As multilateral institutions face growing political and financial pressure, the need for international cooperation has never been greater. Conflict, climate breakdown, widening inequality, and attacks on human rights demand collective solutions. Yet the institutions established to address these challenges continue to reproduce many of the inequalities they were meant to overcome.

This contradiction was at the heart of the High-Level Dialogue on Reinvigorating Feminist Multilateralism, held on September 25 during the 81st United Nations General Assembly. Convened by Mexico, Finland, UN Women, and Karama, in collaboration with WEDO and other feminist civil society partners, the discussion challenged us to consider not only how to defend multilateralism, but how to transform it.

As UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous emphasized, multilateralism must "share rather than concentrate power," placing women's leadership, meaningful civil society participation, and gender equality at its core. Representation can only ever be a starting point. The deeper question is whether governments and institutions are willing to change how decisions are made and whose interests they serve.

From participation to political power

"Our purpose is not preservation; our purpose is renewal," argued Hibaaq Osman of Karama, calling for women's movements to become architects of multilateral institutions rather than beneficiaries of their decisions.

Anjali Shenoi of ARROW similarly called for a shift "from commitments to accountability," emphasizing the importance of evidence, monitoring, and organized political constituencies capable of holding governments to their promises.

These interventions speak to something fundamental in WEDO's experience of organizing within multilateral institutions: their transformative potential depends on the movements that contest them. The networks connecting grassroots struggles to national, regional, and global policymaking are what make agreements meaningful, translating international commitments into political action and accountability.

As I reflected during the dialogue, we refuse to cede multilateralism to power politics. But neither can we mistake the performance of diplomacy for transformation. Feminist movements have spent decades working to change institutions that were never designed to distribute power equally. Those struggles demonstrate why multilateral cooperation remains worth defending, even as its limitations demand more ambitious action.

As Yifat Susskind and Diana Duarte of MADRE argue in their reflection on the future of multilateralism, "Trusted partners across movements and policymaking, whose work is rooted in shared values, must deliberately forge alliances." Their analysis reinforces a central lesson from the dialogue: defending hard-won gains requires more than temporary political alignment. It demands sustained relationships and organized constituencies capable of building power across borders.

From defending commitments to transforming systems

The Belém Gender Action Plan, adopted at COP30, demonstrates what organized feminist coalitions can achieve. Following months of advocacy, more than 90 countries came together to oppose attempts to roll back agreed gender equality language. The resulting nine-year agreement was a political victory, made possible through sustained relationships among feminist movements and government allies.

But securing commitments is not the same as realizing change. Feminist advocates are now organizing to turn the Gender Action Plan into a tool for national and local implementation. Its effectiveness will depend on political will, public investment, and access to resources. It also requires a feminist approach to multilateralism that doesn’t simply defend gender equality, but unites across movements to transform the economic systems driving climate breakdown and inequality.

Cracks in the architecture

The emerging Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF) offers a compelling example of how countries are experimenting with new forms of multilateral cooperation. Established in response to stalled progress on fossil fuels within the UN climate negotiations, TAFF brings together governments and other stakeholders willing to move beyond negotiating commitments toward addressing the practical barriers to a just and equitable transition. Rather than replacing the UNFCCC, this complementary process creates political space to confront issues often left unresolved in climate negotiations, including fossil fuel subsidies, public debt, international investment rules, and the financing of economic transitions. Its first conference in 2026 brought together 57 countries, and Ireland and Tuvalu will co-host the second in 2027, with a focus on translating proposed pathways into action.

What makes this experiment significant is not simply the possibility of faster progress, but the opportunity to organize international cooperation around transforming the economic conditions that sustain fossil fuel dependence. For feminist movements, this is precisely where questions of gender equality, human rights, care, and climate justice converge. Feminist multilateralism must help shape these emerging coalitions, ensuring that the transition confronts unequal distributions of power and resources rather than reproducing them. Otherwise, we risk defending important commitments while leaving the systems that undermine them intact.

Building the multilateralism we need

The UNGA dialogue was conceived as the beginning of sustained political collaboration, not a single conversation. Participants called for deeper partnerships among governments, UN institutions, and civil society, stronger accountability for existing commitments, and long-term investment in feminist movements. The challenge is to turn that ambition into political power.

Defending international cooperation matters. But its future cannot rest on preserving institutions unchanged or celebrating agreements without the resources to implement them. We need coalitions willing to defend rights while confronting the economic and political structures that determine whether those rights can be realized.

A feminist multilateralism must be measured not simply by who participates or what governments promise, but by whether it redistributes power, advances justice, and changes the conditions in which people live.