Abstract
The adoption of the Pact for the Future at the September 2024 Summit of the Future has produced a major multilateral governance reform mandate, encompassing twenty actions on Security Council reform, General Assembly revitalisation, international financial architecture redesign, and strengthened cooperation with emerging technologies. Yet the Pact's adoption also exposes a structural tension that conventional reform debates struggle to address: the gap between the complexity, velocity and interdependence of contemporary global challenges and the rigidity of institutional architectures designed for earlier historical conditions. This article, the foundational theory contribution to the Adaptive Global Governance (AGG) research programme, argues that governance adaptiveness constitutes a distinct analytical construct that existing scholarship on representation, effectiveness and resilience does not adequately capture. Synthesising complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive governance scholarship from socio-ecological systems research, regime complexity literature and networked multilateralism, the article develops a four-capacity conceptual architecture — anticipatory, responsive, inclusive and learning — that together constitute the adaptive capacity of a governance system. It then introduces the Governance Adaptiveness Index (GAI), a provisional composite measurement architecture that operationalises these capacities through indicator selection, normalisation, scoring, weighting and aggregation rules made transparent for subsequent validation. The article illustrates the framework's potential diagnostic utility by mapping the Multilateralism Index 2024 onto the four capacities, revealing a distinctive pattern in which state participation has remained robust while performance has declined across every domain and inclusivity has broadly improved. The article outlines a multi-phase validation pathway, addresses conceptual, methodological and political-economy limitations, and identifies normative trade-offs between adaptiveness and accountability. The article does not claim that the GAI has been empirically validated; it presents a conceptual and provisional methodological foundation for the AGG programme's subsequent calibration, case-study and policy phases.
Keywords: adaptive governance, global governance, Pact for the Future, complex adaptive systems, Governance Adaptiveness Index, multilateralism, institutional learning, composite indicators
