Multilateralism, as a system of global governance, aims to foster enduring peace, stability, cooperation, and prosperity by encouraging nations to address shared challenges collaboratively rather than unilaterally. Rooted in the understanding that no single country or region can solve global challenges alone, multilateralism seeks to ensure equality and accountability across all its constituents, regardless of size, clout, or economic power. Yet increasingly, multilateral institutions have come to represent rather than address global asymmetries. The struggle of multilateral institutions to translate agreements into action, and persistent questions about whose voices and interests they amplify, continue to challenge their perceived inclusivity and legitimacy. In recent years, growing disillusionment with the multilateral order has emerged alongside a broader erosion of democratic values and a loss of confidence in established institutions. Criticism now comes from across the political spectrum, while more radical calls to dismantle the multilateral system entirely have been accompanied by efforts to drain its funding, capacity and operational reach. These recent developments threaten to strip multilateral institutions of their original meaning and mission – to ensure global peace and stability – raising questions about the future of international cooperation as a whole.
Rather than framing multilateralism solely as a story of crisis or decline, the MILE Project explores the tensions as well as the possibilities, the failures as well as the successes, emerging across different forms of multilateral governance. It asks how different forms of governance can learn from and influence each other, while bringing into focus the perspectives of those whom multilateralism has historically and structurally struggled to include. With a particular focus on Geneva-based institutions as the historical heart of global norm-setting, the MILE Project seeks to identify how multilateral institutions and practices can become more inclusive, effective, legitimate, and responsive to the challenges of a changing world.
The MILE Project explores this question through two complementary lenses: Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) and Global Youth Movements.
NTDs highlight the people, communities, and health priorities that remain at the margins of global attention, while also revealing how international institutions can mobilize around long-overlooked problems. While the area of NTDs has been hailed as a success in multilateral cooperation, the fact that it has established a distinct and permanent category and corresponding multilateral infrastructure highlights the ambivalence at the heart of multilateralism. Global youth movements, meanwhile, offer a different perspective on participation and representation, highlighting new demands for voice, agency, and influence in shaping the global agendas that will determine their futures. Yet while youth movements have opened new spaces for participation and brought new voices into global debates, they also raise questions about whose participation is recognised as legitimate, how far new forms of mobilisation translate into meaningful influence, and whether established institutions can adapt to them.
Together, these lenses allow the project to examine not only where multilateralism falls short, but also how demands for greater inclusion can expose its tensions, reshape its practices, and generate new forms of legitimacy, participation, and collective action. Through interviews, workshops, policy briefs, reports, and public scholarship, the MILE Project brings these insights into dialogue with policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and wider publics, contributing to more inclusive and responsive approaches to multilateral cooperation.
