Credit: UN News / SMG International
By Harpinder Collacott
NEW YORK, Apr 7 2025 – Watching on our screens the devastation wrought by the earthquake which struck South-East Asia last week has brought a stark reminder of our shared vulnerability in this interconnected world. It has exposed again, too, the weak beams of traditional funding models that struggle to ensure a timely response to disasters.
Too often, when the emergency call goes out, the full extent of the response needed is held back with the message “please wait while we fundraise.”
Other global threats stalk us all too. Amongst the most worrying is that, while resources for disease prevention shrink, there’s a mounting worldwide risk that infectious diseases could resurge, threatening public health for everyone, everywhere.
At a time when the old systems have fallen down, it’s easy to succumb to the belief that we can only endure crises, not prevent or surmount them. But this fatalism is misplaced. Vulnerability is universal—but so too can be hope.
Harpinder Collacott
Yes, profound changes in the last few years have brought great pain, and no, we can’t undo the past. But we still have the collective power to shape a better future. We can overcome the challenges we face and seize new opportunities, but only if we approach them in new ways—and work together.
The solution to addressing shared global challenges is global public investment, a framework that will ensure support is readily available during emergencies and enable swift action against threats like infectious diseases. No country can face these alone, and no few countries should monopolize the response.
Working together is the way we can tackle shared risks and maximize shared rewards. This is not charity—it is collective self-interest. Everyone plays their part in meeting a common need from which everyone gains, and everyone steers those efforts together. In other words: all benefit, all contribute, and all decide.
But can we afford these investments?
Collectively, of course we can. In fact, we can’t afford not to make them. These investments will ultimately save money. And, it should be noted, countries are already putting resources into disaster preparedness and research for medicines, but too often, they operate in isolation or even competition with one another. With global challenges, cooperation is always a more effective strategy.
An old and patronising assumption in the Global North has been that low- and middle-income countries will never be able to contribute anything towards shared global challenges. In contrast, however, low- and middle-income countries themselves, during the height of the COVID crisis, pointed out their readiness to be involved in shared investment in global public goods.
These nations called for collaboration in research, shared access to medicines, and mutual protection—and warned how dangerous it would be if parts of the world were left to be treated only as an afterthought. High-income countries’ response? They promised to donate leftover vaccines once their own needs were met.
The results of the Global North’s refusal to work with the Global South as equals were, predictably, disastrous: millions more died, the pandemic lasted far longer, and even high-income countries suffered much higher economic costs than they would have faced had they worked in global partnership.
The lesson is clear: we need shared investment, with shared power, to secure our shared future.
Of course, not all countries would pay the same amount. Just as within a country we all contribute through taxes to shared services from which we all benefit, international contributions would be scaled to each country’s means. From this pooling of resources, everyone wins out.
Soo too, sharing decision-making power isn’t a loss; it enhances everyone’s collective capacity to tackle problems too large for any single country to manage alone.
Global challenges are complex, and no single measure will suffice. Alongside global public investment in shared challenges and opportunities, we also need to take other urgent steps, including addressing the global debt crisis and stepping up international cooperation to prevent tax avoidance. This era of “polycrisis” can only be resolved through “poly-action.”
Countries in the Global South are at the forefront of advocating for global public investment. Colombia, for example, is championing reforms to make the international financial system more equitable and inclusive approach and has declared itself “very much aligned with the global public investment approach.”
Chile, likewise, has called on the world “to be creative and ambitious. Crucial will be a significant increase in public money, that cannot be managed as we managed it in the last century. Governance in the 21st century needs to be representative and effective. Chile supports the development of global public investment.”
This call from the South is also winning support amongst forward-thinking countries in the North. “A new system geared toward solving truly common problems must be based on equitable relationships between countries,” says Norway’s Norad agency. “Global public investment is the closest thing to a shared vision for the transformation of international development.”
Experts, international organizations, and governments have been building plans for the global public investment approach for over a decade, and support and momentum have continued to grow.
This year, global public investment is rising up in international negotiations even faster: South Africa’s leadership of the G20’s Development Working Group has named “global public goods and global public investment” as its number one priority, “aimed at the construction of a new architecture of international cooperation, based on three precepts: all contribute according to their means, all benefit according to their needs, and all decide equitably”.
As these pioneering governments are demonstrating in advancing progress for global public investment, hope is not passive, hope is an active force we create together. It needs all of us. For the global challenges we face, building a new international architecture based around global public investment is necessary, urgent, feasible, and widely supported.
As more leaders commit to this cause, global public investment will not only change lives—it will illuminate the path forward in overcoming common challenges.
Harpinder Collacott is the Executive Director of the Global Public Investment Network
IPS UN Bureau
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