Earth Summit, Rio+20 to be held in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro. With
high and growing commitment from some governments, starting with several
Latin American ones and a large number of civil society organisations;
the movement to pin the world’s leaders down to making specific,
well-defined and even quantitative pledges gathered sufficient momentum
to receive approval and a go ahead at the Rio Conference.
Barring the usual issues of global politics, lack of
responsibility beyond narrowly defined national interests, professed
financial constraints and other hurdles that often prevent such
exercises from taking off, there was the whole question of who would set
the agenda and who would decide on the content of the final agreement,
assuming that a body of agreeable propositions was to be found. The two
viable options came down to: should it be the international (i.e. UN)
system as a body, or the Governments acting under the aegis of the UN
General Assembly that would be the overall coordinators. Fortunately,
the task was big enough to allow virtually all actors to take ownership
of the processes and make major contributions to the end result. This
was particularly made possible by the fact that the inter-government
process, called the ‘Open Working Group’ took its title seriously and
was open to the widest variety of participants.
We now have the SDGs, formally to be adopted by the
world community at the General Assembly in September 2015, a body of 17
Goals comprising 169 Targets. Together, these provide a clear roadmap
for the next 15 years during which the governments, civil society and
businesses are committed to eliminating the worst deprivations that have
afflicted human society over the past few centuries: poverty, hunger,
lack of opportunity and environmental destruction.
What has made the SDG process different from earlier
efforts to design a sustainable future for the world is the deep
commitment and actual adherence to the principles of transparency and
participation, so often ignored in the past. With inputs from all
governments, sectors, professional bodies and civil society; this has
been by far the richest and most fruitful negotiation undertaken by the
world community.
What promises to make the SDGs more likely to deliver
results is the solid attention given during the entire process to the
‘means of implementation’, which not only dealt with the need to
mobilise finance, technology and institutions and the role of trade and
national polices but also to make the whole rollout accountable. By
setting up the High Level Political Forum and relying on bottom up
monitoring and reporting (from the local and national to the regional
and global), followed by committing to ‘reward’ rather than ‘punishment’
systems that reinforce positive behaviour by governments and other
actors; the SDGs may well have superior chances of delivering a better
world for all.
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