University of Geneva’s Katherine Milligan, adjunct faculty of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the EMBA programme, has co-authored an insightful article on Devex with Carlos Alvarez Pereira, Secretary General of the Club of Rome. The authors argue that the international development system is at a tipping point and call on leaders to act with empathy and solidarity to renew global cooperation. We invite you to read their reflections below.
“We are at a fork in the road. Will we choose solidarity over fear?
Opinion: The international development system we knew is gone, and there is no going back. What comes next depends on how we choose to respond.
In European capitals of multilateralism — Geneva, Brussels, Vienna — a new season is dawning. The illusion that we could just “hang on for another four years,” after which everything would return to normal, has faded. In its place, a new realization is slowly taking shape: the values, beliefs, norms, funding flows, and rules that form the international development system are tipping in real time.
The late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine had a name for these moments: bifurcation points. His experiments with complex systems demonstrated that once a system reaches a bifurcation point — the critical tipping point when transformation happens — it becomes too unstable and cannot maintain its previous structure.
If that sounds too abstract, here’s a simpler way to put it: we are standing at a fork in the road. Starkly different futures lie ahead for the international development system — some more probable than others.”
To read the full article, click here.
