The Global Initiative is an independent civil-society organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with a globally dispersed Secretariat and a high-level advisory board.Its network members include prominent law-enforcement, governance and development practitioners who are dedicated to seeking new and innovative strategies and responses to organized crime.
The Global Initiative was born from a series of high-level, off the record discussions between mainly (though not exclusively) law-enforcement officials from both developed and developing countries in New York in 2011–12. At these meetings, the founding members of the Global Initiative, many of whom stand at the front line of the fight against organized crime, illicit trafficking and trade, concluded that the problem and its impacts are not well analyzed; they are not systematically integrated into national plans or strategies; existing multilateral tools are not structured to facilitate a response; and existing forms of cooperation tend to be bilateral, slow and restricted to a limited number of like-minded states.
The result was the creation of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, which provides a platform to promote greater debate and innovative approaches, which serve as the building blocks to an inclusive global strategy against organized crime.