Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries 30 May - 3 June 2011, Turkey

Civil Society Global Report

The Fourth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) took place in Istanbul, Turkey from 9-13 May 2011. World leaders were expected to come up with renewed commitments of partnership for the development of the LDCs. It was a great opportunity for the international community to delve into the achievements as well as failures of the past and put forward concrete proposals for rectifying the errors that led to those failures.

As a significant contribution towards the discourse of LDC development, this report is a compendium of civil society voices from across the world, drawn from a series of interactions held at the local, national and regional levels. It has been contextually analysed and articulated to provide desirable sets of policy and programmatic recommendations for LDC-IV, with the aim of addressing the challenges most critical to the sustainable development of the LDCs.

This report seeks not only to assess the failure of the Brussels Programme of Action that came out of LDC-III, but also to craft an ambitious and deliverable plan of action to lift all of the world’s LDCs out of the spiral of poverty, vulnerability and insufficiency. The failure to graduate more than 3 LDCs in the last three decades reflects a critical failure of the current aid architecture and model of development promoted by the dominant players of the international community. LDCs are facing a “development emergency” and it is a global responsibility to come together and lift the LDCs out of the perpetual cycle of poverty, vulnerability and instability. The prime message from civil society in this report is that the development paradigm must change now as the dominant approaches to development have failed the world’s poorest citizens.

To access the full report, please click here.