Multilateralism Is Not Dead - But Its Future Depends on How Knowledge Travels
Multilateralism is under pressure. The principles of the United Nations (UN) are under attack. Funding cuts, geopolitical fragmentation, and the rise of “strongman” politics have led many to question whether the system can still deliver. In the field of gender equality, the warning signs are particularly stark: one in four countries is experiencing backsliding on women’s rights according to UN Women, while major donors are downsizing and redirecting resources away from gender equality and violence prevention. At the same time, reforms within the United Nations such as the UN80 Initiative - aimed at streamlining operations and increasing efficiency - signal not only a financial crisis, but a deeper crisis of legitimacy. And yet, multilateralism is not dead. To understand why, we need to look beyond institutions and formal agreements. The real strength of the UN system lies elsewhere: in its ability to mobilize knowledge across multistakeholder networks. In my book The Global Governance of Harmful Practices: Actors, Networks, and Knowledge Transfer in Transnational Gender Programmes (Bristol University Press, 2026), I show that nowhere is this more visible than in global gender programmes tackling some of the most entrenched forms of inequality, including child marriage, female genital mutilation, and gender-biased sex selection. These programmes reveal how multilateralism works in practice - and under what conditions it remains resilient, even under strain.
Beyond Institutions: Multilateralism as a Knowledge System
The United Nations is often understood as a set of institutions with its agencies, mandates, and intergovernmental processes. But this view misses a crucial dimension. In practice, multilateralism operates through dense networks of partnerships that connect international organizations, governments, civil society, researchers, local communities, and change agents. Global gender programmes exemplify this model. They are not top-down interventions. Rather, they function as platforms that generate, translate, and circulate knowledge across levels: global headquarters, regional offices, national counterparters, and local communities, with complex feedback loops. Having served as a trainer and consultant in the UNFPA Every Girl Counts programme and working across contexts from Armenia to Vietnam, New York to Bangkok, I have seen these partnerships being built from skratch, often with very little means. These alliances seek to transform deeply embedded social norms that sustain harmful practices. This is what makes them both powerful and fragile. Their effectiveness depends less on formal authority than on their ability to align diverse actors around shared understandings of problems and solutions.
How Change Happens: The Politics of Knowledge Translation
At the heart of these programmes lies a surprisingly straightforward process of knowledge mobilization. Efforts to address harmful practices do not begin with ready-made solutions, i.e. a zero-tolerance for harmful practices. Instead, they unfold through a series of steps that involve defining problems, building alliances, and sustaining collective action. In practice, four dynamics are particularly important (these are drawn from Callon’s concept of translation). First, problematization. What counts as a “harmful practice” is not self-evident. Categories such as child marriage or female genital mutilation are the result of global negotiations, where international norms intersect with local realities. Defining a practice as harmful is itself a political act - one that shapes priorities, funding, and intervention strategies. Second, identifying solutions and best practices. Once a problem is defined, programmes must offer viable solutions and align diverse stakeholders’ interests around them. Governments, NGOs, religious leaders, and community actors all play a role. Establishing knowledge on ‘what works’ becomes central to generating interest among these relevant stakeholders. Third, enrolment. Actors must be persuaded to join, commit, and act. This is often the hardest step, particularly when issues are delicate and contested such as in the case of “sticky” gender norms, requiring not just evidence but sustained advocacy, trust, and coalition-building to turn awareness into action. Fourth, sustained mobilization. For global programmes, it requires sustaining knowledge flows and continuous engagement, adaptation, and learning across multiple levels. Successful programmes are those that maintain momentum over time, even in the face of resistance and shifting political environments. These four processes take place not only at the global level, but also in local contexts – for example, when community actors work to break taboos and shift perceptions around harmful practices, as interviews with local activists supporting the Global Media Campaign to end Female Genital Mutilation showed (see below). Multilateralism, in this sense, is not a linear chain of implementation. It is a dynamic and iterative process of negotiation and translation.
“We can now discuss on TV, on radio - we can sit and discuss FGM. Nobody will come and kill you. We have largely succeeded in that.”
