What is multilateralism and why does it matter?

“Multilateralism” is one of those terms that has been used more often lately, especially around international relations, politics, aid, and development. It’s also one of those terms that’s used often without context.

At its core, multilateralism refers to countries and institutions working collectively to address problems that extend beyond borders. 

For humanitarian aid and development, that cooperation is more than theoretical: It shapes how the world responds to conflict, hunger, displacement, natural disasters, and poverty – and how we may be able to solve some of these issues in the long term.

Multilateralism is a response to the fact that many global problems are too large or too interconnected for individual countries to solve on their own (hence the “global”). Stemming from the word “multilateral,” meaning “many-sided,” multilateralism is the collective action between multiple countries or major actors working towards a shared objective. 

You may have just started to hear more talk of multilateral aid and development, but it’s not a new idea. Since early history, nations have worked together through strategic alliances that deliver more than the sum of their parts. We saw a new era of multilateralism come together, however, after World War II with the establishment of organisations like the United Nations, the World Bank, NATO – and, several decades later, the European Union and African Union.  

A quick note on terminology here: Unilateralism is pretty self-explanatory, and refers to countries acting alone in pursuit of their own interests. Bilateralism refers to coordination with another single country, while multilateralism generally refers to three or more countries working together. (Though depending on which countries together, a bilateral relationship can turn multilateral based on the nature of their work.)

That cooperation matters because many modern challenges don’t stop at national borders. What’s more, even high-income countries with a large amount of political influence cannot effectively address global issues alone. 

In this decade alone, we’ve seen how natural disasters, disease outbreaks, economic crises, forced displacement, and threats to security have all affected multiple countries at once. Even a single earthquake, as we saw in Türkiye and Syria in 2023, can be a cross-border issue. We also are more connected as a society than ever through the Internet, social media, smartphones, and global trade. 

Multilateralism cooperation also doesn’t immediately mean unilateral values, priorities, or political systems. Even highly-effective multilateral partnerships have come from governments that fundamentally disagree on major issues, but they can agree to a few basic principles in order to work together. 

Multilateralism is less a single doctrine than a broad approach to managing international relations. As we noted above, many institutions have come out of this multilateral philosophy, which in turn have helped to institutionalise the idea of multilateralism over the last eight decades. 

While there is no universally agreed-upon doctrine of multilateralism, many of the same principles tend to shape institutions and negotiations, as outlined by the UN:

• Collective problem-solving
• Equality and inclusivity
• Shared responsibility among nations in solving global issues
• Adherence to international laws to maintain stability and fairness
• Sustainable development
• Dialogue and diplomacy
• Solutions that leave no one behind

In practice, multilateralism is less about consensus than coordination. Countries cooperate not because they agree on everything, but because many problems have become harder, costlier, and riskier to manage alone.

That’s multilateralism in theory, but how does it work in practice? A lot of this work happens at institutions like the UN and the World Bank and events like COP. 

However, the best way to look at how multilateralism works is through a few moments of multilateralism that actually, well, worked.

For centuries, smallpox moved through cities, trade routes, and entire continents, with deadly effects, killing roughly 30% of people who contracted it, but in many cases devastating entire communities with one outbreak. No country could realistically isolate itself from the disease with travel and trade routes. As long as it existed anywhere, it was a threat everywhere.

This was especially true in parts of Africa and Asia, where smallpox remained endemic well into the 1960s, even as other countries had reached near-immunity thanks to robust vaccination campaigns. Their focus, therefore, was managing recurring outbreaks rather than preventing future ones. 

The World Health Organisation planned a campaign to address this in 1959, but it fell through due to a lack of global commitment (including resources and funding). The WHO tried again in 1967, however, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme. These efforts across two continents combined intensive immunisation campaigns with surveillance and prevention, a two-pronged approach that focused on both managing the spread from current cases and preventing further cases with vaccinations, outreach, and awareness. 

Countries with wildly different political systems and competing geopolitical interests coordinated surveillance, vaccine distribution, reporting systems, and containment strategies around the shared goal of eliminating a deadly virus rather than simply managing recurring outbreaks. 

And it worked: After a global effort that included thousands of health workers and half a billion vaccinations over the course of 13 years, the world was declared smallpox-free on May 8, 1980. The last case had been diagnosed two and a half years earlier. This took a tremendous amount of effort and coordination, but as the WHO notes, the $300 million USD cost of eradicating smallpox has saved the world $1 billion USD annually over the last 46 years. 

In the 1970s, scientists discovered that one of the major contributors to the hole in the ozone layer were chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). If you ever heard about aerosol cans contributing to the hole in the ozone layer, you’ve heard about CFCs (the good news: they don’t do that anymore). CFCs weren’t the only cause for this, but they were a big one, and reducing their use could lower the damage to the earth’s atmosphere and prevent a host of knock-on effects including skin cancer, crop failure, and natural disasters. 

However, ozone depletion – like an infectious disease – can’t be contained within natural borders. This created a difficult political and economic challenge, as CFCs were also key to many industrial economies and banning them immediately would have a direct economic impact. After years of negotiation and pressure, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was agreed to on September 16, 1987. It went into effect on January 1, 1989, and the agreement included financial mechanisms and transitional support that accounted for lower-income countries that had more to lose with this change in their growing industries.  

Critically, the Montreal Protocol was the first universally-ratified treaty in UN history, and one of only three since then that have been universally ratified. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.” 

The results have been measurable: Production of major ozone-depleting chemicals collapsed over the ensuing decades, atmospheric concentrations of these chemicals in turn declined, and the ozone layer has shown signs of recovery. Scientists project that it will return to 1980 levels across most of the world by 2040 (and by 2066 over Antarctica, an area that sustained the greatest damage). 

The Montreal Protocol didn’t eliminate industrial pollution or solve the climate crisis (researchers have detected signs that suggest CFCs are still being used in parts of the world). What it did, however, was demonstrate that large-scale international coordination can successfully address a global crisis before the worst-projected consequences become irreversible. 

In the EU, we see multilateralism play out in our day-to-day lives as well. We have it to thank for the fact that we don’t pay roaming charges on our mobile phones if we travel to another EU state. In terms of travel, we also have passenger protections if our flights or trains are delayed or cancelled between EU member states that many other travellers don’t get. And Irish students who study abroad via Erasmus are able to do that seamlessly in terms of credits and funding thanks to multilateral agreements. 

There are also major safety measures that originated as multilateral solutions to international issues, like food safety and traceability systems that have changed how food recalls, contamination risks, and agricultural standards are handled across the EU. These also make it easier for countries to trade across borders with less friction. 

These are less flashy, of course, than eradicating smallpox or repairing the hole in the ozone layer. Yet these are also examples of multilateralism whose efficacy is measured by crises that are quelled before they even start. We may not notice these systems until they fail, but the fact that they fail so rarely is a success.

As a dual-mandate organisation, responding to emergencies while also supporting long-term development, we at Concern know that the challenges we’re responding to rarely remain contained within national borders. Multilateralism is part of the infrastructure that makes our work possible.

While Concern is a non-governmental organisation, addressing these challenges still requires a lot of coordination with governments – especially in the multilateral sense when we respond to a regional crisis (like the current crisis in Sudan, or when we responded to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in west Africa) – as well as civil society organisations, local communities, and international institutions. 

Multilateral systems can also enable more effective delivery of aid and development. They create shared frameworks for funding, public health coordination, humanitarian access and international humanitarian law, disaster response, refugee protection, and long-term development goals. They also allow us to pool our resources, working with both government ministries and other organisations to share our funds, capacity, and expertise in ways that individual actors can’t achieve alone.