This brief summarizes five key recommendations from the CGD book A Better Globalization: Legitimacy, Governance, and Reform by Kemal Dervis. It presses for reform on a broad front with a renewed, more legitimate, and more effective United Nations as the overarching framework for global governance based on global consent.
The key dimensions of the renewal are:
1. Reform of the UN Security Council to allow universal participation through a system of constituencies and weighted voting that balances continuity and change.
2. A new UN Economic and Social Security Council as an “equal partner” of the Security Council to replace the G-7 at the top of the global economic governance architecture.
3. A Stability and Growth Facility to help middle-income, emerging market economies reduce debt burdens without having to sacrifice the fight against poverty and macroeconomic stabilization.
4. Meeting poor countries’ special challenges with a “big push” in additional development resources coupled with conditions that address the governance failures that threaten their effective use.
5. A truly development-oriented, WTO-led trade liberalization, able to win the hearts and minds of world citizens by spreading the benefits of trade and by compensating those who lose in the short run.