After the biggest election year in history, policymakers everywhere are coming to terms with the new political landscape. The issues they face are, in some cases, longstanding; others are completely new. But what’s clear is that bold, ambitious thinking is needed nearly everywhere to meet the challenges that political leaders face. Here are ten things that we would like to see happen in 2025 – and that we would encourage leaders to focus on.
1. The Reimagined State Becomes a Reality
When politicians come into power they find out that leading a government is hard. It has always been so, but the world today is faster and more complex. The good news, though, is that new technology is giving governments the unprecedented ability to change the way they govern. With the right flows of data to provide evidence, the right decision-making structure to use them and a total reinvention of how citizens interact with the state, real change should be within easier reach than ever.
2. Digital Infrastructure Gets the Status It Deserves
All the elements of future national success – economic growth, public services, educational excellence, national defence, research and innovation – increasingly rest on digital infrastructure. Countries’ networks and compute capacity need to move from niche concerns to central strategic considerations; those that succeed will be those with the right long-term focus on digital infrastructure, allied with the determination to deepen it.
3. Governments Think Big, Start Small and Move Fast on AI
The hype cycle turns faster than ever these days, meaning that the rush to declare that artificial intelligence is world-changing can swiftly be followed by a sudden lack of confidence. But it’s vital that policymakers ignore the noise and concentrate on the underlying value of tech to change government services. This doesn’t imply cumbersome switchovers across entire government departments; instead, what’s needed is a nimble, iterative approach that tries things in low-risk environments before scaling up, or dropping what doesn’t work.
4. AI Governance Becomes a Platform for Global Success
The prospects for AI success around the world depend in part on how governments regulate it. Amid understandable and often sensible analysis of how to manage risk, we see a desire to influence other states and develop competing regulatory blocs. This in itself is risky, not only because of the prospect of the world splintering into separate AI zones but also because it places the risks above the benefits of technology. Instead what’s needed is a broad agreement on principles, an approach that prioritises frontier challenges and enforcement of existing rules rather than the creation of strict horizontal ones that will slow down development.
5. Global Climate Action Becomes More Than the Sum of Its Parts
Though the global approach to carbon reduction has already achieved a huge amount, the clock is ticking to the net-zero deadline of 2050; the world is going to have to go further to reduce its emissions, mostly through accelerated technology deployment. It is increasingly clear that paying to remove the last few per cent of emissions in each high-income country is likely to be much less efficient (in terms of global outcomes) than supporting carbon-free development in lower-income countries. What’s needed is a concerted effort to align incentives so that funding is routed to the places where it can make the biggest difference.
6. Foreign-Policy Outlooks Accommodate a More Complex, Multipolar World
It’s been a common refrain in recent years, but the world looks less predictable than ever going into 2025. The implications of the United States presidential election will be felt across the year to come; for example, the US stance towards China, and the latter’s response, will change the scene for most countries. Meanwhile, we are seeing the seeming entrenchment of the BRICs bloc into a more coherent set of viewpoints, if not yet action. All this will have implications for every country’s foreign policy, defence and diplomacy, which the smartest leaders will already be planning for.
7. Security Gets an Upgrade
Defence technology is changing rapidly – power today is projected not just through tanks and troops, but through AI, cyber capabilities, unmanned systems and space-based assets. They are all reshaping the landscape of national security, so governments must adapt. That means investing in research and development, thinking hard about relationships with the private sector, and enhancing cyber defences to protect critical infrastructure. International cooperation and norm-setting are important, but the race for advantage goes on.
8. Global Trade Becomes a Serious Topic Again
The era of global-trade liberalisation is largely over; regional and bilateral trade deals are still features of geopolitics, but little progress has been made at a WTO level and a tariff war might be on the horizon. That said, there are still big gains to be made, and a serious focus on trade facilitation can unlock a lot of value. In some of the lowest-income countries, the costs of moving goods and services is prohibitive; a new focus on slimming paperwork and tracking movements digitally could lead to huge gains for both exporters and importers.
9. Governments Start Promoting Health, Not Just Treating Sickness
Global understanding of the science and data around health, coupled with new treatments, means unprecedented opportunities to change how the world thinks about health care. Governments need to reframe their countries’ health as something to be invested in – a reward in itself, but also the only way out of an increasing spiral of costs to treat the effects experienced by unhealthy people. The return period for this investment can look daunting, but that makes action now even more urgent.
10. Leaders Prioritise Derangement over Rearrangement
Those on the political progressive centre can sometimes lose hope; populist and potentially dangerous political forces everywhere are offering easy answers to difficult questions. The centre has to show that radicalism is possible not with words but with action. Tony Blair’s latest book, On Leadership, presents the choice between rearrangement (incremental change) and derangement (transformation from first principles). It is the latter we need: cautious reform will lead to a growing state offering diminishing returns, and ultimately further disillusionment. The hope for progressives lies in reminding people of the good that government can do.