Our Stories.

Public Interest is proud to be a part of the Global Public Investment story. We firmly believe that a better, more equitable world needs a renewed development cooperation architecture for raising and distributing international public money. The GPI movement connects partners working on the UN system, regional development banks, multilaterals, and civil society coalitions. We support this journey as a founding member of the Global Public Investment Network (GPIN).

Democracy is in crisis at home and abroad. New democratic techniques are needed to reimagine democracy in light of the challenges and changing circumstances of our time. We are working with other thought leaders to restore and to rebuild democratic institutions, so that publics feel heard and political processes become meaningful again. From civic call ups to new ways of improving diversity in positions of elected responsibility, a wide-ranging shakeup of our democratic architecture is needed. Only by building new and more inclusive forms of civic engagement at the national and international scale will we replace the cynicism of elite democracy with a flurry of hands being raised.

How do we transform the global governance of food to end hunger by 2030? This was the challenge posed to the Kofi Annan Commission on Food Security. Working closely with the Commission secretariat, Public Interest provided the insights and political intelligence needed to map a credible pathway for reform of the global food security governance architecture. At a time when climate and food crises continue to grow, and with the future of the multilateral system in jeopardy, the Commission’s final report provides tangible but far-sighted recommendations for reforming global food security governance so that it better serves the interests of people and planet.

How do we support public interest media through market innovations? A functioning media is a public good whose value is beyond measure. We are seeing daily the very real costs to our democracies and to the fabric of our societies when big tech is under-regulated and media organisations struggle with shrinking revenues and political interference. They are prevented from applying the checks and balances that society needs. Today, independent public interest media are under threat around the world. This creates both a democratic deficit and a brake on economic development. We worked with an international fund seeking to stem this tide by supporting innovative solutions to the underlying market-based problems confronted by media outlets today.

The need to fundamentally reform the international tax cooperation architecture has long been seen as an impossible dream. Recent years have turned the tide on the pessimistic belief that sovereign nations will never collaborate on tax. From proposals for a wealth tax at the G20 to recent progress towards a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, we provided our New York based knowledge partner with a mapping of the state of play in tax cooperation negotiations as part of a larger effort to track movements among the main political blocs engaged in global governance reform discussions.

With partners from the health services industry, we explored for a major multilateral partnership how the bottleneck of global vaccine equity could be broken down into regional vaccine manufacturing platforms. Focusing on two world regions we provided a conceptual sketch of how a functioning regional manufacturing framework could work. We then investigated, with key stakeholders from the private sector to international organizations, how such a platform could be developed over time. The idea of regional platforms has since been taken up in several contexts, such as the Regionalized Vaccine Manufacturing Collaborative hosted by the World Economic Forum and partners.

We were tasked with finding ways to develop a more equitable approach to funding vaccine research, development and manufacturing. The project focused on developing broad government buy-in through partnering with policy-relevant public health advocates in the southern hemisphere, particularly in middle-income countries. Together we engaged the governments of partner countries in a common position on the basis of these findings; developing collective political momentum within the Indonesian G20 presidency in 2022.