Assessment of the Relevance and Impact of Global Challenges for National Policy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the presentation of certain results of the scientific project «Evaluation of national social policy in the context of global challenges», which was carried out by a team of specialists of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the NAS of Ukraine in 2022—2024. These results were obtained during carrying out tasks related to the identification of global challenges for Ukraine, assessment of their relevance and impact on national policy. The main basis of this work is the theoretical and applied findings of the most famous studies of such categories as global risks, threats and challenges. The study of global risks and challenges is one of the most relevant scientific tasks for today, as humanity is increasingly aware of the urgent need to confront possible threats to its existence both at the level of international cooperation and at the level of national policy. The article provides a brief overview of current research with an emphasis on the Global Risk Perception Survey (GRPS) methodology, according to which the World Economic Forum annually conducts assessments and publishes their results in its reports. By analogy with the international GRPS methodology, as part of the project implementation, for the first time in Ukraine, a series of surveys of national experts was conducted to assess the national context of global challenges perception. The first round was held on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine’s territory by Russian troops, in the period from February 16 to February 23, 2022, the second round — in the summer of 2022, and the third — in the fall of 2023. The purpose of this study is to determine the composition, degree of relevance and measure of impact of global challenges (at the national level — on the population of the country, at the local level — on the population of the community), as well as to study the temporal component of changes in their perception. For the formation of main postulates of the research, the work uses general scientific methods of generalization, analysis, comparisons, as well as a graphic method — for visualization of obtained results. As a tool for the two-dimensional assessment of the relevance and impact of global challenges, the authors built a matrix that allowed to group the challenges according to the growth rate of the evaluated parameters. The largest group includes eight challenges that have a significant impact on national policy and will be relevant in the next three years: «Employment crisis», «Deterioration of the population’s mental health», «Collapse of social security systems», «Decreasing accessibility and quality of education», «Damaging the ecosystems», «Increasing social inequality», «Deterioration of water resources quality», «Insufficient ensuring of human rights». The experts assessed only one challenge as catastrophic — the «High level of armed violence», by which they obviously meant human losses due to the death and injury of the military personnel and civilian population, loss of health and work capacity. It is these challenges that will require priority attention in the development of national policy strategies. The ability of our country to face global challenges and ensure social and economic resilience depends on the adequacy of the decisions that will be made.