WHO WE ARE
The GIE Foundation was founded in 2024 to examine some of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our time, through rigorous, evidence-driven research and impactful, effective advocacy.
We believe the world today is less stable, coherent and resilient than it used to be, and that this makes addressing our common challenges much harder.
We try to address the drivers of instability at their most leverageable points. We research important problems; we create policy recommendations; and we advocate for those policies, to strengthen stability in our democracies. We call this idea “democratic stability”.
We believe there are four broad drivers of increasing instability and volatility in the world today:
(1) Technologically-driven instability, from AI to social media to emergent technology
(2) Climate-driven instability, from climate change to resource depletion to environmental degradation
(3) Geopolitical instability, from wars and internal conflicts to migration and globalization
And arising from these, we believe there is a meta-instability:
(4) Institutional degradation in our democracies
In our view, “democratic stability” is thus both the central problem and the enabling condition for modern governance. When stability erodes, the research–policy–action pipeline collapses, and we cannot address challenges in our world. Our work is therefore aimed at the pressure points where practical policy interventions can create outsized improvements in stability.
Radar Image of Amazonian Flooding | NASA
OUR WORK
We apply the INT (Importance, Neglectedness, Tractability) framework to choose and prioritize our topics, believing that this is how we can focus our efforts for maximum impact.
Using this framework, we identify research and policy topics – rules, institutions, gaps, or misalignments that block progress or create a bottleneck, and can be fixed with targeted intervention. Every report ends in actionable policy recommendations.
Our strategy is built around a simple research-policy-advocacy loop:
Identify pressure point topics
Extract best practice/provide strong evidential research
Recommend concrete policy
Advocate for adoption
We have a commitment to independent, rigorous research and policy work, and to impact in our advocacy.
GIE Foundation’s goal is to tangibly improve stability in our democracies. Our research, our policy recommendations and our advocacy are all aimed at finding these impactful issues where a feasible change to policy can have a real impact on the resilience, stability, and capacity of our institutions and our societies.
By doing this, we’re trying to create more stable, coherent and resilient democratic systems, that can improve and self-correct, and ultimately, address the challenges of the 21st century.