Celebrating 25 years of Global Alliance
2026 New Year message from Prof. Justin Green, President & CEO, Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management
Leaders in public relations and communication management, friends and colleagues around the world, it is my great honour to wish you well for the year ahead on behalf of your Global Alliance.
It is traditional in many cultures at this time of the year to look back on the year just past and ahead to the year now starting.
Before I do that, I want to thank all of you for your continued support of our great global profession.
Without your leadership and active involvement at a national, regional and global level, there would be no Global Alliance, and our profession would be all the poorer for that.
One constant in all the change we are living through is how leaders like you have stepped up and taken the lead.
You have done this as the world grappled with the climate crisis, a global pandemic, multiple conflicts and what can sometimes seem like a war on truth as dis- and mis-information take an ever tighter hold in our discourse.
In the most recent period, you have also stepped up and taken the lead in helping ensure that the huge power of AI is used ethically and strengthens our profession, rather than eroding standards in a race to the bottom. Here, Global Alliance has strengthened the Global Alliance Responsible AI Principles for the PR and Communication Profession.
Every day that you uphold the highest professional standards and encourage others to do the same, you are contributing to a global drive to say no to so-called “fake news” and “alternative facts”.
At Global Alliance, we continue to work for you – the more than one-third of a million people in over 126 countries who are our members and give us our licence to operate.
We can only do what we do because you do what you do and we never take that for granted.
Looking back on 2025, it was another year of consolidation and growth for Global Alliance as we continued our work to advance our profession and improve the standing of those who work in it.
Not even AI’s summarising powers can distil the year into a video-friendly script so I will just pick a handful of highlights from the 12 months just gone.
These have included continuing to build on our monthly themed programmes spanning topics as diverse as Health & Wellbeing; Responsible Communication: Ethics First, Education, Training & Development, Technology, Trends, and Communication Transformation, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, World PR & Communications, Student & Young Practitioners and Best of Education, Training & Development.
I have been particularly pleased to see our partnership approach where we team up with other usually larger entities to accelerate our progress and maximise our impact on shared agenda items.
This includes exploring and building collaborations to advance Responsible Communication advocacy with the African Union, the European Commission, and the World Bank Group, as well as with the World Health Organization Quality Rights Initiative, to address mental health challenges in the PR and communications profession.
We also celebrated the annual release of Approaching the Future: Trends in Reputation and Intangible Asset Management report, in partnership with Corporate Excellence and the research Results of Reimagining Tomorrow: AI in PR and Communication Management, produced in partnership with Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and Reputation Lighthouse.
I have spoken previously about the importance of your Global Alliance being truly global and reflective of how our profession has grown and diversified. That is reflected in the choice of Abuja, Nigeria to host the Global Alliance World Public Relations Forum in November 2026 in partnership with NIPR. I encourage you to attend and join over 2,500 delegates in what is sure to be a high-energy and very valuable gathering of leaders like you to share insights and connect.
Our global reach and impact are also reflected in the growing share of the Alliance’s time that is spent working with colleagues and government authorities in Africa, North America, Middle East, Europe and Asia.
Our year end board meeting of 2025 held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, gave us an opportunity to reflect on where our profession is at and going next, resulting in The Sharjah Mandate – Global Alliance’s Strategic Priorities for 2025-2027.
In 2026, we’ve already launched Global Alliance’s Diversity, Equality, Equity and Inclusion Policy Framework, while we also look forward to our upcoming release of Global Alliance Trends and Insights from Around the World 2026 Report, and the 4th edition of the World Public Relations and Communication Awards.
One thing I came away from all these exchanges sure of is that public relations and communication management have a huge part to play in societies right around the world. I have never been more excited and proud to work in this profession.
To close – and this is something I can never do often enough – I want to the thank our CAO and the Global Alliance team. It’s especially important that I call out the board of directors and members of regional councils who give so generously of their time, energy and ideas free of charge to advance world public relations and communication management.
We are stronger together.
I’m Justin Green, your President & CEO of Global Alliance.
Thank you for your continued support and every good wish to you and yours for the year ahead.
Ends.