Experts tout inclusive policies as key to restoring trust, advancing the SDGs

25 July 2025 - At this week’s UN DESA Global Policy Dialogue, development experts emphasized the urgent need to strengthen social protection systems, invest in young people and support economic transformation. These strategies, they argued, are essential to advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under review at this year’s High-level Political Forum (HLPF).

The event, hosted by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and supported by the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund, brought together eight leading voices in economics and sustainable development to chart a path forward amid mounting global challenges.
 

Social cohesion at risk

According to the World Social Report 2025, over half of the global population today reports having little or no trust in their governments.

Such a decline of public trust “strains the foundation of social cohesion in societies” and “strains the foundation of multilateralism and trust here, in the United Nations, and our ability to get together as nations and come to important agreements,” said Ms. Bjørg Sandkjær, UN DESA’s Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination.

With a clear need to address the erosion of trust, experts shared their solutions at the panel, focusing on boosting social protections and eradicating inequalities.

“This trust had been eroded in recent decades as people have really felt the social contract basically failing with these inequalities, more precarious unemployment, and with essential social services under threat,” said Tatiana Moclean, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe. “So this is what we have to target and to work on specifically.”

Parfait Elondou-Enyegue, a professor of global development at Cornell University, advised the change should start by supporting the world’s youth.
 

Youth mentorship key in regaining public trust

“Transition into work is actually becoming a very important element in that trust-building and inclusion, because increasingly you have massive levels of youth unemployment and enormous differences in the opportunities to enter the labour market for young adults who are completing their education,” said Professor Elondou-Enyegue. “So the challenge now is to make sure that we give these young adults, these adolescents, similar opportunities to get a foothold in the labour market but also have a healthy transition into adulthood.”

The best way to support youth is for states to regulate not only the economic sphere but also the social sphere, providing not only economic opportunities but also mentoring, he added.

The UN Major Group on Children and Youth focal point on health Poorvaprabha Patil’s story echoed the sentiment.

“We need to start talking about how there is actually such little support in finding these mentorship opportunities and finding these systems that make this process of navigating through these complexities even in your professional life much easier,” she said. “I think as a woman, it’s even more difficult, so having a strong woman mentorship, a strong mentor has been more critical for me than having any other form of support in advancing my career.”

To Dr. Patil, a surgeon in training, another urgently needed solution is treating inequalities as interconnected issues.
 

Intersectional approach needed

“If I see a woman—which is so often the case—that has walked 12, 13 kilometers to come to the hospital in need for surgery that she should have gotten five years ago but could not because of social neglect, because of issues of not being able to come to those hospitals, I often wonder: We have programmes, but we’re still failing,” Dr. Patil said. “And the only reason that is happening is because we’re thinking of things in different boxes and verticals. We are not thinking of them collectively.”

A successful example of an intersectional approach to addressing inequalities is the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and UN Development Programme’s Multidimensional Poverty Index which complements the traditional monetary measurements by capturing the overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards that people in poverty experience.  

And real-life examples illustrate the importance of looking beyond monetary markers and using metrics to drive practical change.

“In Nepal, they found that the poorest regions were not necessarily the poorest by monetary poverty, so they could reallocate and support them,” said OPHI Director Sabina Alkire. In Panama, the index helped identify that Indigenous comarcas, or regions, had a poverty rate of over 90 per cent, compared to Panama City’s 8 per cent, a disparity not visible from the income figures.

“When you have these data, you can act better and with less money,” she added.
 

Economic transformation needed to address inequalities

With metrics to identify populations most affected by multidimensional poverty, experts identified another missing element in eradicating poverty and inequality: economic transformation.

“There should be no doubt that developing countries need to do productive development policies,” said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. “Because there is no way that social policies alone – as important as they are – can do all the heavy lifting for all these figures that we have about unemployment and the size of the informal economy being 50 per cent on average in Latin America.”

To Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachussets at Amherst, the productive development policies come in the shape of ceasing to focus on export-led growth alone, putting an emphasis on blended finance, ending the debt-driven cycles that developing countries go through, and ending inequalities.

“Fiscal policies that are progressive, taxation of the ultra-rich, of multinational corporations that currently pay a fraction of the taxes that domestic companies pay -- all of these are essential parts of a broader transformation that really we have to do if we want to generate the good jobs,” Ms. Ghosh said. “And that would give us the possibility of the public revenues that we could spend on health, on education, which incidentally are also big job creators.”

And policymaking needs to supplement economic measures.

Ms. Sandkjær recommended that the social lens guide such policymaking, which should focus on investing in people “more and better,” ensuring universal access to adequate social protections, and redistributing wealth through taxation systems.

“We need to have that hope with us that policymaking works, it makes a difference what decisions policymakers make, and it makes a difference when we get together as coalitions to effect that transformation and that change that we are looking for,” she said, wrapping up the event with a message of hope.

 

Watch the full Global Policy Dialogue: https://www.facebook.com/joinundesa/videos/3707768269526091

Learn more about the Global Policy Dialogue Series: https://www.un.org/en/desa/policy-dialogue