The Learning Zone
Here in the Learning Zone, you can explore the existential threats humanity faces, and how we can fix the United Nations to solve them.
EXISTENTIAL THREATS:
UNITED NATIONS 2.0
A NEW UNITED NATIONS 2.0:
What's Wrong With the Current U.N.?
Lack of Citizen Involvement
Nations are represented at the UN by delegates chosen by their national governments. Citizens do not elect their UN delegates and have very little influence over UN deliberations. There's a serious lack of accountability in this institution that, when redesigned, will increasingly affect people's daily lives.
Currently, most citizens around the world don't pay attention to the United Nations because there's little opportunity to influence it, and the UN has little influence in the world. Why bother following something you can't affect and that doesn't seem to affect you?
But as humanity redesigns the UN to have much greater authority over world affairs—as we must to manage existential threats—that authority must be grounded in accountability to citizens. This is essential for both good governance and building the global support the UN needs to be effective.
How the Current System Works
Today's UN delegates are appointed by their national governments to represent government interests, which sometimes differ from citizens' interests. This made more sense when the UN was founded in 1945 as a forum for governments to negotiate with each other. But the challenges we face today require more than government-to-government diplomacy—they require coordinated global action that has widespread public support.
Citizens are less likely to support UN decisions they had no voice in making, which reduces compliance and effectiveness. And they won't support taxation to fund a UN they can't influence and that doesn't represent them.
Potential Solutions
A reformed UN would include meaningful citizen participation in several ways:
Citizen-elected delegates: Have citizens elect representatives to at least one chamber of a redesigned General Assembly. This would give people a direct voice in global decisions while respecting national sovereignty. Countries could hold these elections alongside their regular national elections. Note that national governments would still have their appointed delegates in the other General Assembly chamber.
Citizens' assemblies: Use randomly selected, representative groups of citizens to research and deliberate on challenging global issues. Participants would be paid to take time off work to study complex problems and suggest policies for UN officials to enact. Citizens' assemblies are not bound by the same political pressures as elected officials, so they often propose bolder, more innovative solutions. Citizens' assemblies could even be used during the UN Charter Convention process, as we redesign the United Nations.
Global referenda: For major decisions affecting all of humanity—like new international laws on climate or technology—allow citizens worldwide to vote directly rather than leaving decisions entirely to UN officials. Citizens should have a say on issues with enormous global consequences.
Digital participation: Create online platforms where citizens worldwide can propose ideas for global governance and discuss them with people from other countries. These systems would use consensus-building tools that highlight where people agree rather than amplifying divisions, helping participants find common ground across cultural and political differences. Citizens could submit proposals that, with sufficient global support, would require official UN response and consideration. The process would include face-to-face meetings in many locations around the world, to allow deeper engagement, and to include people with less technological skill or access to technology. All discussions and documents would be published in real-time with full transparency, allowing citizens everywhere to follow and contribute to the development of global policies. Emerging technologies can allow humanity to create systems for worldwide citizen participation that previous generations could never have imagined—we should seize on this opportunity to build truly inclusive global governance.
Why Citizen Involvement Would Make the UN More Effective
Beyond being more accountable, citizen involvement would make the UN more capable:
Broader support: Citizens who help make decisions are more likely to support implementing them.
Better solutions: Citizens' assemblies consistently develop more innovative approaches to complex problems than traditional political processes, often proposing creative solutions that career politicians might consider too risky or unconventional.
Sustained commitment: Public involvement creates political pressure for long-term solutions rather than short-term political fixes that change with every election cycle.
Thriving advocacy ecosystem: As we empower the UN and allow citizens to participate more meaningfully, we would likely see a growing network of advocacy organizations helping citizens engage with global policy. These groups would serve as bridges between citizens and the UN, while generating innovative ideas for addressing humanity's challenges.
Global solidarity: When people participate directly in global governance, they develop stronger connections to humanity as a whole, not just their own countries.
The existential threats we face require not just governments cooperating, but genuine global solidarity among citizens. Building that solidarity requires giving people ways to participate in shaping our shared future. When citizens can meaningfully participate in global governance, people from various countries will work together to influence global policies. This cross-border collaboration among citizens may, over time, help dissolve the nation-first pursuit of narrow national interests that has been so damaging to world affairs.
Next, we'll explain how we can make these changes to the U.N. that we've been discussing.
HOW WILL WE FIX THE U.N.?
