The Global Public Knows What it Wants from UN Reform & the next SG

June 2026

By Katja Hemmerich

Given the general pessimism about the direction of multilateralism and the UN, I was struck by a recent LinkedIn post featuring new public opinion polling across 31 countries in March and April 2026 indicating a resurgence in public support for international cooperation. A little further digging found that this was not just a one off. Another opinion poll undertaken for the Rockefeller Foundation across 34 countries in August and September 2025 that found “a majority (55%) globally agree their country should cooperate on global challenges even if it means compromising on national interests.”

Although slightly different, the surveys have the same analysis of why global public opinion on international cooperation is shifting. Aside from providing a rare positive perspective on the future of multilateralism, the surveys provide surprisingly tangible insights into global public perceptions about effective international collaboration and international institutions. And this in turn, starts to map out a vision to guide UN reform discussions - which has been a major gap to date. Our spotlight this month explores what the global public expects from UN reform and how this translates into some fundamental - and easily implementable - leadership priorities for the next SG.

How and why global public opinion is shifting

The questions posed by the two surveys, commissioned by the think tank Global Nation and the Rockefeller Foundation respectively, are quite different, yet their responses both highlight a recognition by people across the globe that they are personally affected by what happens on the global stage, in part because so much has changed there over the last year and a half. In the Rockefeller survey, undertaken by Focaldata, 54% of respondents expressly indicated that their lives are affected by events in other countries. Of note, is that in this survey, which was conducted in August and September 2025 after the various US Liberation Day and other tariffs had kicked in, the link between global developments and respondents’ personal realities was highlighted most strongly in the economic sphere.

Global Nation’s analysis of its data collected in March and April 2026 by Ipsos references a similar linkage between global events and respondents daily lives:

“Trade Wars and the US-Iran conflict are bringing geopolitical instability directly into people’s daily lives, particularly through cost-of-living pressures. Issues like international law violations and the state of the global economy may once have felt abstract, but when consequences are felt in everyday life, they become immediate and personal. The data suggests that this is reinforcing public awareness that external shocks require international cooperation and collective resilience.” - Global Nation, 'At its darkest hour, is internationalism back?', 2026

Global Nation comes to this conclusion because they’ve been running this poll annually and 2026 is the first time in recent years that declining commitment to global solidarity across their three questions has been reversed across all demographics. They ask three simple questions which gauge the extent to which people feel part of a global community, are willing to pay for it and are willing to have their country bound by global rules as outlined in Figure 1 below.

That a growing number of people think that global rules should be enforced and that their taxes should be used to solve global problems directly contradicts the growing rhetoric that national interest justifies ignoring global rules and the 23% decline in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) in 2025, recorded by the OECD. And it made me optimistic that that people are seeing the consequences of these policies, and don’t necessarily support the growing global disorder.

But as the Rockefeller Foundation poll highlights, this does not directly translate into a desire for a return to the old rules-based order or greater trust in international organizations. The support appears largely conditional on people perceiving that international cooperation gets results that impact the world, their country and their own lives. And even more interestingly, results are significantly more important to people than the cost of such international collaboration.

“People care less about whether cooperation is cheap, and more about whether it delivers real results. When asked what would increase their support for international cooperation, people respond far more strongly to proof of effectiveness than to promises of lower costs. Globally, support is 15–18 percentage points higher when cooperation is framed as solving problems—whether globally or in their own country— compared to when it is framed around reducing costs.” - Rockefeller Foundation, 'Demanding Results: Global Views on International Cooperation', Sept. 2025

How the surveys inform UN reform

And this is precisely where these surveys can start to inform UN reform processes. Cutting costs without also making the UN more effective won’t actually get the organization on a more sustainable footing. While UN80 discussions keep highlighting the importance of effectiveness in addition to efficiency, the reality is that recent funding cuts are so extreme that the UN will need to do less with less - doing more with less is simply impossible. The UN therefore needs a vision around which it can prioritize its limited resources and political capital. Neither the 36 page Pact for the Future resolution or other processes have been able to provide such a focused direction or vision of the future. But these opinion surveys shed light on what the public sees as a priority, and how effectiveness is likely to be judged, which can - and should - inform reform processes and UN priorities.

Effectiveness, as highlighted in these surveys is about managing and addressing global problems that affect people’s every day lives across all countries, regions, income levels, genders and other demographics.  It’s not about better log frames, or streamlined mandates, or using AI instead of people for interpretation - its about getting countries to work together in a way that their own people and the global public at large feel has a positive impact on their lives irrespective of whether they are in a developing or industrialized country.

