The today’s urgency to tackle the most pressing societal challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation, conflict and terrorism is coupled with the loss of credibility in international cooperation, multilateralism and collective action. The Paris Peace Forum, initiated by French President Emmanuel Macron, aims to revive collective governance, strengthen international cooperation, norms and institutions at a time when global challenges have never been so pressing. It took place from November 11 till November 13.
The PPF focuses is on the inter linkages between peace and global governance. The PPF is driven by the conviction that peace is made up of all the governance solutions that help minimize international tensions and work for common benefit: cooperation to tackle climate change, natural resource depletion and scarcity, administering global public goods, justice to assuage grievances and frustration, regulation to address inequalities, etc.
Driven by this conviction, the Paris Peace Forum is concerned with the mechanisms that create and sustain peace, i.e. by mechanisms of global governance. The Paris Peace Forum is meant to mobilize support for multilateral institutions, above all the UN, and for international agendas, especially the SDGs. Because of international tensions, populism and lack of funding, many multilateral bodies are weakened, to the point of being unable to fulfill their role. Rather than inventing a “new multilateralism”, however, the Paris Peace Forum pushes for constructive dialogue on how to reform existing institutions and adapt them to the new international landscape. The PPF presents concrete governance projects and initiatives in five domains: peace and security, environment, development, new technologies and inclusive economy.
The Paris Peace Forum is not meant to negotiate a declaration or an agreement, let alone a treaty. It is not meant as a pledging conference either. Instead, it thrives to produce two primary outputs and reach several secondary objectives. The expected outputs are as follows: (i) testifying and mobilizing in favor of collective action and multilateralism; (ii) advancing concrete projects of governance.
Beyond these large goals, the PPF aims at reaching the following objectives: • Bringing a concrete contribution, through the promotion of governance solutions, to the implementation of the UN SDGs; • Drawing attention to the crisis of multilateral organizations and reaffirming support to them, especially to UN agencies; • Offering the opportunity for bilateral meetings, track 1.5 exercises and mediations on the sidelines of the Forum; • Contributing to the publicization and mediatization of the launch of global governance initiatives; • Devising digital solutions for specific transnational challenges in the Space for Innovation, where a hackathon takes place; • Stimulating dialogue on and cross-fertilization of interconnected issues of governance (development and security, environment and new technologies, and the like); • Promoting a collective dialogue across countries and generations on global governance issues.
Altogether, the Forum features three spaces, a Space for Solutions showcasing governance projects in five “Villages” (peace and security, environment, development, new technologies and inclusive economy); a Space for Debates where initiatives from the Villages as well as cross-cutting themes are discussed; and a Space for Innovation which invites developers and programmers to devise digital solutions for the identified challenges.
Among the projects presented at PPF, its Secretariat has mentioned the following ones: (i) Paris Call for Digital Peace, an multistakeholder declaration outlining the duties of all actors of the cyberspace to restore a safer digital environment; (ii) E-Diplodocus, a platform to link diplomatic academies around the world and create a common documentary basis, in order to promote a common diplomatic language; (iii) The Environmental Pact, which aims at gathering and harmonizing all environmental laws in one single legally binding document. (iv) The World Benchmarking Alliance, an innovative way of incentivizing companies to assume more responsibility by creating an index to rank their contribution to SDGs; (v) The Global Deal, a partnership pushed by to address the challenges in the global labor market by encouraging governments, businesses, unions and other organizations to make commitments to enhance social dialogue; (vi) Enabling Multistakeholder Cooperation in Cyberspace, a platform to allow more than 200 entities to coordinate, ensure policy coherence and jointly develop policy standards to deal with critical governance challenges on the internet.
