After the 2019 Global Solutions Summit: A narrative framework for paradigm change

After the 2019 Global Solutions Summit

From 18–19 March, the 2019 Global Solutions Summit took place in Berlin. Its mission is to support the 2019 Japanese presidency of the summits of the Group of Twenty (G20) and the world’s leading think tanks (T20) by providing it with new policy ideas.

As Dennis J. Snower, the President of the Global Solutions Initiative, said in his opening remarks, we are witnessing a crisis of the liberal world order epitomised by the universalist aspiration to institutionalise the rule of law, national sovereignty, human rights, and progress through economic growth. This crisis, he suggested, is due to the decoupling of the political, economic, and socio-cultural spheres of human activity in global governance. To recouple these spheres and to overcome this crisis, the participants at the Summit agreed, we need global paradigm change—that is, a radical rethinking of the patterns through which we conceive of the world, and which shape its dominant political, economic, and socio-cultural systems.

In this commentary, Josefin Graef draws out the summit’s key insights and proposes a way forward.

Download the commentary here.

The Hertie School of Governance hosts the Secretariat of the Global Solutions Initiative.

Josefin Graef is a Dahrendorf Forum Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Hertie School of Governance.

Image courtesy of the Global Solutions Initiative