Editor’s Note

The world the next Secretary-General will inherit. 

Every race for the next UN Secretary-General invites the same familiar questions: Who is running? Who can win? Who can manage the politics of selection? Who can steady the institution at a dangerous time? 

Those questions matter, but they come second to a more important one: what kind of world will the next Secretary-General actually lead in?

That is the thread running through the first 2026 edition of Our Future Agenda's magazine.

In The UN’s Next Era Will Be Built in Disorder, we argue against the notion that the Secretary-General must recreate a vanished order. Instead their task will be to maintain cooperative governance through rupture, fragmentation, and pressure.

In From Rules to Raw Power, we examine how the Secretary-General’s effectiveness may depend as much on people’s trust in the office as on the formal powers it holds.

But principle alone will not be enough. Show Me It Works asks whether  multilateralism can deliver tangible  results – a protected school, a prevented escalation, a financed clinic, a fairer loan, a community kept afloat.And in Who Pays for the Future?, we look at the deeper architecture underneath all of this: debt, aid, finance, and the unequal costs of building resilience. 

Finally, this issue adds two further tests the next Secretary-General will face. The Secretary-General’s First Test Is Post-2030 argues that the first real challenge may not be a single crisis at all, but whether the UN can begin the transition beyond 2030 with enough seriousness, openness, and discipline to make the next phase more credible than the last.

And The First Interview Round takes readers inside the first interviews of this race — not to relive the exchanges, but to ask what the candidates’ answers revealed about how they understand the job itself: as a role of delivery, system management, political voice, trust-building, and responsibility to current and future generations.

Across these articles, one thing remains clear: the next Secretary-General will need to do more than manage crises. The office will need to connect principle to action, future risks to current choices, and global commitments to tangible outcomes. It will need to speak with clarity, convene with purpose, and build coalitions that reach beyond the usual rooms.

This is also why The World’s Toughest Job campaign matters. Through the public dialogues, the Decoded series, the youth-written Job Description, and the global survey still open through 31 July, young people are helping define what this role should now demand. Not in theory, but in practice. Not only who should hold the office, but what the office should be used for.

By Our Future Agenda  – United Nations Foundation

April 2026