Global Cooperation Barometer

The Global Cooperation Barometer is a recently developed analytical tool that tracks and evaluates the state of international collaboration across multiple dimensions. Released collaboratively by McKinsey & Company and the World Economic Forum, it aims to provide leaders with data-driven insight into where global cooperation is succeeding, stagnating or regressing, thereby helping guide policy and collective action.

Purpose and Rationale

In an era marked by geopolitical tensions, fragmented supply chains, climate urgency, pandemics and rising nationalism, global cooperation is under strain. The Barometer is designed to:

• Quantify levels of cooperation across key domains rather than rely on rhetoric or perceptions alone,
• Identify which areas of global cooperation are strengthening and which are faltering,
• Illuminate trends over time, enabling comparative and diagnostic assessments, and
• Support decision-makers in prioritising areas for renewed collaborative efforts.

Thus, it serves as both a monitoring tool and a policy compass in a more disorderly global landscape.

Structure and Methodology

Pillars of Cooperation

The Barometer measures cooperation across five key pillars, each representing a crucial domain of collective action:

1. Trade and Capital Flows — assessing cooperation through cross-border trade, investment, flows of services and people.
2. Innovation and Technology — capturing openness, knowledge sharing, and collaborative research or technology diffusion.
3. Climate and Natural Capital — gauging joint efforts on climate mitigation, biodiversity protection, and ecosystem services.
4. Health and Wellness — cooperation on public health systems, vaccine development and distribution, pandemic response.
5. Peace and Security — collaborative measures in conflict prevention, arms control, peacekeeping, and stability operations.

Each pillar is composed of multiple quantitative indicators (41 in the 2025 edition) that signal cooperative activity or outcomes. The indicators are aggregated to provide both pillar-level scores and an overall global cooperation score.

Time Series & Comparison

The Barometer tracks cooperation trends over a multi-year period, allowing comparisons relative to pre-pandemic baselines. It assesses whether cooperation has accelerated, plateaued or declined over recent years.

Interpretation

The Barometer’s scores are best understood not as perfect measures but as directional signals—identifying areas of relative strength, stagnation or reversal in global cooperation. Recommendations accompany the data to suggest where governments, institutions or multilateral frameworks may need reinvigoration.

Key Findings (Recent Editions)

• In the 2025 edition, the Barometer indicates that global cooperation has flatlined over the past three years, despite being higher than pre-pandemic levels overall.
• The stability at a plateau conceals variation across the pillars: some domains, such as climate, innovation and health, show modest positive momentum, while peace and security have seen more pronounced declines.
• In the trade and capital pillar, cooperation had been on a rising trend before, but recent geopolitical disruptions—trade friction, protectionism, supply chain fragmentation—have eroded gains.
• In innovation and technology, cooperation remains relatively robust, but growing competition over critical or frontier technologies poses fragmentation risks.
• Health cooperation, including pandemic preparedness and vaccine sharing, remains essential but has experienced strain due to national priorities and uneven capacity.
• Climate and natural capital cooperation sees renewed interest, partly driven by global climate summits and growing social pressure, but implementation gaps remain large.

Significance and Use Cases

• Policy guidance: By flagging weak or declining domains, the Barometer helps governments and institutions identify where to recommit resources, rebuild trust or innovate cooperation mechanisms.
• Benchmarking: It enables cross-country benchmarking—identifying coalitions of states that are leading or lagging in particular domains.
• Strategic foresight: The time-series dimension allows detection of inflection points—periods where cooperation either advances or retreats sharply.
• Public accountability: The Barometer helps civil society, think tanks and media hold governments accountable for their cooperative performance globally.

Challenges and Limitations

• Indicator limitations: Some cooperation is informal, normative or political rather than measurable; hence the Barometer may undercount subtle forms of cooperation.
• Weighting and aggregation: The process of aggregating disparate indicators into pillar and overall scores requires value judgments about weights, which may favour certain domains.
• National bias and data gaps: Data availability and quality vary between countries, especially in lower-income states, potentially skewing results.
• Lagged causal inference: Cooperation trends may reflect past decisions, and the Barometer can flag change but not always identify immediate causes or actionable levers.