By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven.
Last month, the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) were launched at the UN in New York. This is the outcome of two years of consultations, lobbying, and debate about what the “post-2015” agenda should look like. This agenda is likely to have far-reaching implications both for development finance and for the promotion of social and economic rights. However, why adopt goals at all? Any systematic effort to answer this seemingly elementary conceptual question has been disturbingly absent. What’s more, not only has this basic question not been answered, what is most striking is that it has hardly been asked. Read more…
The Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) has published a booklet titled ‘Rethinking the development paradigm: Reflections from civil society in the region on Post2015 and Financing for Development’. Some of the central topics are the role the private sector has been given in the Post2015 development agenda and the diminished support for civil society organizations in the region. This shift in stakeholder roles comes before the adoption of “business-binding human rights standards.” In the global partnership for development the focus has shifted towards private sector involvement while minimizing the goals for fair trade, debt relief and neglecting the regulation and control of capital movement.
As part of the involvement of civil society in the arab track of sustainable development goals ANND has organized forums parallel to the arab economic and social summit, in which proposals and recommendations for the summit were made. The documents in this booklet include analysis of most prominent arab development challenges and tackle on some of the elements of the alternative development model. Read more…
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If it doesn’t challenge power, it isn’t democratic
In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN Member States committed to “reach the furthest behind first”. Can this commitment be applied to governance and related policies, budgets and institutions?
Barbara Adams explores the implications for global governance of the promises of the 2030 Agenda, the practice of the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) and the many and sometimes contradictory approaches and initiatives of the UN system and its ‘governors’.
This analysis highlights the need to move from the current pay-to-play orientation to one of democratic accountability for ‘people and planet’ and recommends a strengthened and re-positioned HLPF and UN General Assembly to drive momentum for the UN as the leader of rights-based multilateralism. Read more
The current status of Artificial Intelligence governance must be reshaped or it will contribute to more being left behind. The risks and shifts are outlined by Cecilia Alemany of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and Anita Gurumurthy of IT For Change (ITFC) in a chapter on Governance of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the 2019 Spotlight on Sustainable Development report.
Four years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda the world is off-track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But there are signs of change. New social movements have emerged worldwide. They not only challenge bad or inefficient government policies, but also share a fundamental critique of underlying social structures, power relations and governance arrangements.
For this reason, the Spotlight Report 2019 has as main topic “reshaping governance for sustainability”. It offers analysis and recommendations on the global governance that sustainability requires, as well as on how to strengthen inclusive and participatory governance to overcome structural obstacles and institutional gaps.
