As world leaders descend on New York City this week for the 80th United Nations General Assembly, you’re likely to see people walking around Midtown Manhattan with name tags and playing “guess the flag” as you stumble across a protest against international aid cuts, resulting in a system of minilateralisms arising where multilateralism once existed.

One of the central questions at this year's UNGA shouldn’t be a big surprise: where will the aid money come from? The cash is drying up just as global cooperation frays, and defense spending is at record highs — $2.7 trillion in 2024, the steepest jump since the late 1980s — while aid budgets are shrinking fast. Official development assistance, or ODA, is expected to plunge another 9% to 17% this year after sharp cuts in 2024, leaving a $4 trillion annual gap for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. As U.N. disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu warns, “Rising global military expenditures are not delivering peace.”

Rather than calling on governments to step up, many leaders gathering this week — from Barbados’ Mia Mottley to the United Kingdom’s Gordon Brown — said it’s time to look elsewhere.

“In the absence of an international rules-based order, we are no different from children on a playground running from the bully and hoping that we can get through lunch time without somebody taking our food,” Mottley said during a private roundtable at The Rockefeller Foundation yesterday, discussing aid cuts and the rise of minilateralisms. “We potentially face a moment where numbness is the order of the day.”

The funding push now seems to be turning away from Western countries and toward a new, more varied army of donors largely made up of philanthropy and private investors. David Miliband, the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, said that rather than trying to get a global agreement of 193 countries, we should be “mobilizing energy wherever we can find it.” He advocated for a system of “minilateralisms” rather than multilateralism. A world where the future of development relies less on governments and more on the risk-taking of civil society, philanthropy, and the private sector.

Read the full article about minilateralism by Jesse Chase-Lubitz at Devex.