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Creating the Post-2015 Development Agenda

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the United Nations set, international reference point for global development since 2000, expire in 2015. Their lifetime has seen the fastest reduction in poverty in human history, with 700 million fewer people below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day in 2010 than in 1990 – but with some 700 million still to reach.

To define a Post-2015 Development Agenda, the global community is pursuing two streams of exploratory processes. One stream is intergovernmental (with UN Member States negotiating the outcomes) and one is rooted in the UN System, with the Specialized UN Agencies and Programmes concerned with development negotiating the outcomes. These streams are expected to converge, under the United Nations Secretary-General’s leadership, into one global development framework built around poverty reduction and sustainable development.

This backgrounder provides an overview of the UN System’s vision of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, as reflected in:

  1. The UN Global Compact
  2. The UN Development Group
  3. The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and
  4. The High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

The concluding section offers recommendations for Canadian engagement with that agenda, bringing Canadian expertise and interests together to promote post-2015 development.

The UN Global Compact

Summary

The UN Global Compact (UNGC) is a policy initiative for businesses to voluntarily align their strategies and operations with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. By sodoing, businesses, as a primary driver of globalization, will facilitate the development agenda’s creation of a sustainable and inclusive global economy delivering lasting benefits to people, communities and markets. The UNGC is led by a Board of Directors that is appointed and chaired by the United Nations Secretary-General.

The Ten Principles

The 10 principles of the UNGC are derived from landmark UN documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption.

Human Rights

  1. Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights.
  2. Businesses should ensure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.

Labour

  1. Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.
  2. Businesses should eliminate all forms of forced and compulsory labour.
  3. Businesses should ensure the abolition of child labour.
  4. Businesses should eliminate all forms of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Environment

  1. Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges.
  2. Businesses should undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility.
  3. Businesses should encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.

Anti-Corruption

  1. Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.

As businesses are increasingly affected by and affecting socioeconomic and political challenges, corporations are recognizing the need to collaborate with governments, civil society, labour, and the United Nations. This has resulted in rapid growth for the UNGC. With over 10,000 corporate participants from over 130 countries, it is the largest voluntary corporate responsibility initiative in the world.

The strength of the UNGC is tied to the compulsory annual publication of “Communication on Progress” (COP) reports by participating companies. COPs ensure accountability and commitment from participants, as a failure to communicate efforts and results can lead to expulsion.

United Nations System Integration

The UNGC strives to work closely with the United Nations System to combine the best properties of the UN (moral authority and convening power) with the private sector’s solution-finding strengths and resources.

The United Nations Development Group

The United Nations Development Group (UNDG) is the coordination body for the thirty-two UN funds, programmes, agencies and departments that engage in development work. The Group works to align the development activities of the UN system into a coherent and unified strategy that multiplies their impact and increases efficiency. As part of creating a Post-2015 Development Agenda, the UNDG facilitated a series of consultations with people across the globe to seek their views on the successors to the MDGs. The results of these consultations were articulated in the report A Million Voices: The World We Want. The report does not establish a new framework for post-2015 but offers six distilled key messages.

The report was designed to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on the development process. Facilitated by UN Country Teams, consultations occurred at the local, regional and national level in 88 countries with more than one million people. Consultations occurred withthe traditional voices in development –governments, civil society, the private sector, universities and think tanks. More importantly, consultations occurred with groups that generally do not participate in policy formulation. For example, in Iran, consultations were held with Parent Teacher Associations, and female health workers. In Ecuador, a particular focus was placed on grass roots leaders from the Amazon regions. Contributions were sought through a variety of offline and online methods to maximize participation and breadth. People in remote regions sent in their perspectives through SMS (enabling and accessible mobile phone technology), posted on the custom-built We Want and My World websites, shared on social media, participated in interactive web consultations, and answered online surveys. The consultations validated individuals in their role as key stakeholders and essential voices in the decision-making process for the post -2015 development agenda.

Key Messages

  • People demand to play a role in shaping and changing their world.
  • The fundamental areas covered by the MDGs remain critically important. At the same time, there is a call to be more ambitious and increase the urgency.
  • People are indignant at the injustice they feel because of growing inequalities and insecurities that exist, particularly for poorer and marginalized people.
  • The challenges are complex and interlinked, requiring a sustainable development agenda that is integrated, holistic and universal, applying to all countries and all people.
  • People call for a new agenda built on human rights, and universal values of equality, justice and security. Better governance underpins many of their demands.
  • The focus on concrete, measurable goals should be retained but measurement of progress needs to be improved. A data revolution will support an accountability revolution.

