We live in a world where the problems that impact our lives the most increasingly do not start and stop at our country’s borders. Pandemics don’t. Climate change doesn’t. Conflict, inequality, and financial crises don’t either. Our world is too interconnected for crises anywhere to be someone else’s problem.
So what does it take to solve challenges on this scale?
Part of the solution lies in effective international institutions. Whether coordinating a pandemic response, tackling climate change, or managing global finance; cooperation between countries is no longer optional. But institutions on their own don’t solve problems. They only work when people believe in them and when their constituent governments are under real pressure to make them work. That pressure ultimately comes from citizens.
At every level of society, institutions succeed or fail based on whether the people they serve feel a sense of belonging and ownership. Families, neighbourhood groups, trade unions, and nation states all rely on this basic principle. Yet in international affairs, we often pretend the rules are different. As if global institutions should function even when citizens feel disconnected from them, or when leaders face few political costs for undermining them. The result is fragile cooperation.
International cooperation has not been anchored in public expectations
In any country, it would be politically unthinkable to shut down public hospitals. And yet, walking away from the World Health Organization has been seen in the USA and Argentina as a legitimate political choice. That tells us something important: international cooperation has not yet been anchored in public expectations in the same way domestic institutions are.
For that to change, people need to see global cooperation not as something distant or imposed, but as something that reflects their values and protects their interests alongside the range of national, local, and personal influences that shape their identities. They need to feel those institutions belong to and work for them. So, what can public polling tell us on that front?
Each year, our organisation produces the Global Solidarity Report, where we work with Ipsos to survey 22,000 people across 31 countries to understand how strong people’s sense of global belonging – or ‘global solidarity’ really is. We ask whether people consider themselves more citizens of the world than the country they live in, whether they support their taxes going towards global problems, and whether they want international organisations to enforce solutions on issues like the environment.
There is a solid base to build on but support is declining
We find that a significant minority (around a third) say that they feel more a citizen of the world, and a similar proportion want their taxes to go towards global problems. Meanwhile a majority (57%) want international institutions to have enforcement powers. This shows there is a solid base to build on.
But between 2024 and 2025, support for all three statements fell across most countries, across generations, and income levels. Even younger generations, often assumed to be more globally minded, are now no more internationalist than their grandparents. Perhaps most worrying is that we found a growing vocal minority who actively oppose international cooperation, likely because they are increasingly being falsely persuaded that it is a threat to national interests.
Democracy depends on the same ingredients as global solidarity: trust, shared purpose, and confidence that collective decisions can truly improve people’s lives. When people stop believing that others will do their fair share or that their institutions can deliver, participation drops and polarisation rises.
And so rebuilding solidarity through visible cooperation doesn’t just help us solve global problems, it helps restore faith in democratic problem-solving. In a world facing climate breakdown, conflict, and inequality, the future of our ability to solve global problems and the future of democracy are deeply intertwined.
This will require far more than rhetoric. People need to see cooperation delivering results that make life fairer and more secure. Where to even start? I would posit that few issues matter more here than inequality. Exploding wealth inequality has eroded confidence in governments and institutions at every level. When leaders fail to address it, international organisations often become an easy scapegoat.
Yet financialised wealth is as slippery as carbon dioxide and viruses in the way that it knows no borders. If cooperation can help tackle the rise of extreme wealth and stagnation of living standards for the majority through international tax cooperation, it can restore faith not only in global institutions, but in collective decision-making itself. And this is not some distant fantasy. A world-first UN tax convention is formally underway which, for all its political and technical challenges, demonstrates that multilateral solutions are already in motion. And while the current US administration may oppose the UN tax convention, the rise in popularity of political figures like Mamdani who won his New York mayoral election promising to tax the ultra-rich, suggests that support from the world’s largest economy may one day be possible. Indeed, it was a step forward when Brazil’s G20 leadership secured a landmark declaration by G20 finance ministers on international tax cooperation.
When people see that cooperation works, they are far more willing to support it. And that belief is the quiet foundation on which both effective global action and healthy democracies rest.
