by Molly Elgin-Cossart | May 12, 2014 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system, North America
In a new report from the Center for American Progress, we explore the implications of implementing the post-2015 development agenda in the United States.
Given the massive changes in the world since 2000, when the Millennium Development Goals were adopted the United Nations headquarters, it should come as no surprise that the post-2015 development agenda is shaping up to be quite different from the MDGs. One of the most profound shifts is that the post-2015 will be a universal agenda.
To echo the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (HLP), a universal agenda is based upon true global partnership, a joint endeavor to end poverty and promote sustainable development. Universality signals a transition away from the North-South dynamic that has defined development policy for decades.Though the specifics are still unclear – in particular how best to accommodate varying national circumstances and contexts – the basic idea is that every country would have work to do, both at home and as members of the global community, in order to achieve the post-2015 development agenda.
While an incredible amount of energy is focused on the what of the post-2015 development agenda, relatively less attention has been paid to the all-important question of how it will be implemented.
In this new report, John Norris, Casey Dunning, and I explore what implementing the post-2015 development agenda might look like from the perspective of the United States. The result of our analysis is a report, Universality In Focus. We use the illustrative set of goals and targets set out by the HLP as our starting point, identifying the achievability, measurability, and merit of each target, and as appropriate, the potential level of ambition for the U.S. in meeting such targets.
Rather than a definitive analysis of a very broad and complicated set of issues, it is our hope that this report is the start of a more specific and focused conversation on implementation and the practical implications of universality in the post-2015 development agenda. We would hope that others undertake similar analysis in different countries, to further inform the ongoing conversations among diplomats in New York.
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by Molly Elgin-Cossart | Mar 25, 2014 | Economics and development, Global system
The UN’s Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) will meet next week to discuss potential goals and targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015. The OWG and its co-Chairs deserve praise for making significant progress in an incredibly complex process involving an overwhelming number of issues and actors.
The OWG co-Chairs have admirably attempted to reduce a long list of development priorities into 8 “clusters” for discussion (issued last week), following reactions to the 19 “focus areas” they released last month. Many asserted that 19 is too many, compared to the 8 goals of the MDGs. Though the co-Chairs are careful to caution that the focus areas are not goals – and that the clusters are simply for discussion – these caveats are generally ignored. The co-Chairs themselves have indicated they would like to have a better sense of the sustainable development goals and targets by the end of next week. Under considerable pressure to provide structure, producing the 8 clusters is a natural attempt to meet these demands. But any clustering of issues at this point will inevitably raise questions.
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by Kirsty McNeill | Feb 7, 2014 | Global system
The Fabian Society has a new pamphlet out this week which lays bare some of the big strategic fights underlying Labour’s emerging foreign policy. I’ve attempted to summarise them here.
Labour politics has taken an inwards-looking turn since 2010 but a new pamphlet, published by the Fabian Society this week, sees the party’s internationalists limbering up for a ruck with the opposition, the leadership and each other all at once. If the IPPR’s Influencing Tomorrow was a genteel debate in the officers’ mess, the Fabians’ collection is a squaddies’ bar room brawl between, in Mark Leonard’s words, “the New Labour tribes of globalisers, liberal interventionists and pro-Europeans and the Blue Labour apostles of localism and disengagement”.
by Molly Elgin-Cossart | Dec 13, 2013 | Economics and development, Global system
Climate negotiations in Warsaw made faltering steps towards a possible 2015 agreement. Trade talks in Bali were salvaged at the last minute. As global negotiations on trade, climate and development reach a crescendo between now and 2015, success or failure to reach agreement will be seen as signals of the future of multilateralism itself.
These talks remain fraught with complexity and technical and political disagreements that have considerable potential to derail agreement. As former chief of staff for the Secretariat of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, I know first hand how difficult it will be for these groups to arrive at consensus on the world’s most contentious issues- and how besieged they will feel by the demands of governments and stakeholders from around the world.
A number of lessons we learned from the Panel could improve the prospects for consensus and the ability to put forward recommendations that effectively address the challenges the world will face in the coming decades.
In this new commentary for New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, I outline 10 critical actions. (more…)
by Kirsty McNeill | Dec 2, 2013 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system
In our latest #progressivedilemmas article we look at how the left should respond to China’s rise.
During Labour’s last period in government we failed to make responding to illiberal powers one of the organising concepts of British foreign policy and paid the price in Copenhagen, Geneva, and New York. If we want to avoid repeating that mistake, we need to face up to the scale and nature of China’s power. Labour’s future China policy must combine the humility to recognise the UK’s diminished leverage and the confidence to believe the west’s collective capacity to shape the environment in which Beijing makes its choices has not been lost.
