The key question for assessing the consequences of the partial implementation of the “Great Reset” agenda by 2025 is straightforward: who ultimately benefited, and who paid the price. To answer it, one must strip away the rhetorical veneer of social engineers who framed “inclusive capitalism,” the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the Great Reset itself as projects of justice, sustainability, and care for future generations. A practical assessment shows that, under slogans of security, convenience, and public health, a redistribution of resilience took place—but not in favor of society as a whole.
Even partial implementation of this agenda strengthened the positions of major structural actors while simultaneously undermining the resilience of the middle class. This imbalance largely explains the scale of public backlash, declining trust in elites, and political turbulence observed between 2023 and 2025.
The primary beneficiaries were large technology corporations, whose economic and political influence has expanded steadily over the past two decades. The total digitalization of governance, the shift to electronic services, digital identity systems, big data, and algorithmic decision-making objectively entrenched Big Tech as an infrastructural intermediary between the state, business, and citizens. The financial sector also emerged stronger—particularly the largest asset managers and investment funds, which now effectively set the rules governing access to capital. These actors became the principal operators of the ESG agenda, acting as arbiters of which industries, companies, and jurisdictions are deemed investable.
Large transnational corporations also benefited, as they were far better equipped to adapt to ESG reporting requirements and new regulatory standards. Unlike small and medium-sized enterprises, they possess the financial, legal, and organizational capacity to restructure operations and comply with expanding compliance regimes. Major consulting firms likewise gained, as demand surged for ESG advisory services, sustainability frameworks, expert ratings, and newly constructed “green” and digital market niches.
At the same time, the Great Reset agenda inflicted systemic damage on the middle class in developed economies. Rising living costs, employment instability driven by automation, and widening income disparities became structural features of the new model. Small and medium-sized businesses proved particularly vulnerable, as compliance with new investment access requirements became prohibitively expensive. This accelerated market exits and corporate consolidation, further concentrating capital in the hands of transnational actors.
Developing countries faced similar constraints. Climate and ESG conditionalities have restricted industrialization pathways and limited access to investment, reinforcing structural dependence on external financial centers. Meanwhile, labor itself—well beyond routine occupations—came under pressure from automation and insufficient retraining mechanisms. According to international forecasts, including World Economic Forum assessments published in 2025, tens of millions of jobs are at risk due to artificial intelligence and automated systems.
A revealing moment came in 2025 when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, temporarily appointed co-chair of the World Economic Forum, alongside André Hoffmann, Vice Chairman of Roche Holding, stated that among developed economies, the greatest gains would accrue to countries with shrinking populations capable of rapidly deploying robotics, AI, and automation. This amounted to an implicit acknowledgment that the emerging model prioritizes technological efficiency over social equilibrium.
Taken together, these dynamics predictably fueled declining trust in elites, rising social tension, and the global surge of populism. Governments responded by expanding surveillance and control mechanisms. Notably, such reactions had been anticipated by the architects of the new global order themselves, who outlined similar trajectories in early 2010s scenario planning documents, including forecasts produced by the Rockefeller Foundation.
By 2025, the implementation of individual components of the Great Reset had progressed unevenly but retained a coherent internal logic. ESG continues to function as a gatekeeper for capital access. While formally presented as a measure of reputational risk, in practice it operates as a tool of financial coercion, compelling private actors to align with the political priorities of supranational financial structures. Despite ongoing legal disputes, U.S. courts have upheld the use of ESG criteria in pension fund investment decisions. In the European Union, ESG remains embedded in institutional investment frameworks, while in Russia and other jurisdictions, banks and corporations continue strengthening ESG profiles due to their direct impact on financing access.
A full-scale rollout of central bank digital currencies had not occurred by 2025, but preparations accelerated markedly. CBDCs are conceived as a mechanism for replacing traditional money with programmable digital tokens, enabling centralized oversight of all financial transactions. Developing markets—including parts of the CIS, Africa, and Latin America—have served as testing grounds, often justified by the need to combat the shadow economy. China has emerged as the technological frontrunner, while the European Union has focused on regulatory and institutional groundwork for a digital euro, initiating large-scale infrastructure contracts by late 2025. The United States, by contrast, under the Trump administration, adopted a political pause and effectively became a brake on global financial unification, favoring private stablecoins instead.
Against this backdrop, Switzerland’s decision to constitutionally protect the right to use cash—driven by a civic initiative under the slogan “cash is freedom”—is particularly notable, as is Slovenia’s adoption of similar legislation. These precedents raise the question of whether countries such as Azerbaijan should likewise constitutionally guarantee access to and circulation of cash as an element of financial sovereignty.
In Azerbaijan, preparations for the introduction of a CBDC have been underway since 2022 with technical support from the IMF. Pilot projects are being implemented to restructure payment systems and the banking sector, including accelerated deployment of blockchain technologies. Azerbaijan is also cooperating closely with the Central Bank of Turkey, integrating itself into a broader regional architecture of digital finance.
By 2025, digital identity had become a central pillar of the digital state. The number of Digital ID users worldwide approached three billion, with projections indicating a doubling by 2030. Originating from the ID-2020 initiative, digital identification is promoted as a tool for service access and administrative efficiency, yet in practice it forms the backbone of integrated social rating systems based on comprehensive analysis of an individual’s digital footprint.
In Azerbaijan, digital identification has already been implemented and is expanding under the 2025–2027 digital development strategy. Digital IDs are widely used across government and financial services, mobile identifiers are legally equivalent to physical documents, and inter-agency data integration is steadily deepening.
Artificial intelligence constitutes the fourth and integrative component of the new governance architecture. While implementation varies by region, the overall trajectory is clear: large-scale data integration, predictive modeling, and the transition toward anticipatory governance. The EU has reported progress in building interoperable data infrastructures, the United States has advanced integrated platforms in healthcare, and Russia has focused on centralized administrative control.
In Azerbaijan, the government is actively promoting the digitalization of public services and the elimination of paper documentation, laying the foundation for inter-agency data integration. The Ministry of Finance is developing a “Digital Public Finance” system that consolidates budgetary, tax, and customs data. In parallel, the MİRAS system is being deployed to create a unified analytical environment and standardized datasets across key state institutions. Over time, this will concentrate extensive personal data—ranging from birth and education records to health information, mobility patterns, and behavioral indicators.
Such systems, including emerging predictive governance tools observed in several countries, are designed to standardize and modulate societal behavior in line with elite political priorities. Global administrative unification through total digitalization inevitably simplifies political systems and gradually hollows out traditional institutions—political parties, elections, and public debate.
In this sense, the partial implementation of the Great Reset by 2025 demonstrates not its failure, but the limits of social tolerance and the directions of its subsequent adaptation. It is within this framework that the phenomenon of Trump 2.0 should be understood—not as a rejection of global transformation, but as an attempt to recalibrate its instruments in response to accumulated societal resistance.
Aytan Gahramanova, PhD, a political scientist specializing in global processes, is the author of Inclusive Capitalism: Pandemic Preparedness and Green Transition as a Model of Global Governance.
Trump 2.0 and the Managed Transition to a Post-Westphalian World