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network

The United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) is an independent global network of academia, civil society, the private sector, and technical institutions. The SDSN was commissioned by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012 to mobilize scientific and technologic knowledge to advance sustainable development. Population growth and rapid technological change are predicted to drastically increase the human impact on the physical Earth and exacerbate inequalities in societies. As part of their mandate to provide expert advice on the design and implementation of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the SDSN produced An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development. This operational framework, driven by evidence-based research, identifies ten priorities that can mobilize the whole of society for sustainable development.

Priority Goals for Sustainable Development:

  1. End extreme poverty including hunger.
  2. Achieve development within planetary boundaries.
  3. Ensure effective learning for all children and youth for life and livelihood.
  4. Achieve gender quality, social inclusion, and human rights for all.
  5. Achieve health and wellbeing at all ages.
  6. Improve agriculture systems and raise rural prosperity.
  7. Empower inclusive, productive and resilient cities.
  8. Curb human-induced climate change and ensure sustainable energy.
  9. Secure ecosystems and biodiversity, and ensure good management of water and other natural resources.
  10. Transform governance for sustainable development.

The High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

In July 2012, the UN Secretary-General created the 27-member High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons (HLP) on the Post-2015 Development Agenda to provide recommendations on the successor framework to the MDGs. Building upon the expertise of the SDSN and the global consultations of the UNDG, the HLP held its own consultations with more than 5,000 civil society groups from 121 countries through direct meetings and online dialogue. Collectively, these consultations confirmed that, while achieving success in some areas, the MDGs did not go far enough to eradicate poverty in all countries. The very poorest and most excluded people remain vulnerable, while the debilitating effects of conflict, violence and poor governance on development have not been adequately addressed. Thus the Post-2015 Agenda needs to continue the best of the MDGs – addressing practical issues such as poverty, hunger and education – but also go further to address the new challenges and opportunities of the 21st century to create a new development paradigm.

Five Transformative Shifts:
The HLP successor framework for MDGs is expressed as five transformative shifts and a roadmap of twelve new goals in its report A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development. These shifts are:

  1. Leave no one behind.
  2. Put sustainable development at the core.
  3. Transform economies for jobs and inclusive growth.
  4. Build peace and effective, open and accountable institutions for all.
  5. Forge a new global partnership.

Twelve Universal Goals
While the goals are universal, the targets for each are left to be established by the nations themselves.

  1. End poverty.
  2. Empower girls and women and achieve gender equality.
  3. Provide quality education and lifelong learning.
  4. Ensure healthy lives.
  5. Ensure food security and good nutrition.
  6. Achieve universal access to water and sanitation.
  7. Secure sustainable energy.
  8. Create jobs, sustainable livelihoods, and equitable growth.
  9. Manage natural resource assets sustainably.
  10. Ensure good governance and effective institutions.
  11. Ensure stable and peaceful societies.
  12. Create a global enabling environment and catalyse long-term finance.

From Four Processes to a Single New Agenda

From these four processes, the UN system is seeking to create a standardized set of unified goals that will shape the development agenda for the next two decades. These processes reveal a consensus that the new development agenda must go further than the MDGs by including the following four new components.

Universal Sustainability

Sustainability is the most common idea that the four processes agree is essential for a new agenda. With a world population of 7.2 billion people and an annual global GDP of US$90 trillion, the current world economy already exceeds some planetary boundaries. Yet inequality continues with the billion richest people accounting for 72% of world consumption while the poorest 1.2 billion consume 1%. As the global population in 2030 is predicted to reach 8.2 billion, adhering to current resource usage rates for the resultant larger economy will overtax the Earth’s resources while still neglecting those in extreme poverty.

The MDGs viewed production and consumption as two separate policy spheres. Yet international summits and negotiations on economic growth and the environment repeatedly find that one cannot be addressed without the other. As overconsumption and overproduction continue, deforestation, water scarcity, food insecurity and increased damage from natural disasters is the result. This affects those living in poverty first and the most, making development progress short-term and unsustainable. Both high and low-income countries need to adopt sustainable behaviour that decouples economic growth from overproduction and overconsumption. Sustainable development is a universal goal.

Public-Private Partnerships

As exemplified by the UNGC, but also incorporated into the goal advanced by the UNDG, SDSN and HLP, partnerships are needed between the private sector and the public sector. Traditional development actors no longer can create progress alone. Private investment in developing countries far surpasses aid flows from developed countries. Businesses drive globalization and the globalized economy. Through the collaborative activities of corporations, in conjunction with actors from civil society or actors from transparent accountable governments, corporations will establish norms that further human rights compliance and shape whether economic growth can occur in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner. The Post-2015 Agenda will be the effort of the whole society.

