Together First’s Global Consultation

By Together First on 3rd March, 2020

Last week, Together First held a digital consultation to discuss practical ways to improve our global system.

With over 70 registered participants and over 440 comments across 5 discussion threads, conversation was focused on how we can more effectively prevent, mitigate, and manage the risks of global catastrophes.

People from across the globe took part, with participants including:

Together First’s Coordination team, focus group and advisors
Representatives of organisations in our coalition
Members of partner and parallel organisations such as UN2020 and the Elders
Those who have made proposals responding to our Together First Call for Submissions.

The discussion was productive and wide ranging - a key priority highlighted across the threads was the need for greater involvement of civil society in global governance.

The proposals aim to respond to a wide range of problems. Participants discussed how proposals can be achieved, identifying common themes where we can work together to facilitate shared goals.

Common themes identified across the proposals included climate action, improving citizen engagement, reforming existing processes within the UN, reforming finance, and possible new processes to improve global governance.

In addition to this, takeaways included:

The importance of education on global issues to empower civil society
The urgent need to ban both nuclear weapons and killer robots
Proposed next steps in the process: to identify concrete actions and push for them to be implemented

Finally, the UN’s 75th anniversary presents an excellent opportunity not only to take stock of what our global institutions have achieved, but what changes need to be made. As part of our consultation we held a UN75 dialogue. Participants shared what they hope to achieve during the UN’s 75th year and beyond, giving insight on the world they hope to create, and what state the world will be in 2045 if the current global trends continue.

A civil society declaration is due to be presented to the UN in April. UN2020 presented their methodology for generating a civil society declaration to participants; see their call for proposals and ideas here.

What comes next?

Following this consultation, the proposals will be published on our ideas hub in the next week - we encourage you to read the proposals and endorse the campaigns you want to get behind. We will soon conduct a mapping exercise to find ideas that can be campaigned on and implemented in the near future.

This will feed in to our to do list for world leaders, due to be launched in April.

What can you do now?

If you have an idea to improve global governance, share it with us here, and join our coalition.

Photo: Beijing+25 regional civil society forum in Geneva - UN Women/Antoine Tardy

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