When G7 leaders gather in Évian on 15 June, they will confront a postwar order that has run its course. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and other pillars of international cooperation—all founded on the belief that universal rules could underpin global governance—delivered decades of relative stability and economic integration. But today’s world is too multipolar, too digitally interconnected, and too politically heterogeneous for broad consensus alone to serve as the primary mechanism for managing global affairs.
As national interests diverge, economic interdependence is increasingly wielded as an instrument of coercion, giving rise to rival strategic blocs at a moment when global challenges such as climate change, migration, and AI are intensifying faster than existing institutions can respond. While it may be tempting to cling to a fading order or resign ourselves to permanent geopolitical rivalry, what is needed is a transition to a new model of international cooperation grounded in coalition-based governance.
In many respects, this shift is already underway, though it remains largely unrecognised. From semiconductor supply chains to climate and security, countries are increasingly cooperating through issue-specific coalitions—flexible partnerships reflecting the realities of a fragmented yet deeply interconnected world. The question facing the G7, then, is not whether coalition-based governance will emerge, but whether democracies will shape this transition or allow it to be driven by power politics alone. Few bodies are better positioned to guide the process than the G7, which combines economic scale, technological capability, institutional capacity, and broadly aligned political values. But that requires rethinking governance accordingly.
For starters, policymakers must move beyond the pursuit of universal agreement. Consensus increasingly leads to paralysis, and even when broad agreements are reached, implementation is often inconsistent. The 2015 Paris climate agreement illustrates the problem: while it established shared goals, national commitments vary widely and enforcement remains weak. Similar problems are now evident in digital governance, taxation, trade, and migration policy.
Coalition-based governance offers a more practical alternative. Rather than requiring universal agreement, it allows countries to work together on specific challenges while committing to common standards, monitoring mechanisms, and enforcement tools. Participation remains voluntary, but membership comes with responsibilities.
AI is a case in point. Countries could form a coalition to establish shared standards for frontier AI systems, common data-governance rules, coordinated oversight of AI supply chains, and safeguards against systemic risks. Access to coalition markets, financial systems, research networks, and digital infrastructure would be contingent on meeting those standards. The same logic could be applied to climate policy, trade, critical minerals, biotechnology, cybersecurity, and financial transparency.
Far from abandoning multilateralism, this approach adapts it to today’s multipolar reality. Coalition-based governance offers a more flexible and effective framework for cooperation in a world in which major powers no longer share the same interests, values, or political models.
At the same time, governance must become more integrated. Today’s most pressing challenges are deeply interconnected, but governments continue to approach them through bureaucratic silos. This makes no sense. Trade policy cannot be separated from environmental sustainability and technological security. Financial regulation must account for climate change and geopolitical risk. And digital governance must balance innovation and competition with democratic resilience and national security.
The G7 could lead this shift by building coalitions around interlinked systemic challenges that require integrated policy responses, such as food, water, and energy security; AI, employment, and digital human rights; and climate change, biodiversity loss, and industrial transformation. Bringing together finance ministries, regulators, central banks, security agencies, businesses, and civil-society organisations, these coalitions would align economic, technological, and security priorities rather than merely coordinate policy.
Perhaps most importantly, governments must rethink how they define success. For decades, economic output has been the primary measure of performance. But as recent experience has shown, robust GDP growth can coexist with economic insecurity, social fragmentation, political polarisation, declining trust, and environmental degradation. Governments that measure success narrowly tend to govern narrowly. One promising alternative is the SAGE dashboard, which offers a simple evaluative framework that organises the major drivers of human flourishing around four factors that have enabled societies to thrive throughout history: solidarity, agency, material gain, and environmental sustainability. Instead of defining success solely in terms of economic output, this framework evaluates whether people enjoy cohesive communities, meaningful agency over their lives, and a healthy environment.
No emerging international order will revolve around a single center of power, development model, or set of priorities. In the best case, it will comprise overlapping coalitions focused on different issues and sectors. The challenge is to ensure that what overlaps also reinforces, rather than causing friction, fueling conflict, and perpetuating incoherence.
The future of global governance lies in learning how to govern a more diverse and fragmented world. The G7 summit offers a unique opportunity to articulate a coalition-based vision of international cooperation that can expand and evolve to incorporate new partners from the G20 and beyond. In doing so, it can help lay the foundation for a more adaptive and resilient world order.
The writer is President Emeritus of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
