Multilateralism Is Dead. Long Live Plurilateralism.

But worsening geopolitical tensions make all this harder. Rivalry between major powers, the global north-south distrust over finance, fossil fuel interests, and security competition have turned climate diplomacy into a defensive struggle over national advantage. The U.N. climate regime has been described as a “multilateral zombie” that is formally alive but increasingly unable to generate the level of collective ambition needed to confront the climate crisis.

As a result, the COP process has become a source of alienation. Vulnerable countries, civil society, and the wider public see urgent climate demands rejected through procedural blockage. Instead of enabling meaningful collective response, the process by scripted national positions and rigid red lines is trapped in procedural deadlock. This produces a wider public alienation: Citizens increasingly experience intensifying fires, floods, droughts, and heatwaves (a late spring heat wave in Europe shattered temperature records), while global climate diplomacy seems distant, technocratic, and unable to translate shared anxiety into decisive action. The result is a paradox: Climate change demands deeper cooperation just as geopolitical tensions reduce the capacity for mutual responsiveness.

Given these conditions, a negotiated fossil fuel phase-out agenda has zero prospect of advancing at the United Nations. But the good news is that a parallel plurilateral process can still advance that agenda. What was once only a theoretical discussion—or dismissed as politically unrealistic—is now happening and moving into implementation territory. And now, plurilateralism is creating political space to further not just climate change mitigation efforts but also artificial intelligence governance, action on critical minerals, and other challenges that transcend national boundaries.

In April, Colombia and the Netherlands convened the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, the first international conference of its kind. Held in Santa Marta, Colombia, the conference brought together 57 countries and a broad range of stakeholders including subnational governments, civil society, scientists, and Indigenous communities from around the world. The meeting was more than just another climate gathering. It signaled a growing impatience with the multilateral climate negotiations that have too often allowed fossil fuel interests and geopolitical rivalry to dilute a central question of climate change mitigation: the phase-out of coal, oil, and gas. A key achievement of the Santa Marta conference was that it has helped move the fossil fuel phase-out agenda toward practical implementation. As a result, national governments are beginning to design national roadmaps for a Paris target-aligned phase-out of coal, oil and gas.

A follow-up conference is already planned for 2027, co-organized by Tuvalu and Ireland. The new process signals more than just another new alliance: It’s a step change and structural shift in climate governance.

Such a “coalition of the ambitious” can act as a laboratory for cooperation and an ambition accelerator. The plurilateral process allows willing countries and partners to raise commitments, test implementation pathways, build trust around practical solutions, and generate momentum that can eventually feed back into the wider multilateral system.

Why is this working where multilateralism has failed? For decades, climate diplomacy, environmental multilateralism, and the U.N. system more broadly have operated according to the consensus rule. But over time, the participation and growing influence of fossil fuel interests and major oil-producing states in the U.N. climate process has contributed to weakened language, delayed action, and outcomes that remain insufficient to keep the world on track to meet the key mitigation goals that government signed on to under the Paris Agreement. This was particularly obvious at COP30 last year in Belém, Brazil, where key language on a fossil fuel phase-out was diluted or removed. As such, the consensus principle leads to agreement on the lowest common denominator.

Still, there are challenges and shortcomings for plurilateral climate initiatives. The absence of major emitters in Santa Marta raises questions about the gathering’s effectiveness. Without actors such as China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the United States, the plurilateral initiative may still struggle to deliver emissions reductions at the scale required to prevent runaway climate change.

At the same time, the Santa Marta meeting was careful to present itself as complementary—rather than oppositional—to the COP process. By bringing together countries willing to engage directly with the politics, finance, and practical sequencing of fossil fuel decline, such meetings will be able to develop policy solutions that are unlikely to emerge through consensus-based U.N. negotiations in the near term. One example is its common framework for national and regional fossil fuel phase-out road maps, requiring countries to set out how they will manage the decline of coal, oil, and gas production and consumption; address their exported emissions; and reform fossil fuel subsidy schemes.

Plurilateral processes like Santa Marta also provide the opportunity for subnational actors to contribute. By contrast, in the formal U.N. process, the participation and inputs to negotiations by subnational actors such as cities and states such as California are not represented.

