Security, Equity, Solidarity: Contestation and the Limits of UN Authority in the Pandemic Accord Negotiations

Eighty years after the founding of the United Nations, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed profound vulnerabilities in the global governance architecture and triggered one of the most politically contested treaty-making processes in recent UN history: the negotiation of the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Accord. Initiated in 2022 and ratified at the 2025 World Health Assembly, this process illuminates the mounting challenges facing the UN system at a moment of crisis over its effectiveness, legitimacy, and authority. This paper uses the Pandemic Accord negotiations as an empirical window into how geopolitical realignment, value divergence, and competing social purposes are reshaping the politics of multilateralism at the UN. Drawing on direct research engagement with the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body in Geneva, the paper shows that Member States approached the Accord from sharply divergent normative positions. Developed countries prioritized security, advancing a global health security model centred on surveillance, preparedness, and rapid response. Developing countries foregrounded equity, demanding distributional justice in access to vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics, and financial resources. Least-developed countries emphasized solidarity, insisting on unconditional development assistance, technology sharing, and guarantees of support during crises. These value positions map onto distinct geo-economic blocs that exercise different forms of constitutive power within the UN system; material, normative, and ideational. Crucially, these principles (security, equity, and solidarity) do not operate as complementary pillars of a unified multilateral order. Instead, they have emerged as competing and often incommensurable social purposes, producing deadlock over the normative foundations of global health governance. Rather than multipolarity alone explaining this fragmentation, the deeper crisis lies within the constitutive assembly of international order itself: states increasingly disagree not only on policy design but on the purpose of international cooperation and the legitimacy of UN authority to define global public goods. This raises a broader question central to the panel’s themes: why do UN-anchored treaty processes struggle to generate legitimate and durable frameworks in response to planetary-scale challenges? International treaties have historically served as instruments of ordermaking across domains such as trade and the environment. Yet they are now increasingly sites of contestation, exposing fractures across legal and institutional ecosystems and contributing to a fragmentation of global governance rather than its consolidation. To address this puzzle, the paper examines the Pandemic Accord through the lens of global constitutionalism. It makes two contributions. First, descriptively, it explains why common constitutional norms and values, such as shared responsibilities, equitable access, and collective security, failed to gain cross-bloc recognition in negotiations. Second, normatively, it interrogates why states resist acknowledging their responsibilities to shape, legitimate, and operationalize rights and obligations relevant to global health emergencies. The paper argues that reimagining global constitutionalism requires rethinking the social purposes underpinning the UN system, moving beyond developmentalist paradigms toward planetary principles capable of sustaining order amid transnational crisis. Keywords: United Nations, contestation, legitimacy, WHO, Pandemic Accord, global governance, international treaties, fragmentation, multilateralism.