In July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a 27 member High-level Panel (HLP) to advise on a new set of global development goals. These new goals are to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) whose final target date was set in 2000 for 2015. The new process has thus been dubbed post-2015. The UN and the HLP have made a special effort at outreach during this process, with numerous meetings being held around the world by the panel members together and individually. In addition, a site for online input My World was created.
The process has generated a lot of discussion, both off and online. And as Ian Thorpe writes this conversation in and of itself is a good thing
Last week the High-level Panel released their report and held a 2 hour interactive session at UN Headquarters. It was interesting how often the panel members used words like ‘bold, radical, transformative, and universality’ to describe their work. They also highlighted what they felt were some major paradigm shifts:
- A move towards sustainable development and ending poverty, just not poverty reduction for the most marginalized.
- An attempt to have integrative themes with a recognition of the importance of context (such as stable and peaceful societies, effective institutions and the state of the environment) more than (important but) siloed areas.
- The hope that through the interactive outreach process the new goals will be locally owned rather than the more ‘top down’ approach of the MDG development.
During the interactive portion of the session some challenges to the report were also highlighted including:
- Taking the report ideas through to member state adoption, and eventual national implementation plans.
- How much are the goals actually transformative change and a challenge to ‘business as usual’?
I am especially interested in what we can learn from the process, as well as how the goals will be able to be used going forward. In the lead up to the UN Millennium Assembly and the eventual Millennium Development Goals in 2000, although there was great pressure on the UN secretariat to include a variety of topic areas, the report presented to the Assembly was primarily a product of the UN Secretary General and his staff. The more recent process, as noted above, was an attempt to include many more people and groups and pave some of the way for avenues of communication that might continue to function in the implementation stage. Although it is always easier to sustain effort for a shorter period of time (to develop goals and plans) than a longer one (of implementation) the process that led to last week’s report is a major step in the right direction from the lead up to the Millennium Development Goals of a decade ago. An increasingly large ‘umbrella’ of interested and invested groups is being created. Although the HLP has not yet formally debriefed it’s process, some of the comments made by the panel members were telling, including John Podesta’s noting how the panel members learned to take off their official hats and “listen” and Patricia Espinosa’s comments on the “respect” that this very diverse group gave to each other.
As Charles Kenny writes, If this very diverse panel of 27 can “agree to 12 indicative goals that are reasonably coherent, somewhat selective, and involve a lot of targets that are important, compelling, time bound and measurable, maybe (maybe) the UN General Assembly can manage something similar.” We can certainly expect much additional discussion as we move towards 2015 and the consideration of the proposed goals by the 193 UN member states. For NGOs and other organizations who have not yet been involved in any of these discussions, following their continued development over the next few years may be a good way to strengthen their own local-global connections and possibly even identify new partners to help forward their own goals.
Additional reading:
Post2015.org – compiles many posts and resources
A Blueprint for a Better World
Sneak peek of the post-2015 global development agenda
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in the Long Awaited Report
The Broker’s post-2015 compilation