For countries outside the coalition, the concern might be that rules are being written without them. To avoid this, Santa Marta-type initiatives should be designed as transparent pathway-setting forums, not exclusive rule-making clubs. The most important design principle is that any plurilateral agreement should be open to accession. That means countries can join later if they meet agreed criteria, rather than being excluded from an elite group. There’s a risk that the fossil fuel phase-out process could be framed by parts of the political right as an “elite club,” especially if it is seen as a coalition of progressive governments, NGOs, and experts. That risk is heightened because the process is designed to move faster than consensus-based negotiations, which opponents could portray as bypassing national sovereignty or democratic debate.

This is why while plurilateralism represents a reaction to the failure of multilateralism, it can and must support a new multilateralism. It can show that progress is still possible when universal consensus is temporarily blocked, and its smaller gatherings can build a bridge to larger multilateral ones.

The COP31 hosts—Turkey and Australia—are facing a credibility test. They need to connect the U.N. and the process initiated in Santa Marta. To ensure this happens, the Santa Marta coalition will need to distill its commitments into draft language that can be tabled there. It will also need to provide concrete steps as to how the national phase-out plans can be included into countries’ nationally determined contributions.

The logic of plurilateralism is also becoming increasingly relevant beyond climate change.

In the critical minerals context, U.N. efforts such as the Secretary-General’s Initiative on Critical Energy Transition Minerals have sought to establish common principles around justice, benefit-sharing, environmental protection, and human rights across the whole minerals value chain. So far, that panel has had limited influence on restraining the intensifying competition in the global race for minerals. A significant governance gap remains not only for critical minerals but for resources and materials more broadly. The challenge is to move beyond incremental coordination and bilateral deals toward a more inclusive global regime. A plurilateral initiative co-chaired by developed and developing countries, similar to the model of the Santa Marta initiative, could help elevate the idea of an International Materials Agency from a technical concept into a political process.

The governance gap is also acute in AI, where governance is at serious risk of failure. The United States and China increasingly view AI through the lens of strategic competition, prioritizing national advantage and technological leadership over deeper forms of cooperation. This makes universal agreement difficult, especially where governance proposals are perceived as limiting competitiveness or constraining sovereign control over frontier technologies.

The U.N. has been slow to get its ducks in a row on AI governance. While the Global Digital Compact created a mandate for a more inclusive U.N.-based dialogue, the first session of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance is only scheduled for this July in Geneva, with a second session to follow in New York next May. This illustrates the gap between the breakneck speed of AI development and the pace of multilateral institution-building.

In this context, smaller groups of willing states and stakeholders could move ahead on shared standards for AI safety, transparency, model evaluation, or compute governance. Initiatives such as the International Network of AI Safety Institutes or the Global Partnership on AI (44 member countries from six continents) can do the heavy lifting and establish principles for responsible AI and workable norms as well as build technical capacity and create templates that wider groups of countries can later adopt.

Plurilateral initiatives can also help bridge policy areas that are often kept separate in formal U.N. processes. AI governance, for example, is usually discussed in digital, security, or human rights forums, while its climate risk implications are not covered. Yet the rapid growth of AI is already creating significant material pressures through rapidly rising electricity demand from data centers, water use for cooling, and demand for critical minerals and digital infrastructure. A plurilateral coalition could bring together climate, energy, digital, and industrial policy actors to address these intersections more directly.

As climate impacts intensify and critical deadlines to avoid crossing tipping points draw closer, coalitions of the willing are crucial to creating a genuine “race to the top.” Their value lies in creating practical models, implementation pathways, and political momentum that can later be adopted by wider multilateral forums.

Following the logic and diplomacy that led to the adoption of the Paris Agreement, and responding to the renewed sense of urgency created by worsening climate impacts, governments should aim for a new landmark climate agreement by 2030—the next major political and scientific deadline for closing the implementation gap. To be successful, it will need to take up the lessons from plurilateral initiatives and translate them into a level of ambition commensurate with the scale of the climate challenge.