Turkey’s Statement
in Follow up & Review Session
of Post 2015 Development Agenda Intergovernmental Negotiations
(20 May 2015, New York)
Follow-up & Review Session- Answers of Turkey for Co-Facilitators’ Questions
Distinguished Co-facilitators,
I would like to thank firstly for your summary of the process and enlightening questions. I would try to briefly express our views on 4 issues.
1. As per the terminology to be used;
We believe that strengthened global partnership for mobilizing the means of implementation needs to promote good governance and accountability frameworks since, governance paradigm is vital for managing long term social challenge. Neither top-down government policies nor bottom-up market forces can alone support directed long-term sector-wide changes towards sustainability; they can only occur through combinations of government policies, market forces, and bottom-up initiatives from civil society. Good governance and accountability is a key for this collaborative effort.
2. As per the heavily loaded agenda of the HLPF;
We think that co-facilitators’ proposal regarding the thematic reviews can be a solution. But this approach should not lead us to fall into the silos trap. We should ensure the review of the agenda as a whole. As we’ve mentioned in our previous interventions, we think that Global Sustainable Development (GSD) Report is useful for communication of global progress. The structure of the Report can be further improved for monitoring post-2015 development agenda. Thematic reviews of progress could be conducted in various platforms throughout the UN system without jeopardizing the integrity of the global assessment process. We may integrate the synopsis of these reviews to the GSD report to track the progress. Clearly, ECOSOC and the GA will need to have key roles for this coordination.
3. Regarding the question of the work of HLPF next year, as the other delagates mentioned, implementation of SDGs is a bottom-up approach and for effective implementation, key is integration of these targets to our national strategies and policy endeavors. Each country will set their own national post-2015 development priorities, guided by the aspirational global SDGs but obviously by taking into account national circumstances as well. The methodology for this process may vary according to the decision making structures of countries. Though, this process of prioritization and integration may take time according to countries’ decision making mechanisms. Therefore we think that we may initiate the HLPF agenda with those SDGs that were already covered under the MDGs, such as poverty and health. These fields may bring more enriched discussions because we already have available data schemes for them. In addition to this, the initial agenda of the HLPF may include the goals that have existing data to monitor and assess the developments. And 2017 may be early to conduct the first review of the whole SDG agenda, considering the capacity building needs at all levels, particularly the ones related with data and monitoring.
4. Lastly, regarding the issue of discussion of country reviews at regional level, we think that follow up and review of SDGs should be a bottom-up process, as we have mentioned previously. This necessitates national reviews, which should be accountable firstly to their own citizens. Therefore we perceive the work of regional reviews to be related with sharing of country experiences and serving as a discussion platform for region specific challenges rather than discussion of country performances of SDGs.
I thank you.
