Thank you Madam Moderator, Good afternoon colleagues,
I am very honored to be in this Panel and especially happy to be interacting with our civil society friends who have such an important role to play in supporting the Intergovernmental negotiations which are about to begin.
I thank UN-DESA and NGLS for this opportunity to share some thoughts on means of implementation.
Madam Moderator,
Please allow me to start with a small observation first. I was quite curious to see the interesting arrangements for this session on MOI. Curious to see particularly how it is India and Brazil who are the only 2 member states on this Panel. I am sure this is not deliberate, but perhaps this is indicative how the debate on MOI is generally perceived?
Often countries like India and Brazil are seen as the ‘demandeurs’ if you like, in so far as the MOI are concerned. Against, for want of a better word, the ‘resistors’. And I don’t have to specify who!
However, and this is my first point, in my opinion it will be useful not to view this debate in such binary terms and better to frame it more constructively. I will return to this point a bit later.
Secondly, if you look at the history of development cooperation, the concept of MOI is actually not new. As a matter of fact historical evidence would suggest that MOI actually came first. In the initial phase in the 1940s and 1950s and up to quite later, development cooperation was more about ‘cooperation’ and less about ‘development’. It was more about assisting developing countries, or as they were called then the ‘under-developed countries’ with financial aid etc. to help them ‘modernize’ their economies and develop economically.
It is only much later, most notably with the MDGs, that the focus shifted to setting common metrics and parameters on what ‘development’ should look like. With the MDGs of course, the needle shifted a bit too much on the other side and they have therefore been criticized, rightly or wrongly, on focusing exclusively on ‘outcomes’ and not on the ‘means’ to reach those outcomes.
Thirdly, today as we unveil a new development agenda for the coming decades, we are standing at the cusp of a transformational moment. We do not realize this yet perhaps, but the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals has already fundamentally transformed the multilateral development agenda. How we may ask?
For the first time perhaps the normative development agenda of the United Nations is being reduced to concrete actions in the form of goals and targets. In other words and perhaps to commit a sin against English language, the entire development agenda has been ‘targetized’.
The other transformation of course is that the agenda has also expanded over 3 times to cover all 3 pillars of sustainable development. This is also a first. The agenda has also been ‘universalized’, i.e. it is no more just for the developing countries to take actions but the developed countries are also expected to be called into account for actions at their end.
What follows therefore and this is my fourth point, is that the means of implementation must also expand commensurate with the transformation of the substantive agenda. This is the important change we are expecting to be achieved in the negotiations in the coming months.
Fifth, what is an agenda? Is the agenda merely a compendium of ‘to do’s’ or is it a more comprehensive template of objectives, means and follow-up? I hope you will agree that it’s the latter template that should be our objective.
In other words, without adequate means of implementation built into the agenda, the development agenda itself would remains a mere ‘wish-list’.
Sixth, to be successful, the development agenda must fulfill the test of ‘multilateralism’.
The Post 2015 development agenda is, at the end of the day, an agenda for ‘international cooperation’. It cannot be limited to an academic exercise in telling countries what is good for them. There are enough reports and research papers available for that purpose.
To pass the test to multilateralism, the new agenda must incorporate a meaningful component of means of implementation to ensure that we reach where we want to reach in 2030.
Finally, the discourse on means of implementation is not about giving and taking, although some amount of this is inevitable given the unequal world in which we live in. But often we find that the MOI debate comes with lot of baggage, as a binary zero sum game that I alluded to in the beginning. As if there are sets of countries who want them and there are some countries who say no. In think we need to come out of this negative paradigm. In our view, the means of implementation is firmly about ‘collaboration’, it is about pooling of resources, it is about creating a development friendly system internationally. It is really about joining hands to get the job done.
Thank you.
