From Declaration to Delivery: actioning the post-2015 agenda

This report, prepared for Save the Children, is based on the outcomes of a series of dialogues with 8 countries that have already begun exploring how to implement the post-2015 agenda. The roundtables were held in Denmark, Ghana, Mexico – with the participation of Colombia, Guatemala and Peru – Pakistan and Tanzania.

Each roundtable took the proposed Sustainable Development Goals and associated targets as their starting point, looking at examples from UN member states who have already started work on implementation.

This report identifies themes or ‘reality checks’ drawn from the roundtables to illustrate the opportunities and challenges of delivering a sustainable development agenda (June 2015)

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Every Child Deserves a Childhood

Continuing with our work on the Time to Deliver theme, focusing on the core promises that should be made to children, this report explores the potential for the United Kingdom to play a leadership role at the heart of a proposed new global partnership to protect children; using new targets to end abuse, exploitation and all forms of violence against children as the focus for a drive to protect children both within the UK as well as globally, through the UK’s foreign and development policy.

This report was written in collaboration with UNICEF UK and will be used by them to develop the new partnership for children, both in the UK and globally.(May 2015)

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A Global Partnership for the post-2015 Agenda

Debate about what new Goals should succeed the Millennium Development Goals after their 2015 deadline is now well underway. But there has so far been much less discussion of another key issue: a new Global Partnership to deliver them.

This is worrying – because although we won’t know the full list of new Goals for another two years, it already seems clear that we’re heading for a much more ambitious set of objectives than the Millennium Development Goals. There’s a real risk of a mismatch between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of post-2015, if governments agree an ambitious, universal set of Goals, but fail to commit to a credible action plan for making them happen.

Against this backdrop, I’ve just finished a Center on International Cooperation report (full pdf available here, and 8 page policy brief here) that sets out to explore both what kind of a Global Partnership is needed, and which elements of it look feasible for agreement in the current political context.

The report starts with an assessment of which countries want what from post-2015, and of what sort of goals the new Global Partnership may have to deliver, before setting out analysis and policy options of two key areas: financing, in the broadest sense, and the wider sustainable development agenda (encompassing areas like trade, migration, sustainability, technology, data, and global governance reform).

It also sets out a 10 point ‘early harvest’ plan of measures that could – at a stretch – be agreed over the next two to three years, and which have the potential to act as confidence building measures that might, with luck, start to catalyse more momentum and trust in an agenda that badly needs more of both.