For at least 25 years, the international community has grappled with the need for a more coherent, equitable and effective sovereign debt architecture. Despite numerous proposals, declarations and initiatives the global system remains fragmented and inadequate to address the complex challenges of modern sovereign debt crises.
The sovereign debt challenge is not new, but its urgency has never been greater. All three recent UN Secretary-Generals have highlighted the human toll of unsustainable debt burdens and their corrosive effects on shared development goals. The current debt crisis has exposed deep structural weaknesses in our international architecture at a time when an unprecedented number of stakeholders need coordination, competing interests require balancing, and collective action demands mobilization.
The 2023 SDG Summit, 2024 Pact for the Future, and the upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) have concentrated political and public attention on the enduring challenge of a fragmented debt architecture. These high-level discussions have sparked hope for a more predictable, equitable and reliable alternative.
This roundtable, co-hosted by UNU-CPR, UN DESA, UNCTAD and the Government of France, directly contributes to a call in Paragraph 43(e) of the First Draft of the FFD4 Outcome Document, which envisions "an intergovernmental process at the United Nations, with a view to closing gaps in the debt architecture and exploring options to address debt sustainability, including but not limited to a multilateral sovereign debt mechanism".
The discussion will examine proposals for a new global sovereign debt mechanism that have emerged over the past several decades and explore institutional analogs that have been most influential in the design of a global debt mechanism - assessing how they differ, and how they enhance and strengthen existing initiatives and recent innovations introduced by multilateral institutions like the IMF, G20 and the Paris Club. The event will present a range of institutional design options—from legal frameworks to mediation forums and technical advisory bodies—and provide experts and Member States the opportunity to comment on their distinct value propositions and feasibility.
