TED Talks Daily - Is inviting everyone to the meeting killing global cooperation? | Qahir Dhanani

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

International collaboration expert Qahir Dhanani makes the case for rebuilding public trust in broken institutions by embracing small, focused coalitions that can move faster and act bolder — offering a hopeful, practical vision for updating diplomacy to meet the world’s toughest challenges. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. We are facing a crisis of trust in the very institutions and systems that built our modern world. In this talk, international affairs and development expert, Cahir Danani explores why the old way of getting every nation into the negotiation room no longer, works, and asks us to reconsider what global cooperation looks like and why it matters that we rebuild it. The next time you take an international trip, do me a favor. Take a look at your passport.

On the cover, there's your country's coat of arms. And then you open it, and there's your photograph. The best one you've ever taken, right? on that page there's two lines at the bottom letters and numbers that's called the machine readable zone

those two lines are magic the product of international cooperation because without them you wouldn't be able to get on that plane you wouldn't be able to cross immigration you wouldn't be able to

travel the world see your family now what I find fascinating is that those two lines came about in 1980 when the International Civil Aviation Organization set about standardizing passports. At the beginning, only three countries adopted the standard. Today, just about every single country has that standard.

This is international cooperation at its best. And it doesn't stop there. Did you know that 160 years ago, 20 countries came together to lay the foundation of our global telecommunications networks? They founded something called the International Telegraph Union, or the ITU. It's still active today, although it's moved on from the telegraph. Even in times of conflict, global cooperation continues.

In the midst of the war in the Ukraine, representatives from the United States, China, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Russia were sitting in the same room at the ITU continuing to negotiate things like internet protocols or global digital governance. Did you know that time zones exist because of a multilateral agreement? Or that green means go

because of a multilateral agreement? Our lives are made better when countries collaborate. It is the infrastructure of the modern world and we can't live without it. But today, we're facing a crisis of trust. Trust in the international system. I see this every day

because I work with international organizations and their leaders trying to make them more effective. And I'll be the first to admit that talking about multilateralism and effectiveness in the same sentence sounds a bit complicated. Many think about these organizations

and they see a mesh of red tape or they see endless bureaucracy or political posturing. They wonder, is there any tangible impact? It's making people lose faith in international organizations. I get it. In our constantly changing world, is it any surprise that the institutions crafted around the geopolitical realities

of the end of the Second World War 80 years ago that those organizations are struggling to keep up? It's making us ask, is international cooperation even worth it? well I'm here to persuade you that it absolutely is I implore you take another look and I give you a fair warning that staying in the arena and giving multilateralism another go means one thing for sure

we cannot continue with business as usual it is time to rethink to reevaluate to recalibrate how we collaborate on a global scale and in my humble opinion this starts with rebuilding trust. How? Allow me to offer something rather provocative. We must stop insisting on inviting everybody to the meeting. Sounds a bit hard, I know, but hear me out. Imagine trying to get your slide deck together or your project budget or your memo written with 200 of your most well-meaning colleagues working with you on it. Sounds pretty difficult, right? Which is

Why, trying to negotiate anything with 193 countries at the outset and trying to achieve global consensus on that issue will deliver one thing for certain, if anything at all. And that is the least objectionable outcome. But to rebuild trust and take on the most difficult challenges of our time, we cannot settle for the least objectionable outcome. We need the most ambitious, the bold, the transformative outcomes. So let's take an alternative, an augmented path forward, one that is rooted in the art of diplomacy,

one that has served us for over a century, but one which we seem to have lost. Let's unleash coalitions of the willing to show what 21st century multilateralism and cooperation can and should look like. I define coalitions of the willing as small, dynamic groups of like-minded and sometimes not-so-like-minded actors coming together. They can be some combination of countries from the south and the north, the east and the west, civil society organizations, academic institutions, religious organizations, and this is important, businesses. They come together with shared purpose to solve a problem larger than themselves, a problem that requires genuine collaboration

and co-creation to solve. Problems that require a committed group to act first and to act boldly. The coalition takes on the risk. It serves itself up as the guinea pig. It proves the model. It makes it easy for others to join in and it pushes the snowball down the mountain.

This is how we've done diplomacy. for decades. We've just forgotten. I love this example from the 1950s when banks started issuing credit cards. There was one problem. Some cards were small, some cards were large, some were made of paper, some of plastic. There was no interoperability. So a few of them came together, American Express, Diners Club, and a few others. They came together and they adopted a uniform standard for a credit card. So what you have in your wallet today is standard. It has your name and a number on the front and a metallic strip on the back. And then they worked with countries to enshrine this in the International Standards Organization. So today, when you go to a restaurant and you tap your card

or you go to an ATM machine and you take out some cash if people still do that, You trust that it's going to work, but you don't attribute that to multilateralism or to the ISO or to a coalition of the willing. But that's how it started. Imagine we had to renegotiate or start afresh negotiating what a standard credit card looks like today. What would that look like, insisting on inviting everybody to the meeting? Well, the idea would be put to a committee. The committee would run consultations, endless consultations with hundreds of actors, those that are super relevant and those that are less relevant.

Then it would craft a convention or a resolution or a compact and put that forward for 193 countries to negotiate. There would be co-facilitators appointed to run this process. Their objective would be to reach global consensus. among 193 countries, and the result, the least objectionable outcome. Which is why today we need to start with coalitions of the willing to make things work ambitiously for the future.

I would be so energized to see the United Nations or other multilateral organizations invite coalitions of the willing to take on some of our most difficult challenges most difficult challenges, AI governance, migration, food security. It's not happening at the rate we wanted to happen, but it is actually happening, and I have a lot of hope. One example that gives me a lot of hope is the Leaf Coalition, the lowering emissions by accelerating forest finance coalition. It started with a handful of countries that were donors, a handful of countries that had forests, a handful of corporations, and a handful of civil society organizations.

They all came together and they sat at a table, a small table, and they tried to figure out what do we do about deforestation? How do we protect biodiversity? And so they didn't wait for 200 countries to negotiate the last clause of a treaty. They acted. They put billions of dollars on the line, and they created a new market for protecting nature. And now everyone is rushing in to join that coalition. This is what 21st century multilateralism and international cooperation can and should be. And so we have a choice. Should we stay together and take this new path forward, or should we walk away?

I hope we stay together. Thank you. That was Cahir Donani, speaking at TED at BCG in Dubai in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonica, Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisie Bogan.

Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.