A panel organized by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) with:
– Magdy Martínez-Solimán (Assistant Secretary General, UNDP Director of the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support)
– Michael Gerber (Ambassador and Special Envoy for Global Sustainable Development)
– Gilles Carbonnier (Professor of Development Economics, Graduate Institute)
- Who are the key players?
Mr. Martínez-Solimán cited governments as the key actors in the post-2015 world. Despite the prominence of other actors in the global sphere, ultimately governments are the ones that we hold accountable for negotiating, implementing, coordinating, and working with the other key players. Of course, development doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and academic institutions, the UN, and the private sector were also brought up as important actors for the implementation of the SDGs. Mr. Gerber especially emphasized the importance of the private sector, explaining that this is a difference between the environment when the MDGs were established and the environment today as the SDGs are being established. According to Mr. Gerber, today the private sector is actually becoming more important than traditional areas like oversees development assistance (ODA), which was the traditional model for development aid. This led the moderator to bring up the next question—
- Can the traditional structures of development aid be changed, and should the development sector reform itself?
Mr. Martínez-Solimán suggested 4 ways that the development sector needs to be changed:
- Merge normative and the action-oriented work
- Currently, the development sector is divided between normative agencies (like the UN and WHO), which set norms and standards, and action-oriented agencies (like the MSF). While this is useful in that it breaks apart the work into digestible chunks based on various organizations’ strengths, it seems that it also has led to bureaucratic and logistical challenges.
- Build bridges between the various silos in development aid
- Martínez-Solimán recommended that while fragmentation is inevitable and positive, it’s important to connect across disciplines—for example, groups focusing on health aid should talk to people working on human rights, who should talk to organizations spearheading universal education.
- Increase partnerships
- From what I’ve observed at my internship, there isn’t enough dialogue between normative agencies like the WHO and action oriented agencies. For example, there is a disconnect between the pharmaceutical industries that develop HIV/AIDS drugs, the WHO that writes the guidelines, and the in-country regulators of drugs. That is why partnerships between these groups, often mediated by outside organizations like the International AIDS Society in this case, allow these actors to come to consensus and makes public health work much more efficient.
- Broaden the development sector to have a role in both the north and the south
- In the development sector, the term “North-South divide” is used to describe the socio-economic and political divide between roughly the northern and southern halves of the hemisphere. The North is home to 4/5 of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and mostly covers the West and First World. On the other hand, the South is considered to be the poorer, less developed region, and has access to 1/5 the world’s income. Traditionally in the world of development aid, there was a flow of cash from the North to the South, something that’s particularly apparent in the MDGs. However, the SDGs apply to both the North and the South, as many of them include things like non-communicable diseases (think cancer and diabetes) and poverty. Thus when approaching the SDGs, there should be a totally different approach.
Mr. Gerber agreed with Mr. Martínez-Solimán, and added another challenge that will require change is the funding mechanism. As the development sector has grown, the demands for aid have increased, and while funding has also increased, it has not increased proportionally. He suggested other incentives be maintained and increased, such as market incentives for the private sector to invest.
- How can we put in mechanisms that build the needed trust and accountability between multilateral organizations, governments, and the private sector?
Mr. Martínez-Solimán emphasized transparency. Mr. Carbonnier added that academia has a responsibility to augment this with strong data and make it “smart data”—data that can be used to track, predict, and model. In addition, he suggested that academia work on establishing other indicators besides GDP to measure a country’s performance. It turns out that looking at satellite imaging of sub-Saharan Africa at night is a better proxy for looking at economic growth than GDP! While Mr. Gerber agreed, he pointed out that one challenge with the SDGs is that accountability has become politicized. For example, SDG # 16, (“promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and institutions at all levels”) is seen by many countries as a threat to national sovereignty because has the feel of “measuring governance”.
The United Nations
Image source: Phil Roeder
For those of you who, like me, have trouble with the UN’s alphabet soup:
- ODA: There are more bells and whistles attached to this, and there is a special list of recipients, but broadly ODA is a flow of money provided by official agencies (like governments) administered for “the purpose of economic development and the welfare of developing countries”.
- MDGs: Millennium Development Goals, established in 2000 to be finished by 2015. There were 8.
- SDGs: Sustainable Development Goals, being developed as we speak and hopefully finalized around September 2015.
