The planet is facing a bevy of “wicked” problems, which threaten global destabilization. Issues such as climate change, food and water, biodiversity preservation, and pandemic disease cut across disciplines and borders and affect people at all levels of society. This new threat set requires cooperation between countries, but such challenges cannot be resolved by the same type of diplomacy that characterized the 20th century.

There are also thousands of organizations and people all around the world engaged in positive nonviolent and collective action. There are hundreds of indigenous environmental struggles around the world, from the US and Canada to Central and South America and Asia and Africa, resisting fossil fuel and other corporations from building pipelines, mining terminals and other controversial projects.

The logic of climate diplomacy is that the best way to encourage others to do more is to reduce emissions more rapidly yourself. But Singapore is limited in what it can offer in terms of cuts because its small land area restricts the availability of domestic renewable energy.

That is the essence of the change in global politics that enables the rise of public diplomacy. The theory is not complicated, but putting public diplomacy to work requires imagination and persistence.

On April 29th, 2016, the inaugural International Forum for China-Japan-ROK Public Diplomacy and Trilateral Cooperation was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. During his opening remark, Mr. Zhang Yesui, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs called on the three countries to study establishing a China-Japan-ROK Cooperation Fund and other important initiatives to provide more support for trilateral cooperation.