An options brief by David Steven, published by New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and funded by the UN Foundation, on the role that global goals can play after the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015.
As the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda meets in Liberia, New York University’s Center on International Cooperation has published a new paper of mine on the role that global goals can play after the Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. You can download it here.
The paper:
I don’t advocate any of the options in the paper. Instead, the aim is to try and clarify what can be quite a muddy and confusing debate. Why do we need goals? Who should they be for? How can they best be constructed?
This work forms part of CIC’s broader engagement on the post-2015 process. Alex and I have published a series of papers for CIC and the Brookings Institution (1, 2, 3). For me, this goes back to a post on Global Dashboard from 2011, which offered a first sketch of a post-2015 agenda that aimed to end absolute poverty.
Many thanks to the UN Foundation for funding this work.
Climate, scarcity and sustainability are among the most important – and politically challenging – elements of the post-2015 development agenda on what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals.
While sustainability issues did not feature heavily at the recent London meeting of the new UN High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, which was focused mainly on household level poverty, they are likely to figure much more prominently at the Panel’s second and third meetings – in Monrovia in February and Bali in March – since these meetings will focus on national and global level issues respectively.
Before these meetings, sustainability advocates have some hard thinking to do: on both their policy objectives and their political tactics, in both the Panel and the post-2015 agenda as a whole. To try to contribute to that thought process, here’s a 6 page think piece. It’s deliberately provocative, and also still a working draft – so feedback is very welcome.
Update: The paper’s now been finalised and published as a Center on International Cooperation think piece; many thanks to everyone who commented.
What should sustainability advocates aim for in the post-2015 international development agenda – and how should they go about it?
The focus of the post-2015 world today is New York where the High-Level Panel appointed by the UN Secretary-General to provide him with advice on the post-2015 agenda has its first meeting this afternoon. It’s the first meeting and the 26 panel members will probably spend most of the time going round the table and introducing themselves. But should they be looking for advice, there’s no shortage of it around.
Maybe too much. We’re still very much in ‘Christmas Tree’ territory, and it’s not clear how the long agenda that is emerging is going to be whittled down. Essentially, the panel’s job is to prioritise between the 101 good ideas that are out there, and to tell a story explaining the decisions they have made which is convincing enough to persuade others that it’s the right way to go.
One way to do that might be to go back to thinking about what a new agreement might be for. I wrote about this here a while ago, but the conversation has changed a bit since then. There seem to be three (why is it always three?) ideas around:
It’s still far from clear where we’ll end up with this. But the panel will meet at least four more times before the final report comes out, so be assured – we can all keep talking about this for months to come.