Multilateralism is an evolving phenomenon. It exists in the thousands of conventions and treaties that nations have signed, in the 1,800 intergovernmental institutions that have been established to implement and monitor these agreements, and in the multiple international courts and tribunals that resolve disputes arising from their members. These institutions range from larger global organizations such as the UN and the World Bank to regional organizations like the Organization of American States and the African Union, and to smaller, albeit increasingly active, sub-regional organizations such as the West African Health Community. They provide the legal and operative frameworks for international cooperation in diverse fields, ranging from peace and security to trade and finance, environmental management, human rights, education, law enforcement, health, science and technology, and the use of the "global commons."
Multilateralism, however, also flourishes outside the institutional framework of global and regional organizations. It takes the form of diverse collaborative arrangements, such as the Group of 77 or the G-8, largely informal mechanisms for promoting policy objectives among "like-minded" states, and in the "coalitions of the willing" on which much of peacekeeping has come to depend. Increasingly, it manifests itself through public-private partnerships for the delivery of goods and services and in the expectations and actions of individuals and NGOs around the globe that have come to believe that the "international system" has an obligation — and should have the capacity — to respond to the range of needs that individual governments can no longer meet on their on.
The Center's work on New Dimensions of Multilateralism focused on a set of cross-cutting themes that dominated discussions of international cooperation. These included the changing nature of the international architecture for managing transnational and global affairs; the roles of non-governmental actors in international governance and service delivery; and the singular role of the United States in promoting and sometimes constraining multilateral cooperation. Underlying each of these lines of work was an effort to clarify the political, legal, financial, and operational aspects of effective multilateral cooperation.
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