamental level, inside and outside the UN.

These difficulties are compounded by the emergence of dangerous ‘minilateralisms’ – small, informal groupings of powerful states that bypass multilateral institutions, such as the Board of Peace, the body a handful of powers set up to oversee Gaza’s post-war governance. As trust in public institutions erodes, space opens for these arrangements to operate outside the inclusive, principled and transformative multilateralism that civil society advocates for. Civil society continues to work with states, particularly those from the global south, and with allies in the global north, to bring these principles back to the table to restore the credibility of multilateralism.

It is increasingly clear that the UN’s three foundational pillars of human rights, peace and security, and sustainable development have intersectional ties. Although the SDGs centre on development, the other two pillars of ensuring the respect, protection and fulfilment of human rights and assurance of peace and security are fundamental prerequisites for sustainable development. All three pillars must work in unison, including across the Pact for the Future, covering external reforms, and the UN80 process, focusing on efficiency within, to operationalise genuine transformation.

As civil society, particularly from the global south, we feel that a great deal was sacrificed to reach agreement when the SDGs were being negotiated. The SDGs paper over deep power imbalances in global governance, including its colonial roots, a system still bent on maintaining the status quo and the fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council face no accountability for their records on peace and security, human rights and their contribution, or lack of it, to sustainable development.

In practice, it’s the big powers who make the final calls, managing these multilateral institutions in line with their unilateral policy priorities. So if they aren’t willing to lead by example, where are we to look for leadership in a supposedly rules-based order? That is what results in performative contradictions such as illicit financial flows that exceed development aid many times over and military expenditure that exceeds US$3 trillion this year, while official development assistance continues to be lacklustre at a couple of hundred billion dollars.

Civil society movements run coordination mechanisms at different levels, channelling grassroots voices and lived experience into policy discussions to press for governance reform, from the local level all the way up to the UN. What we need to work on, perhaps, is the access to influence gap, the compartmentalisation into our factions, and building a movement grounded in normative and representative legitimacy. Addressing these issues should help us bridge our divides and differences and bring member states and the UN secretariat together with us around a collective cause.

The UN is our political collective, and it needs to be saved. But the UN we need to protect is an empowered one, not the version being cut down to size by the liquidity crisis and today’s political constraints. That’s what the UN80 process endangers. It’s being done in the name of efficiency and good governance, but neither the process nor its expected outcomes address how the liquidity crisis will be resolved in the long run, how it will affect the institution’s ability to deliver on its promise on human rights, peace, security and sustainable development, or what it will mean for the participation of civil society, including grassroots movements. How can the resource base be shrunk, instead of expanded, in the face of multidimensional crises?

States withdrawing funding or failing to meet their financial commitments are threatening the whole system. Civil society needs to defend, as its normative capital, the idea of a UN that is transformative and bold. Even as we explore ways of engaging beyond the UN, we must keep pressing to ensure it emerges from this moment in better shape than it is today.

In conversations with states and the UN secretariat and among ourselves, pushing for an alternative to the SDGs has met resistance. But an alternative is exactly what we need. From a global south perspective, the SDGs’ theme-based model is deeply problematic. So we are proposing a framework built around addressing systemic barriers, particularly the inequalities embedded in global governance and increasing corporate capture by the empires of the future.

Fix the bigger picture, and other elements, including the eradication of hunger, education and universal healthcare, will follow. But we must first address the core, structural issues that have impeded progress on the SDGs.

However, the political climate may not allow for intergovernmental consensus on such a framework. In pragmatic terms, we may have to settle for articulating priorities to address the barriers that have blocked SDG progress while building on what already exists in the current framework.

I hope that by next year’s SDG Summit, we will have a clear set of proposals for what the post-2030 framework should look like. The post-2030 framework has to be transformative in scope and bold in ambition, delivering on priorities that the last two frameworks failed to achieve. This is not just about the SDGs’ shortcomings. It’s time to operationalise the structural changes needed to deliver transformation on the ground.

Our advocacy strategy is to decolonise, deliberalise, decarbonise and democratise, in order to realise development justice. That’s what people in the global south are asking for to ensure a fairer future for all. The UN Charter opens with three words: ‘We the Peoples’. That’s the principle we need to galvanise member states, the secretariat and broader civil society around this agenda.