Measurable and Universal Targets

Three of these processes provide a list of proposed goals and measurable targets. While the MDGs were revolutionary in creating universally measurable indicators, one of the lessons learned was the need for better data systems to track progress towards these targets. Currently, mobile phone subscriptions have exceeded 6 billion, with 250 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2017, over 80% of the world will have access to wireless broadband internet. With the rapid spread of communication technology, the new set of goals will be bolstered by the possibility to collect data at the local, national and global levels and provide open access to it.

The Necessity of Security for Development

Spurred by the global community’s recognition that instability and violence undermine the sustainability of development, the enhancement of security will be an essential component in the Post-2015 Agenda. Armed violence can initiate forced population displacement, erode social and human capital, undermine public institutions and destroy infrastructure. As most current conflicts are intrastate – wars between groups within a country’s borders – the burden of violence shifts from combatants to society as a whole. Research shows armed violence is both a cause and consequence of underdevelopment. The risks of armed violence, such as weak institutions, persistent unemployment, and economic inequalities are associated with underdevelopment. A new development agenda will recognize that peacebuilding – activities that prevent conflict, provide peaceful dispute resolution and create peace – is an essential part of enhancing development efforts.

Conclusion

The post-2015 development agenda has sought legitimacy and credibility by being knowledge/evidence based and inclusive. Collectively, these four processes are an effort to balance the perspectives of states, civil society, the private sector, the Global North and the Global South to reveal shared aspirations and the desire for a new agenda built upon sustainable development and poverty reduction.

How Can Canada Help Set the Post-2015 International Development Agenda?

There is a natural synergy between Canada and the post-2015 roadmap as conceived by the HLP. The Government of Canada’s (GOC) three priority themes for development – increasing food security, securing the future of children and youth, and stimulating sustainable economic growth – are key planks in the proposed post-2015 framework. Yet Ottawa’s participation in the post-2015 process has largely followed a hands-off, ambivalent approach. Canada has been a participant solely through bureaucratic channels, co-sponsoring, with Senegal and Germany, a thematic consultation on education in March 2013 and providing $1 million to the consultation process. Canada has the potential to offer much more through the sharing of best practices and expertise, especially in precisely the new areas of universal sustainability, public-private partnerships (P3), and universal and measurable targets which have been identified as essential to the Post-2015 Agenda.

  • Universal Sustainability. With current trends demonstrating that resource extraction will be a key driver of economic growth in developing countries, Canada should share its best practices and strategies for building natural resource governance capacity and regulatory institutions. Assisting in effective and sustainable resource management is a key component of DFATD’s Sustainable Economic Growth Strategy and can build upon Canadian successes in countries such as Ghana, Peru, Columbia and Bolivia.
  • Private-Public Partnerships. The push for integrating the private sector in development raises questions about how to ensure accountability among these new actors. The GOC can help address these questions by sharing lessons learned from its extensive history in successful (and less than successful) and accountable private-public partnerships. Through its Sustainable Economic Growth Strategy, and domestic P3 agency PPP Canada, Canada has a global reputation for ensuring value and accountability in P3 development projects.
  • Universal and Measurable Targets. Statistics Canada, internationally-lauded Canadian polling firms and leading academic institutionscould form a private-public partnership to provide the GOC with a repertoire of potential indicators and assessment methods to measure the post-2015 goals. This would be strengthened by sharing how the GOC currently pursues an open data initiative for its aid projects that allows the public and civil society to access the raw data informing the GOC’s policy decisions and independently assess their success.
  • Security.Security as an area for engagement has been de-emphasized by the GOC,which signed on to the 2011New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States merely as an adopter, not a policy leader.Before the merger of the Canadian International Development Agency into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development), security development related projects largely consisted of demining and funding external agencies' disarmament and demobilization programs.Security engagement requires renewed political will to engage in multilateral forums such as the United Nations.

As UNA-Canada’s President & CEO Kate White has observed elsewhere, the key prerequisite for any greater involvement in the new agenda is the abandonment by the GOC of language that casts the United Nations as merely a ‘talk shop’. As those in the diplomatic trenches over the long haul know, it is dialogue that leads to norms, norms to practice, practice to prosperity and peace. The setting of the global development agenda for the coming decades is a time for Canada to make its mark: to show that the ideology of equality is universal. The time for waiting on the sidelines is over.

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Written by Andrew Koltun, Brittney Emslie, and Kathryn West of the Academic Council on the United Nations System.