This week at the United Nations, additional
sessions for consultations on the Revised draft of the Outcome document of the Third
International Conference on Financing for Development (12-15 May).
There
have been some substantive and promising steps forward including some dampening
down on the blatant references to Public-private partnerships and less overt
courting of the private sector and foundations.
There appears to be a lot of effort being dedicated to ensure that the
synergies between the FFD process and Post-2015 development agenda are
maximized. But if you go beyond words or political “hot air” then there appears
to be a fundamental lack of economic commitment to action or belief in the
possibility to achieve genuine change.
One positive was the addition of “Our goal
is to eradicate poverty and hunger in this generation” yet a number of
delegations appeared to find “in this generation” to be unclear and did not
support its inclusion. While putting a specific timeframe on eliminating
poverty is hard – within one lifetime should be achievable and if we were to be
ambitions we would aim for sooner rather than step away from specifics. By
2050, the human population is projected to be 9.5 billion (UNEP, 2015) and the
extremes of wealth and poverty have been widening at unacceptable speeds. As
Oxfam noted early this year, if current trends continue, the world’s richest
one percent would own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016.
The aspect of the Post-2015 development
agenda that appears to have any likelihood of contributing the impetus we need
to accelerate change appears to the Sustainable Development Goals. They are
numerous, and messy but the time for quick and easy fixes has long passed. We
have to be willing go beyond the simple and actually dive deep to find the root
causes such as greed and inequality.
As the post-2015 summit looms closer, hopes
increase for an “ambitious” development agenda. But a lot of key actors
are taking a pragmatic look at the costs and asking — where is the money going
to be coming from?
It’s not going to be the private sector.
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