As the world prepares for a packed calendar of global negotiations, from the World Social Summit on Social Development in Qatar, to COP30 in Brazil, the UN tax negotiations in Kenya, and the G20 Summit in South Africa, one message is rising across civil society networks: our future must be public.
Public services are far more than line items in national budgets. They are the backbone of dignity, equality, and human development. When people can access quality education, healthcare, water, sanitation, energy, social protection, and care, societies flourish. Inequality narrows. Economies grow more resilient. Women's unpaid care burden reduces. Communities build trust in their governments.
Yet today, that foundation is under threat.
A Global Moment of Reckoning
Across continents, young people are taking to the streets, not out of apathy, but out of exhaustion. They are protesting overcrowded classrooms, collapsing health systems, unaffordable utilities, and shrinking social safety nets. Decades of austerity, mounting debt repayments, and pressure to privatize have left essential services stretched to the breaking point.
The upcoming global summits in late 2025 present a rare window for change, a chance to reshape international economic policies so they uplift people rather than creditors.
Civil society organizations from around the world have come together to voice a collective call: put public services at the center of global development, climate action, and economic justice.
Key Demands for a Public-Focused Future
The civil society statement highlights priorities that governments and global institutions must urgently embrace:
1. Build a new social contract grounded in strong public services.
A just transition, fair climate action, and sustainable development all depend on well-funded, publicly delivered services.
2. Mobilize more domestic resources through progressive, gender-responsive taxation.
With aid shrinking and debt rising, countries must increase tax-to-GDP ratios to sustainably finance health, education, care, water, and energy.
3. Stop the push for “private finance first.”
Development financing should strengthen public systems, not replace them with fragmented, profit-led private schemes.
4. Halt privatization and financialization of essential services.
Governments should not sign off on PPPs or private sector expansion without clear human-rights–based evidence of public benefit.
5. Invest in public service workers.
Teachers, nurses, midwives, community health workers, and social workers — most of them women — are the backbone of national wellbeing. Cutting wage bills undermines national resilience.
6. Fix the global debt crisis.
More than 75% of low-income countries now spend more on debt servicing than on health. A new, fairer UN-led sovereign debt architecture is long overdue.
7. Set measurable targets to reduce inequality.
Universal access, not targeted, exclusionary social protection, must guide policy.
8. Make climate justice impossible to ignore.
Climate finance must support robust public systems capable of protecting communities through climate shocks and long-term transitions.
Reclaiming the Public, Nationally and Globally
National coalitions working across sectors, education, health, housing, agriculture, transport, water, energy, social protection, and care, are uniting to demand a renewed vision of the public good. Meanwhile, global reforms such as the UN Framework Convention on Tax and momentum toward a UN Convention on Sovereign Debt signal a shift away from the dominance of creditor-led institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
As we mark the UN’s 80th anniversary, civil society is reminding world leaders of a simple truth:
When people’s voices are heard, public services thrive.
And when public services thrive, societies thrive.
The decisions made in Doha, Nairobi, Belém, and Johannesburg in the coming months will shape the next generation. Civil society is clear: it’s time for governments to choose people over profits and rebuild a world where universal public services are recognized not as costs, but as cornerstones of justice, equality, and shared prosperity.