Right now large global summits (like the Paris Climate summit) are organized on an ad-hoc basis. This can be inefficient because they occur at uneven intervals and the format and deliverables change each time.
Instead, there should be multiple standing “summits” each year where all the leaders of all the countries of the world are invited to work on the largest issues of the year.
The format and the dates should be preset and standardized.
One yearly summit for each major subject. For example
- Climate
- Defense
- Trade
- Immigration
- etc
The emphasis should not be on trying to get leaders and countries to sign things or pass “resolutions” but rather simply to do a best effort to draft a basic consensus on the current state of affairs and policy refinements for the year to come. The emphasis of the drafting process should be to get rough broad strokes down on paper with the end of the summit acting as a forcing function (e.g whatever we have will be released at the end no matter what).
The world would then have a document that represents broad, shared directional understanding. A simple tool to focus conversation.
Countries can (and likely will) choose to ignore the details - but if these documents create even lose alignment they will be valuable.
This process will also force counties to come to the table with something of a global perspective multiple times each year.
This is similar to how teams inside companies work to drive consensus by using standing meetings and rough consensus. No one has to sign anything, they just get a good idea of next steps and move on with their day.