The New Way to Solve Complex Global Problems: Minilateralism

Sitting at UN conferences, one has to ask the hard question:  what difference do these meetings really make?  Beyond the soft law accretion, public awareness and mobilization, and other real effects–how do we explain the failure of agreements over the past 10 years, and the lack of signitories to keep their committments to the most important of the most recent one, the Milennium Development Goals?

The big idea, courtesey of Moises Naim in FP.com:

The pattern is clear: Since the early 1990s, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared, but at the same time multilateral talks have inevitably failed; deadlines have been missed; financial commitments and promises have not been honored; execution has stalled; and international collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed. These failures represent not only the perpetual lack of international consensus, but also a flawed obsession with multilateralism as the panacea for all the world’s ills.

So what is to be done? To start, let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.

via Minilateralism: The magic number to get real international action. – By Moisés Naím | Foreign Policy.

Count on Steven Walt to cite this as an idea close to his heart:

Need I point out that this is a decidedly realist approach? Realists have always emphasized the role of power and argued that the agenda of world politics — including the prospects for meaningful cooperation — depends mostly on the actions of the major powers.

But…an idea that he notes, “will work in some contexts but not in others.”  Perhaps a dose of realism is what institutions and arrangements based on idealism need to make them more pragmatic and workable.