Thank you all so much for being here. I should mention that in addition to my role as representative for the Baha’i International Community’s United Nations Office, I serve as one of the co-chairs for the Coalition for the UN We Need, which recently penned an open letter that many in this room have signed. I wish to offer my gratitude to those of you who have signed it and a request that those of you who have yet to do so to please consider it. The open letter is about the Summit of the Future and the need to rethink and recast the process around the Summit in a more positive and appropriate light given the circumstances of the world. 

I want to build on the really important question that our host started with this morning around rethinking our economic and social scaffolding. All around the table were intrigued by this prompt because it lies at the heart of what we are considering. When we speak about changing systems, I often think about motivation: What are the motivations that would inspire us to take the steps necessary? And how do we center those motivations above others as we are challenged to rethink our economic and social scaffolding.

This week the teachers of my third and first grade daughters shared what they are doing in their first weeks of school—laying the foundations for the rest of the school year by outlining the rules which characterize their classroom, and understanding what it means to be kind to each other, developing clarity on the purpose and vision for the coming year. They do this every year. Imagine if we did this here every year.

Now, it may seem excessive, but in fact every year there is a new reality, a new group of people, a new set of demands. For example, it used to be that the world was like a traditional office space where every country had its own four walls and a door. Somebody brought in a smelly lunch, perhaps the neighbors would smell it. If they were yelling on the phone, perhaps the neighbor would hear it. They would come together at certain spaces and times, but, by and large, they were more or less isolated. Yet now we live in an open office space, where if you bring in your lunch, everyone will smell it. If you speak loudly on the phone, everyone will hear it. What happens in one part of the office is shared by all, whether we like it or not. 

This means we need new kinds of rules to guide us. Traditional office layout rules, in a world as interconnected as we are today, are no longer suitable. There are a number of transitions taking place to reflect this. What, then, are some of these transitions that we have learned over these past 75 years?

One is that progress used to be conceived solely as material growth—the more a country is growing, the more progress it is making. But now we are seeing limits to growth—we are infringing on our neighbors and the carrying capacity of the earth. Alongside growth, we also have to consider progress as sufficiency: do we all have enough? It used to be that extreme poverty was the floor and that there was no ceiling to growth. But now we have to place a ceiling, since we are in a world where there are still so many living in abject poverty while others continue to amass wealth to a degree beyond moral responsibility. 

Another one is the role of state sovereignty. I like to paraphrase my understanding of what former president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, once said: the State’s interests align with global necessities if we extend a timeline long enough. The long-term existence of a country and of the planet are the same. As such, we now have to think differently about what the most appropriate form of State sovereignty looks like.

Another shift is this idea of the lack of trust as a great concern versus the lack of trustworthiness. It may seem a subtle difference, but if one says trust is lacking, it would mean that the people would need to trust their governments more. But maybe it’s actually about trustworthiness. Are the governments being trustworthy? When they make a promise, do they fulfill it? When they say something will be done, does it get done? It would be unfair to ask people to trust their governments if their governments are not being trustworthy. The Secretary-General speaks so often about trust, which is vital, but trust can only be built with trustworthiness.

Another is recipients versus protagonists. The common approach to development is that “we” are doing things for “them”, and that “they” will receive our generosity and our donations. But the “them” are protagonists. They are active participants in the future of their lives and those of their families and communities. If we continue to treat them as passive recipients of our generosity, then they will not be included in the processes that they are meant to partake in. One small example: if we take the UN as a microcosm, we have this assumption that the biggest donors to the budget should choose what happens to the funds that they donate. But the countries in need of those funds are fully capable of knowing what their necessities are. Maybe they should have an outsized influence on the use of those funds. A similar consideration: perhaps the Security Council should be made up of the most peaceful countries instead of the most powerful countries. I am not saying that these are recommendations, but rather that we have to be rethinking the underlying assumptions of the systems we have.

And, finally, I want to talk a little bit about leadership. Individualism right now is rewarded, and power and privilege are often treated as the ultimate objective. State-centrism and short termism dominate our governance models. But what would the world look like if we center different values like collectivism and sufficiency, or trustworthiness and justice, care and stewardship, humility and service. If those were the measuring stick by which we determined success, I think we would have a very different looking planet. 

The last little bit I want to mention is a couple of dichotomies that we have to contend with as we are engaging in this process. One is firefighters versus engineers. We are called upon all the time to be both: we have to put out the emergency that is happening now, while planning out a system that is going to survive for future generations. We can do two things at the same time, but we have to be very careful that we know what our recommendations are trying to solve. Are we treating the symptom or the underlying illness? Is it the short term financial needs of countries paying high debt burdens, or is it the long-term structural nature of the banks that we deal with? I am not saying that these two things are not the same, but rather that they are different dimensions of a problem and require different treatments. We have to be honest and thoughtful about the recommendations we are making.

Another is education for employment or education for knowledge. This was mentioned this morning by another colleague in the room. We have to be thinking very critically about what kind of education we are providing our rising generations and what we are educating them for. Is it purely for jobs so they can partake in the market as it stands, producing and consuming? Or are there other dimensions of life that we should be thinking about educating for—care, for example, comes to my mind first and foremost. 

Another is the question of representation as quota or representation as change. Representation is vital, and I do not want to undermine the importance of arguing for greater presence of those who historically have not had their voices heard sufficiently. But representation, in the current model that we have, is insufficient. Rather, we need representation so that the systems we have are able to change in order to better reflect the needs of today and of humanity’s future. It is not just about a female Secretary-General, which would be a wonderful sign, but it is also about what women in leadership can do to improve the functioning of the office, to change the structure of the system so that it has the flexibility and ability to adapt. We saw the importance of these qualities, especially during the COVID pandemic, that women in leadership tend to advance. Though it is not only women who can do this, it is the trendline that we are seeing. And I would say the same would go for youth engagement, and really the host of diversity that makes up the tapestry of humanity.

My final thought is about status quo versus evolution. We can all agree that the United Nations will not be around forever in its original form. The framers likely also introduced a sort of planned obsolescence: as we found new systems more suited to the needs of humanity at any given time, the UN would evolve. In order for this to happen, however, we need to think about a sort of planned evolution. How do we plan for the UN, and really all of our systems to evolve? Do we say every 10 years we have another rethink of the Economic and Social Council? Every five years we have a rethink of the Trusteeship Council? How do we plan so that these institutions can evolve over time? Without considering this now, we run the risk that in another 75 years from now our future generations will be at the very same standstill as today? A planned evolution, then, is something we should be considering in any of the recommendations we are making. 

This idea of planned evolution is essentially the same as what happens at the beginning of every year in my daughters’ classrooms. It is an opportunity to rethink the needs of that classroom, the vision for the coming year, and then to ensure that those rules are what guide that class. If we can do that as an international community, I think we would be in much better shape. Thank you so much.

Daniel Perell is a Representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations