Knowledge of the stress field in the Earth's crust is a key issue for the understanding of geodynamic processes, seismic hazard assessment, and stability of underground openings such as waste disposals, tunnels, mines or wells, and reservoir management. The World Stress Map project is a collaborative project of academia, industry and governmental organizations that aims to understand the states and sources of tectonic stresses in the Earth's crust. We present the World Stress Map at 1:46,000,000 scale as a result of more than two decades of international collaboration. The map reveals that the first-order pattern of stress is of plate-wide scale, indicating that plate boundary forces are the major control of the stress orientations and the tectonic regime.