Articles by: "Ngaire Woods"
The Covid-powered challenges to come in 2022

After a year in which people longed to get back to ‘normal’, it’s now clear that Covid-19 will not make this possible. The pandemic, now in its third year, has profoundly affected individuals, communities, countries …

Is multilateralism a fig leaf?

International organisations are currently plagued by allegations of powerful states wielding undue influence over outcomes. These include recent revelations about Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other countries pushing back against the United Nations on climate …

Global health governance from the grassroots

The World Health Assembly met last week amid a slew of proposals—most recently from the United Nations Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response—to create stronger, enforceable global rules for tackling future infectious disease outbreaks. …

Building better bureaucracies

On 8 April, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he will close France’s elite postgraduate school for training public leaders, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). Macron, himself an énarque (as graduates are known), says he …

The brutal governance lessons of 2020

Covid-19 has offered some tough but useful lessons about governance. Many wealthy countries didn’t manage the crisis as well as anticipated, whereas many poorer, more populous and vulnerable countries exceeded expectations. The difference raises important …

Multilateralism will survive the great fracture

At the opening of the United Nations General Assembly last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the United States and China could ‘split the globe’ into separate trade and financial blocs with diverging internet …

Learning to live with Covid-19

One of Covid-19’s paradoxes has been the way in which some wealthy, high-capacity countries (particularly the United States and the United Kingdom) failed to contain the virus, while some poorer countries and regions with less …

A global Covid-19 exit strategy

The world that emerges from the coronavirus pandemic may be a warring collection of countries that are more closed off and nationalistic than before. But without rapid and effective global cooperation, the world may not …

When viruses turn political

Before the coronavirus exploded into the news, a report by the World Health Organization warned that the world was not prepared for ‘a fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen pandemic’ that could kill 50–80 million people, cause …

Britain’s post-Brexit choices

Huge amounts of time, effort and frustration have gone into negotiating the terms of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. And with the UK set to hold a crucial parliamentary election on 12 …