Shining a spotlight on the 2030 Agenda

A report by a civil society coalition monitoring implementation of the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development considers the challenges faced in realizing the objectives of the Agenda.

by Kanaga Raja

GENEVA: A global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs) and networks on 24 October presented a report assessing the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as highlighting some of the structural obstacles and challenges to its achievement.

The CSOs that have come together under the Reflection Group on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND), Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Social Watch, Third World Network (TWN) and Global Policy Forum (GPF). The Reflection Group is supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES, Friedrich Ebert Foundation).

The presentation of the Reflection Group’s annual report, which is titled Spotlight on Sustainable Development 2016, took place at an event at the UN here co-organized by the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) and FES.

Some of the key findings and recommendations of the report were highlighted at the event, which included as panellists Roberto Bissio of Social Watch, Gita Sen of DAWN, Areli Sandoval of Equipo Pueblo, and Sandra Vermuyten of Public Services International (PSI). The session was moderated by Hamish Jenkins of UN-NGLS, with Richard Kozul-Wright, Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), as discussant.

Reflection Group’s approach

In his opening remarks at the event, Hubert Rene Schillinger of FES said that FES has been sponsoring the work of the Reflection Group since the latter’s inception in 2010.

Some of the earlier thinking of the Reflection Group was laid out in its first report to the Rio+20 UN summit on sustainable development in 2012. It was at this summit that the notion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was developed and agreed upon by the international community, Schillinger said.

(The SDGs would become the centrepiece of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted by world leaders at a UN summit in 2015.)

The approach of the Reflection Group to the then upcoming global sustainability agenda was further developed in a discussion paper titled “Goals for the Rich”, where the approach taken was that the concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR) that officially applies only in the area of climate change also has to apply to the sustainability agenda.

Schillinger explained that this implies particular responsibility for the rich and powerful both domestically in their respective countries and also internationally, where the rich countries have a particular responsibility including but not only with regard to the means of implementation.

Another key element of the approach taken by the Reflection Group is policy coherence, which implies a strong focus on structural and policy obstacles that might stand in the way of successfully implementing the 2030 Agenda and achieving its goals.

Hamish Jenkins of UN-NGLS said that what is in the Spotlight report is quite exceptional in terms of looking both at the opportunities of the new 2030 Agenda and also at the hardcore questions that need to be addressed in terms of the incoherence in the global governance system.

“I think this report will be the start of a series that will really help the international community guide its path towards a genuine implementation of the [Sustainable Development] Goals that do offer fundamental transformative potential but require a certain number of political changes that are quite difficult in the current conjuncture,” said Jenkins.

Roberto Bissio, Coordinator of Social Watch, said that the report has two parts. The first is the physical part (the present report), and the second, which Social Watch helped to facilitate and contributed greatly to, is virtual but easily available on the Social Watch website (www.socialwatch.org). According to Bissio, this second part consists of 40 national reports (from civil society) that look into the 2030 Agenda and the potential for its implementation in the different countries.

He noted that the 2030 Agenda is very ambitious and that civil society “were active participants in the process.” He referred to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, the predecessor to the SDGs) as being the outcome of a limited formulation of a set of goals by a group of experts without any consultation with either governments or civil society. But the process for the 2030 Agenda was completely different, resulting in what is a global, universal agenda.

It is not just about what developing countries should be doing to achieve a certain set of goals, but about goals that are global in nature and that commit all countries, said Bissio. “In that sense, our formulation in the previous process that we needed goals for the rich is contemplated in the new agenda.”

He said that goals for the rich in the new Agenda does not just mean that richer countries have to contribute to the achievement of the goals of those countries that have less capacity. It also means that they have responsibilities to their own societies within their own countries, which is a new component.

Bissio also pointed to the implicit need in the SDGs for developed countries to look at the extraterritorial impact of what they do at home.

He highlighted some obstacles, namely, the malfunctioning trading system and an international financial system that is not making money flow the way it should flow.

He also pointed to two risks. One is that the discussion on the SDG indicators is still open and some of the important concepts in the Agenda, such as policy space, do not have a definition or do not have a clear indicator.

The other major risk is that implementation of the Agenda is largely put in the hands of the private sector and/or partnerships between the private sector and the public sector, such as in mobilizing financing for infrastructure.

According to Bissio, a majority of the 40 national reports above point to problems with public-private partnerships (PPPs). PPPs end up being more expensive than any other alternative to fund the same infrastructure. They create debt in forms that are outside the scrutiny of parliaments or even outside the scope of decisions of economy ministers. And they lack transparency, which inevitably leads to more corruption.

“So there is a major risk that the diagnosis and the aspirations clearly put us on the right side but the solutions identified so far are pushing the other way,” said Bissio.

Corporate involvement

Gita Sen of DAWN said “we had the soaring rhetoric of the Millennium Declaration followed by the reductionist goals that got enshrined as the MDGs, which, for many of us who participated in the UN conferences of the 1990s, were an extreme disappointment because they in fact shrank dramatically what we thought was an opening and expansion of the agenda.”

In contrast, she said, the SDGs had very strong mobilization. Women’s organizations were centrally engaged in the process throughout.

