Serious global risks and challenges are accumulating in many areas and governments and companies must rise above their parochial interests to set up a properly structured global cooperation system, warns a World Economic Forum (WEF) report.

The product of a year-long effort of over 1,500 academic, business, governmental and civil society experts from around the world, the forum’s Global Redesign Initiative report contains 58 specific proposals and nine thematic essays by some of the international community’s leading authorities on international economic, environmental and security cooperation.

Entitled 'Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World', the report warns that governments, international institutions and arrangements are often ill-equipped to provide a proactive response.

Reminding the international community that in the midst of the financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009 it “was seized with the transformational nature of our times,” the report calls on it to “hold on to that moment of possibility, consolidate its considerable accomplishment in containing the crisis and renew its earlier commitment to renovate the international system.”

The report concludes that the time has come for governments, companies and other civil society institutions to “rise above their immediate, parochial interests and consider more seriously their long-term stake in a properly structured and resourced global cooperation system for the 21st century.”

Writing in the report’s overview chapter, forum managing director Richard Samans, executive chairman and founder Klaus Schwab and vice-chairman Lord Malloch-Brown conclude: “Even as governments develop their exit strategies from fiscal and monetary stimulus measures applied during the crisis, they should engage in an effort to absorb the larger meaning of the changes that have transformed the international community during the past generation and rendered much of its cooperative architecture not fully fit for purpose.”

The report proposes a “blueprint for renovating international cooperation in an era of increasingly complex interdependence, rendering it both more effective and legitimate” based on the many proposals that have emerged from the Global Redesign process.

In particular, it proposes a more results-oriented “multidimensional” approach to international governance and cooperation that encompasses but goes beyond multilateralism.

Arguing that the international community’s increasing interconnectedness and interdependence creates new modes and means of accelerating progress on many global challenges, it demonstrates how pragmatic strategies that take advantage of these additional tools and capacities can be combined to achieve breakthroughs on such issues as climate change, fisheries depletion, unemployment and poverty, public health, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and educational access and illiteracy, even when new multilateral agreements appear to be diplomatically beyond reach.

The report calls for the “state-based core of the international system to be adapted to our more complex, bottom-up world in which non-governmental actors have become a more significant force.” To this end, it urges governments and international organisations to conceive of themselves more explicitly as constituting part of “a much wider global cooperation system that has the potential to overcome the limitations of scale, information and coherence from which they currently suffer by anchoring the preparation and implementation of their decisions more deeply in processes of interaction with interdisciplinary and multistakeholder networks of relevant experts and actors.”

In parallel, the report calls for a stronger sense of ownership and responsibility – a shift in values – on the part of these non-governmental institutions and their leaders regarding the underlying health of the international system.

Criticising the “severe price the international community has paid for its complacency about systemic financial and macroeconomic risks that were well publicised but nevertheless allowed to accumulate for too long,” it calls on “those who educate and select business, scientific, academic, religious, media as well as political leaders – particularly graduate education programmes and boards of directors and human resources departments – to redesign their curricula and senior talent development and promotion policies to reflect that they are cultivating not only leaders of functional organizations but also stewards of the international system and the contribution of their professional disciplines thereto.”

The proposals of the forum are being discussed at a special World Economic Forum Global Redesign Summit which opened in Doha today (May 30).  More than 400 delegates from over 60 countries are participating in the two-day summit.

The Summit will be an informal working laboratory or marketplace in which many of these policy ideas and partnership opportunities will be explored, refined and taken forward.

“If we do not want to be caught in a continuous vicious cycle of crisis fighting, we have to analyse the fundamental forces changing our world and formulate policies which take into account the manifold structural changes in geopolitics and geo-economics,” said Professor Schwab said.

The governments of Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland and Tanzania are patrons of the Global Redesign Initiative. – TradeArabia News Service