Partners for action
Meeting the Millennium Development Goals means finding common cause on finance and trade
The world, in one voice, committed itself at the dawn of the new millennium to ambitious goals: halving worldwide poverty by 2015, achieving universal education, promoting gender equality, and among others, creating a global partnership for development. Yet as we approach the mid-point of the implementation period, a glance at the state of goal eight – on partnerships – shows that finance and trade are relative weak spots in international development cooperation. The thematic informal debate on partnerships towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals held at the General Assembly in late November made one point clear: Failure to deliver on commitments in the areas of development assistance, debt relief, and, most importantly, access to export markets by developing countries may well compromise attainment of the targets for 2015.
The compact or “global partnership” between developed and developing countries – expressed in the outcome of the International Conference on Financing for Development at Monterrey in 2002 – is a partnership of shared responsibilities and obligations. It arises from a recognition that the main responsibility for development rests with developing countries themselves – including through improved governance. However, commitments by industrialized nations to provide more and better development assistance and debt relief, and to reduce trade-distorting subsidies while supporting a more equitable world trading system, are vital enablers of developing country efforts.
Goal number eight, on the global partnership for development, must be strengthened since cooperation among states, civil society and the private sector remains a cornerstone of the development effort.
For many countries, official development assistance is still an essential catalyst without which economic and social progress would be severely constrained. Although ODA has steadily increased since the Monterrey Conference, regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania, on current trends, will not be able to meet any of the goals envisaged for 2015, while Southern and Western Asia are not advancing fast enough. These trends could be reversed through a combination of improved policies and more resources in the spirit of global partnership. Yet with eight years to go to the MDG target date, we are still far from reaching the long-standing UN aid target of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product for ODA, today met by only five countries. As the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, José Antonio Ocampo, points out, “Scaling-up development aid flows, strengthening aid effectiveness, and maximizing ODA’s impact on poverty reduction are of critical importance. Indeed, when ODA is not determined by geopolitics, it can have a strong positive effect on long-term growth, essentially because it supports investment in infrastructure and human development.”
The General Assembly concluded 2006 with a key message from its informal thematic debate on partnerships towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals: Good intentions remain to be matched by concrete action. Departing Secretary-General Kofi Annan recalled that “many donors are already falling short of their commitments to increase aid – and the longer this shortfall persists, the harder it will be to correct. They must be held accountable.”
Recent agreement at the General Assembly Second Committee to hold a follow-up conference on financing for development to review the implementation of the Monterrey Consensus in Doha, Qatar in the second half of 2008 should serve this purpose of holding countries accountable and to strengthen this pillar of global partnership for development.
External debt relief has been a positive step in that direction in helping liberate the poor countries’ resources for poverty reduction – as the decision to cancel the external debt of 18 heavily indebted poor countries demonstrates, but debt burden still weighs heavily on many developing countries. What is more, the Second Committee passed a month ago a draft resolution expressing concern over failure by some poor countries that have reached the completion point of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Debt Initiative to achieve lasting debt sustainability. Another text approved by the Committee emphasized, in this regard, the need for creditors and debtors to share responsibility for warding off unsustainable debt situations.
In any case, when discussing debt relief and emergency aid, it is worthwhile to nuance that neither of them back long-term development. They should, therefore, complement and not replace existing ODA obligations. In support of the Millennium Development Goals, as the DESA World Economic and Social Survey 2005 on financing for development stresses, the call for more development assistance must refer specifically to real cash increases, fresh money, and be targeted to the poorest and least developed countries.
Beyond development assistance, it is encouraging to note how innovative sources of financing are enlarging the resources for financing development. Nineteen countries are already putting in place a solidarity levy on airplane tickets to finance an international drug purchase facility (“UNITAID ”), launched last year at the opening session of the General Assembly. This financial mechanism should facilitate the poorest people’s access to drugs for the treatment of diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria. Another initiative, the International Finance Facility, was launched in November with the support of eight donor countries to fund immunization programs in campaigns against measles, tetanus, and yellow fever through the initial flotation of a USD 1 billion five-year bond.
While encouraging this partnership among states, DESA also continues to explore ways of promoting partnerships in its own work, not only in support of intergovernmental consensus, but also in the implementation of the UN Agenda. For example, the financing for development process promotes participation of experts from the public and private sectors, international organizations, academia, and civil society in various consultation processes, some of which are directly organized by private sector and civil society partners. Voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiatives in the area of sustainable development were, too, a fundamental outcome of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, where more than 200 partnerships were launched. In this sense, in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation in 2002, Governments designated the UN Commission on Sustainable Development as the focal point for the elaboration of partnerships that promote sustainable development including the sharing of lessons learned and progress made.
DESA’s promotion of partnerships can also be extended to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Forum on Forests and to the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development, a platform for cross-sectoral dialogue launched less than a year ago with the purpose of integrating ICT into development activities. That task is indeed paramount if the internationally agreed development goals, including the MDGs, are to be achieved in 2015.
In general, debates on economic and social issues in the General Assembly and in the Economic and Social Council are all processes with the concept and practice of partnership at the core of their work. The recent approval of a General Assembly resolution that gives the Council two new functions offers, moreover, a reason for optimism in the path toward a genuine global partnership for development. One of these new functions, the Development Cooperation Forum is expected to bring the discussion on aid effectiveness to a truly multilateral arena, so that the forum will be able to bolster the effectiveness of oversight provided by ECOSOC of the global development cooperation system. Effectiveness on this front is crucial to ensure an efficient and effective partnership for development.
Another of ECOSOC’s new functions, the Annual Ministerial Reviews, can be a platform for political engagement and be useful to help keep the focus, beyond verbal commitments, on actual implementation. It can also serve to assess progress on the various aspects of the UN Development Agenda , helping determine what works and what should be scaled-up. Reviews with broad participation can, at the same time, be instrumental in unlocking the potential of civil society and the private sector and to set in motion new partnerships for development.
At the start of a new year, existing challenges still need to be faced. The collapse of the multilateral trade negotiations under the Doha Round in the World Trade Organization shows that “our global partnership for development – to paraphrase departing Secretary-General Kofi Annan – remains more phrase than fact.” Obstacles owing to lack of compromise among major parties on export subsidies and domestic supports in the agricultural sectors remain, but it also remains imperative to overcome such an impasse.
This lack of consensus among states was well reflected in the end of the year at the Second Committee. While the Committee adopted more than forty resolutions on a broad range of issues, the inability to reach consensus on the trade and development resolution for the third consecutive year is precisely “symptomatic of the growing gap between negotiating partners,” Under-Secretary-General Ocampo noted in a recent address to the Committee.
Be that as it may, the successful conclusion of the Doha Development Round is “a sine qua non” for achieving the international agreed development goals, including the 2015 goals, as outgoing Secretary-General recently highlighted. On current trends, most of the world’s poorest countries will miss most of these targets, underscoring the need to match rhetoric with palpable action worldwide. The clock is ticking.
Data on MDG indicators, including goal eight on the global partnership for development, and other relevant information, can be found at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx .