Global tax cooperation stands at a crossroads. As negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC) gather pace, one question cuts through everything else: how to design a regime that commands broad political support while still delivering real, enforceable change in an increasingly fragmented geopolitical order?
This paper turns to three decades of climate diplomacy under the UNFCCC to answer that question. It argues that the success (or failure) of the UNFCITC will hinge less on political ambition alone than on institutional design choices: how commitments are framed, how protocols are deployed, how accountability is enforced, and how flexibility is managed without undermining coherence.
The core message is simple but demanding: the UNFCITC must break out of lowest-common-denominator cooperation and instead build a system that is coherent in design, credible in enforcement, and capable of reshaping how global tax governance works in practice.