She noted that all of this is happening amid the “ferocity” of climate change, militarization and conflict, and economic crises driven by neoliberal financialization. She also highlighted the extreme and ongoing conservative backlash against women’s human rights on a variety of fronts.

One of the central challenges for the implementation of the SDGs, said Sen, is the rapidly expanding role of the private corporate sector.

She said it is useful that the World Health Organization (WHO) finally adopted a Framework of Engagement with Non-State Actors (FENSA) at its World Health Assembly last May. However, some of the FENSA provisions raise some questions. One of those is paragraph 27 bis of the final FENSA document, which may be one of the most problematic because it completely appears to water down due diligence and risk assessment.

Sen also lamented that proposals to pool the funds from contributors to WHO in order to avoid undue influence by any particular individual funder could not secure agreement in the FENSA process.

On PPPs, Sen noted that the European Commission’s expert panel on effective ways of investing in health adopted an opinion in 2014 based on a review by an independent consultant of 15 PPP cases in European countries. She cited the expert panel as saying: “Public disclosure of data and analysis behind PPP investments is very poor, inconsistent and not standardized. The expert panel has not found scientific evidence that PPPs are cost-effective compared with traditional forms of public finance and managed provision of healthcare.”

“If that is for the European Union, which has more institutional capacity for managing PPPs,” Sen pointed out, “just imagine [how] developing countries with very weak health infrastructure and health systems [will] be able to manage this kind of explosion and plethora of PPPs that we seem to be driving towards.”

Areli Sandoval of Equipo Pueblo spoke on the Mexican chapter of the Spotlight report, which focuses on barriers to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in Mexico due to the lack of a human rights and sustainability approach in the country’s legal and policy frameworks. She said that calls have been made to review and reform some of these frameworks.

Sandra Vermuyten of PSI said the broad objectives of recognition of the importance of full and productive employment, decent work for all, universal social protection, the human right to water and sanitation, universal free education, healthcare for all, gender equality and reduced income inequality, were by and large reflected in the 2030 Agenda. What is worrying, however, is that the supporting framework and implementation are not in line with those declared goals.

According to Vermuyten, PSI has held the opinion that the Agenda could end up being a vehicle for privatization and maintaining the status quo. “Unfortunately, one year down the line, with a follow-up meeting of the FfD [Financing for Development] and the HLPF [High- Level Political Forum], our opinion hasn’t changed.”

“It is a wonderful opportunity for multinationals to get an entry into the United Nations but we haven’t seen a lot of commitment to public service delivery, because we don’t see the unconditional criteria that are needed to ensure that the private sector intervention is in line with public interest, especially when public resources are used to support the private sector.”

Privatization and PPPs in water and energy have been proven to lead to disastrous results, she said.

All of these developments are in complete contradiction with the 2030 Agenda and the human rights obligations of states.

In addition, much-needed public policies that are more sustainable are lacking, and little or no attention has been directed to alternative models of development such as the social and solidarity economy.

“We also have to look at trade agreements – to what extent they are compatible with the SDGs and human rights obligations. We think ISDS [investor-state dispute settlement] systems [provided for in many trade agreements] are certainly not compatible with the 2030 Agenda and its implementation,” Vermuyten said.

A step forward

Richard Kozul-Wright of UNCTAD noted that the authors of the Spotlight report welcome the SDGs as a positive move from the MDGs. The SDGs are more ambitious, more universal, more inclusive and more transformative. In a word, they are essentially more developmental, he said. Despite their name, the MDGs were never very developmental; they were essentially about eliminating extreme deprivation rather than addressing developmental challenges.

“At least from the UNCTAD perspective, that is why we welcome the SDGs too as a positive step forward in terms of fashioning an international development agenda.”

The MDGs, because they were focused on deprivation and not on development, failed to address the structural flaws in the global economic and financial system.

“As the report says, it is now incumbent on those people that are responsible for implementing the SDGs not only to think about those in national terms and the kinds of national policies that are implied by meeting the SDGs, but also to address the problems at the international and multilateral level,” said Kozul-Wright.

This is becoming an increasing challenge given the steady weakening of multilateral institutions over the course of the last 30 years.

In that context, according to Kozul-Wright, the overview to the report points to a number of concerns that will be essential for proponents of the SDGs to address if they are to become a meaningful agenda that moves economic and social progress forward.

He also said it is no good just talking about inequality but that it is important to recognize that many inequalities are closely interconnected: economic, racial and gender-based.

He further pointed to the recognition that in much of the framing of the SDGs there is a ceding of responsibility from the public to the private sector, in particular from the public realm to the corporate realm, and this poses serious worries in terms of meeting the SDGs.

On PPPs, Kozul-Wright said it is about the lobbying power of large corporations and the consequences that it has for democratic representation. It is about the undermining of fiscal space through tax havens and other kinds of illicit flows.

Unless these are part of the serious agenda on the SDGs, it is difficult to see how they will be met, he underlined. (SUNS8342)                                          

The full Spotlight report, including the national reports, can be found at www.socialwatch.org/node/17211.

Third World Economics, Issue No. 627, 16-31 October 2016, pp12-14