- Sierra Leonean activist, Global Media Campaign to End FGM and Safe Hands for Girls
Three Models of Knowledge Mobilization - and Their Trade-offs
Global gender programmes rely on different strategies - localization, centralization and co-creation - to mobilize knowledge across actors and levels. Each comes with its own strengths and limitations. Localization seeks to empower local actors shifting responsibility to produce and dissiminate knowledge to partners on the ground. While this approach enhances contextual relevance, it depends heavily on trusted partners with local resources and capacities. In some cases, like the Global Programme to Address Gender-biased Sex Selection, identifying such partners has proven difficult, particularly when navigating contestations around abortion. Centralization focuses on building global knowledge hubs that collect and disseminate data and best practices. While this can improve coordination and standardization, it often raises questions about accessibility and ownership. Data may be centralized, but not necessarily shared widely beyond core institutional actors, like the centralized Female Genital Mutilation “Data for all” platform showed, which despites its name was not available for wider audiences. Co-creation represents a more collaborative approach, bringing together diverse stakeholders to jointly produce knowledge and solutions. Initiatives like the Child Marriage Research to Action Network that link research, advocacy, and policy - often through partnerships with civil society networks - show particular promise in scaling up impact. However, co-creation also raises questions about whose voices are included and whose are marginalized. Rather than offering a single solution, these approaches highlight the inherent trade-offs in managing knowledge within complex multilateral systems under pressure to demonstrate impact.
Measuring Success in a System Under Pressure
Assessing the effectiveness of global gender programmes remains a major challenge. One of the core difficulties lies in data: data for key indicators for monitoring progress on Sustainable Development Goal 5 Gender Equality (including Target 5.3. on the elimination of harmful practices) are still incomplete or unevenly available. Despite these limitations, existing evidence offers optimism. Long-term data systems, such as Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) funded until early 2025 by USAID, have significantly improved our understanding of trends over time (and ongoing financial commitments are needed to maintain ‘the DHS Program as a global good’). In some cases, global programmes have demonstrated measurable impact. For instance, global efforts to end child marriage have contributed to notable reductions in prevalence rates, with intervention countries in several instances outperforming comparable non-intervention settings as I show in my book The Global Governance of Harmful Practices. These results are important - not only for advancing gender equality, but also for the broader legitimacy of multilateralism. At a time when international organizations are increasingly asked to demonstrate impact, evidence of success becomes critical. Yet this evidence base is itself under threat. Cuts to development funding risk undermining the very tools and data infrastructures (including DHS) needed to track progress and inform policy. Without reliable data, the ability to make the case and pinpoint effective multilateral action will weaken.
A System at a Crossroads
What, then, is the future of global gender programmes - and of multilateralism more broadly? A pessimistic view would point to shrinking budgets and political salience as signs of decline. The Global Programme to Address Gender-biased Sex Selection illustrates this fragility. As funds declined and stakeholder engagement became harder to sustain, the program struggled to maintain its network of partners. Difficulties in continuous enrolment - combined with limited visibility and tensions around abortion - ultimately contributed to its dissolution. Similar risks now confront other global gender programmes, as financial pressures intensify and donor priorities shift away from gender equality. At the same time, resources are increasingly redirected toward security and militarization, putting hard-won gains into reverse. In this scenario, global programmes may give way to more fragmented, regional, or national initiatives. However, an alternative and a more optimistic interpretation points to the resilience of these programmes. Their strength lies precisely in their dense, multi-actor networks, which allow them to adapt to geopolitical shocks and operate even under extreme conditions, including conflict settings. These networks create institutional ‘backdoors’, spaces where work can continue despite political resistance or declining formal support. What becomes clear is that the strength of multilateralism does not lie in its formal institutions, but in its ability to sustain networks of knowledge and collaboration.
Reclaiming Multilateralism Through Networks
The current crisis facing the United Nations is not only a crisis of funding or efficiency - it is a crisis of trust. Rebuilding that trust requires recognizing how multilateralism actually works. It is not a static system of international norms and institutions, that is increasingly overruled by power politics, but a tapestry or web of interactions among diverse actors. Its effectiveness depends on the continuous production, translation, and mobilization of knowledge. Global gender programmes offer a window into this process. They show that even in a fragmented and contested world, collective action is possible to raise awareness and challenge some of the most entrenched gender norms. Multilateralism is not dead. But its future will depend on whether these networks can be sustained, strengthened, and made more resilient in the years ahead.
About the author:
Laura Rahm, Ph.D., is a political sociologist and demographer specializing in global governance and sustainable development. She is currently a Policy Leader Fellow at the European University Institute’s Florence School of Transnational Governance and an Associate Researcher at the Centre Population et Développement in Paris. Connect on LinkedIn or Email.
The views and opinions expressed in this think-piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of SIPA or Columbia University.
Photo credit: The image was made with Chat GPT