Cooperation remains crucial to strengthening economies at a time of muted growth, bolstering security during an increasingly unstable and conflict-prone period and capitalizing on new opportunities emerging in the AI era. Yet, so long as sovereign politics remain a dominant feature in many countries, headwinds to cooperation will likely persist.

In this context, dialogue is essential to advancing cooperation and understanding where there is potential for agreement. Yet, dialogue is often not practised effectively, with parties using engagement with one another not to identify areas of mutual interest, exchange insight or advance shared agendas but to deliver one-way positioning statements. In this way, dialogue can divide, rather than unite. Parties should therefore approach discussions constructively, as confidence-building mechanisms attempting to identify common interests.

Public- and private-sector leaders who are deliberate in strengthening dialogue will be poised to identify cooperative pathways forward that can be based on key capabilities and strategies:

– Proactively match the right cooperation format to the right issue. The forms of cooperation opportunities emerging from dialogue will be varied. Leaders should play offence – meaning adopt a proactive and agile mindset to “re-map” international engagement. This will require collaborating at multiple levels – global, regional and in various pragmatic and interest-based minilateral constellations. In this way, partnerships and alignments take place at multiple layers and are fortified at a time of greater unpredictability. Respondents to the Global Cooperation Barometer Survey recommended this type of collaboration, with some advocating to “invest in multistakeholder coalitions”, to “focus on regional or sectoral cooperation” and to “use newer and agile groupings”.

– Strengthen resilience and cooperation through new organizational capabilities. Public and private entities will need to build cooperative capabilities that can strengthen resilience in an era of continuous disruption. In practice, this means keeping a live view of the cooperation landscape – the platforms, partners, incentives and financing mechanisms that are the focus of discussion. Institutions are establishing small, cross-functional intelligence teams to track new avenues – trade agreements, corridor initiatives, standards alliances and public-finance facilities – and surface pilot opportunities with both governmental bodies and industry partners. Many private entities are also upgrading their corporate affairs capabilities to more effectively engage with public institutions and stakeholders.⁷⁴ In parallel, leaders can establish clear decision mechanisms, set escalation thresholds and pre-authorizations for pilots, agree information-sharing protocols, and cultivate liaisons with counterpart ministries and industry bodies – such that multi-party initiatives can move at speed when opportunities arise.⁷⁵

– Advance shared interests through new public-private and private-private coalitions. Businesses can be engines for global cooperation by engaging in different ways. Public-private dialogue has always been an important mechanism for advancing crucial global priorities. It is now even more important to advance economic security in a rapidly shifting global climate. An example is the Minerals Security Partnership struck between governments and leading companies to move a pipeline of critical-mineral projects towards investment.⁷⁶ In addition, because public policy can take more time than desired, private-private engagement can become a force multiplier as the private sector focuses on specific issues where shared interests allow rapid coordination. For example, the Resilience Consortium, convened by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company, aims to bring together businesses’ agility, the public sector’s long-term views, and multilateral development banks’ ability to mobilize private capital.⁷⁷

Addressing today’s challenges and opportunities necessitates collaborative action. The question is not whether to cooperate but how. Uniform approaches might be too brittle to withstand the pressures of a fast-changing landscape. Instead, leaders will need to be decisive in pursuing cooperation but flexible in the approaches they take for the collaboration to meet today’s moment.