The international system today carries the feel of an era that has outlived its own assumptions. Institutions built with the optimism of 1945 continue to stand, yet their foundations no longer align with the world taking shape around them. The gravitational pull that once held the system together, its shared purpose, its post-war coherence, has loosened. This sense of drift formed the intellectual backdrop to the recent Global South Perspectives Network (GSPN) Open Consultation Monday* dialogue convened not only to analyse China’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI), but to understand why such an initiative matters in this moment of transition.
The consultation revealed a system suspended between epochs: still recognisable from the past, yet increasingly at odds with contemporary realities. In this atmosphere of hesitation and slow institutional evolution, the GGI emerges not simply as a policy framework, but as a response to systemic stagnation.
A system struggling to keep pace with reality
Participants began with a shared diagnosis: global governance no longer reflects the world it claims to order. The Security Council remains frozen in the power map of 1945 and the Bretton Woods institutions continue to distribute authority according to antiquated hierarchies. Reform commitments have repeatedly stalled. This is not merely bureaucratic delay, it is an inability of institutions to reimagine themselves. The widening gap between architecture and reality naturally creates space for alternative proposals. The GGI enters precisely this gap.
China’s dual impulse: Critique and construction
The consultation highlighted the GGI’s duality: it is both critique and construction. China’s dissatisfaction with the current system echoes long-standing grievances across the Global South, where universality is often proclaimed, but hierarchy practiced. Yet the Initiative also aligns with China’s broader pattern of institutional entrepreneurship, the AIIB, the New Development Bank, the Belt and Road.
This dual impulse was not read as contradictory. Rather, it becomes meaningful, because the established system has left reform unattended. The GGI grows in soil tilled by others’ inertia.
Great-Power reactions: A mirror of strategic anxiety
Responses of major powers were interpreted as reflections of their own insecurities. The United States frames the GGI as revisionist, while resisting reforms that might dilute its influence. Europe, in turn, shares these concerns, but faces the contradiction of defending normative leadership, whilst at the same time holding institutional privileges that no longer correspond to its global weight.
Asian powers, such as India and Japan navigate ambivalence, in that they support reform, but remain wary of a Sinocentric order. In these varied reactions, participants detected a common thread that spans across regions, namely an anxiety over losing hierarchies that have structured global governance for decades.
Global South perspectives: Resonance without alignment
The consultation emphasised that the GGI resonates widely across the Global South. States recognise in its critique the language they have long used to challenge unrepresentative institutions and inconsistent global norms. But resonance does not produce automatic alignment. Most states view the GGI as an expanded space for agency, not as a replacement for the UN-centred system.
Civil society raised concerns about transparency and rights, which apply not only to China, but also to Western powers whose selective invocation of norms has undermined trust. Legitimacy, they argue, cannot be owned, it must be continually earned through universality and inclusion.
The future of multilateralism: Between adaptation and fragmentation
The reflective core of the discussion centred on the fate of multilateralism. The GGI does not cause the current crisis, it reveals it. Three insights guided the analysis:
- Alternatives arise when institutions fail to adapt.
- Multipolarity is real and unavoidable. Any future order will be hybrid and plural.
- Containment strategies will fail in that the GGI resonates amongst the Global South, because it speaks to shared structural inequities.
The danger is fragmentation, the opportunity is renewal, and the outcome depends on the choice as to whether established institutions can accommodate new voices and whether emerging actors can advance proposals without deepening divides.
Conclusion: A mirror held to the international community
Ultimately, the GGI acts less as a blueprint than as a mirror, reflecting both the failures of the present order, but so too the possibilities of a more inclusive future. The consultation ended with a simple, but powerful observation: the world is not choosing between a Western order and a Chinese order, it is choosing between an order that evolves and an order that fragments.
If existing institutions cannot reform, they will invite alternatives. If new initiatives fail to embrace diversity, they will accelerate division. The path forward lies in recognising that legitimacy is a shared construction, one that must be re-imagined as the world itself changes.
*This is a summary of GSPN Open Consultation Monday, held on 8 December 2025. The recording of the event can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/LWGrvWvQqpI?si=B2RpnMqRUgc1iTHK