“For most, cooperation is not about abstract ideals or diplomatic prestige. When asked what should motivate countries to work together, one in three people worldwide say ensuring peace and stability is the top reason for countries to cooperate, making it the undisputed first motivation in every region surveyed.” - Rockefeller Foundation, 'Demanding Results: Global Views on International Cooperation', Sept. 2025

The important nuance here is that people want peace and stability, which goes beyond how the UN defines ‘peace and security’:

“People see global cooperation as essential for managing both everyday needs and global risks. There is overwhelming agreement that international cooperation is important for addressing key issues. At the top are food and water security (93%), trade and economic development (92%), conflict prevention and peacekeeping (92%), human rights protection (92%), and global health and pandemics (91%). A second cluster of priorities includes poverty and inequality (90%), jobs (90%), and strengthening national security (90%), showing the strong link people make between cooperation, livelihoods, and stability.” - Rockefeller Foundation, 'Demanding Results: Global Views on International Cooperation', Sept. 2025

These are all global challenges even if they affect different countries in different ways. I’m writing this spotlight from Canada, where many people I talk to perceive the current US administration’s interest in making Canada the 51st state not just as a way to access Canada’s oil resources, but also its fresh water reserves. There are citizens in many other countries with different levels of development that likely share similar concerns about their neighbours. If multilateralism is going to be perceived as effective, these opinion polls are telling us that it’s time to start demonstrating results for all of these people.

What the next SG needs to prioritize and reform at the UN

All this data and analysis therefore provides a useful roadmap for what the next Secretary-General should prioritize. As conflict between countries impacts not only the people caught in those conflicts directly, but the economic and food security of billions more across all regions, there is clearly a desire for the UN to return to basics and focus on what it was set up to do: enhance global ‘peace and stability’ by facilitating cooperation between states, even when that is difficult and resisted by some member states.

There are concrete ways to do that. One simple way is for the next SG to show up in “the hard places where the UN is most needed”, as a recent IPI article has suggested, and something that has apparently been de-prioritized in recent years.

“As secretary-general, Guterres has not visited South Sudan, Sudan, Kosovo, Cyprus, or Western Sahara, all of which hosted a long-standing UN presence during his tenure and were visited by his predecessors. In fact, he has made no visits to peacekeeping operations in sub-Saharan Africa in his second term. Nor did he travel to East Africa in 2023 when Sudan collapsed into chaos, Syria following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, or Southeast Asia in 2025 during the Thailand–Cambodia conflict. After the Iran war started in February 2026, he conducted his response entirely from New York apart from one short solidarity trip to Lebanon.” - Daniel Safran-Hon, Where Does the Secretary-General Go? Travel as a Proxy for Effort, 2 June 2026

This lack of engagement may be a reflection of the growing sense of futility that seems to be pervading the UN Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Political Affairs as a result of the growing political deadlock in the Security Council. It’s as if those working in the UN have forgotten that for the first 45 years of its existence, the UN navigated the divisions of the Cold War, ‘inventing’ peacekeeping and even convincing the Security Council to approve the first ever transitional administration UNTEA in West Irian less than a month before the Cuban missile crisis broke out. Such achievements are also going to be rare in this new era, but that is all the more reason why they need to be pursued. Part of that will be accepting that sometimes there are failures, as Daniel Safran-Hon has pointed out. Yet even in failure there can be positive improvements in peoples lives. A study published in the Journal of Peace Research in March demonstrates that SG visits to a country lead to measurable improvements in human right protection in those countries, even in the absence of coercive authority or the signing or any formal agreements.

This lack of enthusiasm for engaging member states is not just a personality specific issue of this SG, or those working with the Security Council, it is institutionalized in the UN’s current leadership framework. Nowhere does the UN’s leadership framework indicate that facilitating agreements with and between member states is a core leadership function. In fact, the only mention of member states in the 16 page documents is to emphasize that leaders should engage “the multiplicity of stakeholders beyond the Organization and its Member States”.

All of these things are within the purview of the SG’s authority to change relatively quickly and easily to start demonstrating the value of the UN from the start of her or his new term. They can focus their time and energy on engaging with member states for peace and stability that affect peoples realities across the Global South and North. Other stakeholders become an important source of influence in addressing resistance to these efforts, as that same Journal of Peace Research article shows: “by meeting with and publicly recognizing domestic civil society organizations, the UNSG strengthens their legitimacy and visibility, thereby increasing their capacity to maintain advocacy efforts and exert pressure on governments”. That means just showing up where the UN is needed most needs to be another priority for the SG. And thirdly, make sure these priorities trickle down consistently to leadership across the organization, by recognizing this is a core function of UN leader and selecting and rewarding them on the basis of their willingness and abilities to engage with member states on the most difficult negotiations, while accepting that some of these initiatives might end in failure.