Illicit financial flows are gaining recognition as an important issue for development. As 2015 and the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals draws nearer there are calls both from civil society and from within the UN system to make control of such flows a priority within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is still an open debate as to the role they should play in the world’s sustainable development agenda.
The Yale Global Justice Program and ASAP hosted Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University for a special lecture, \”Sustainable Development Goals: The Emerging Global Agenda.\” Critical responses were given by Dr. Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics at Yale and President and Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action and Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and Director of the Global Justice Program and President of ASAP.
Videos are available of Dr. Sachs’s lecture, responses from Dr. Karlan and Dr. Pogge, and audience Q&A. Photos from the event are also available.
Dr. Sachs has been a leading figure in the effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, an eight-point framework for promoting poverty alleviation and development worldwide, agreed to by all the world\’s countries and leading development institutions. The Millennium Development Goals will expire in 2015, and the framework that replaces them will shape poverty alleviation and development efforts for the next fifteen years. Dr. Sachs\’s is an important voice in the global debate over priorities for the next phase in international development.
Dr. Sachs is a world-renowned professor of economics, leader in sustainable development, senior UN advisor, bestselling author, and syndicated columnist whose monthly newspaper columns appear in more than 80 countries.
Dr. Sachs serves as the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. Sachs is also one of the Secretary-General’s MDG Advocates, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Development. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).
An online educational analogue to the Health Impact Fund is currently being developed by Gordon Brown, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, to provide free primary secondary, and tertiary education courses that would be universally accessible in developed and developing countries.
In this second piece in ASAP’s series on the Millennium Development Goals replacement dialogue, contributing writer Robaiya Nusrat speaks to Professor David Hulme, Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He is a leading researcher and commentator on rural development, microfinance and the MDG efforts.
The UN’s High-Level Panel has now issued its detailed recommendations for global poverty alleviation efforts to replace the Millennium Development Goals project, which expires in 2015. The panel, headed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and including political leaders, diplomats and poverty experts from around the world, has called for the eradication of severe poverty by 2030 and vigorously addressing climate change, among numerous other proposals (http://www.post2015hlp.org/). The recommendations will form the basis for dialogue between UN member states over the next two years about a new global agreement on poverty and development. ASAP is interviewing experts on global poverty about the new recommendations and the likely
Presentation on the post-MDGs and SDGs by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on the Millennium Development Goals
The ASAP Genuinely Participatory Consultations (GPC) Working Group has published its initial assessment of the UN’\’s global consultation process on the next phase of international development.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has been leading an initiative to genuinely include poor and marginalized people, governments, NGOs, the private sector, unions, and academics in the discussion of the global development framework that will succeed the Millennium Developments Goals (MDGs). This process, initiated in spring of 2012, has included national consultations in more than 60 countries and eleven global thematic consultation meetings. National consultations concluded in January and thematic consultations will run through the spring.
According to the UN Development Group website\’s page on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, consultations were meant to \”stimulate discussion amongst national stakeholders and to garner inputs and ideas for a shared global vision\”.
This global consultation process stands in contrast with the method used to design the MDG framework in the late 1990s. Although the years leading up to the formulation of the MDGs saw many global summits on development issues, the list of MDGs was finalized without public input. While the policy process this time has been more inclusive, it is not yet clear how the ideas generated in the post-MDG consultation meetings will influence the new development framework.
ASAP has formed an expert working group on participatory consultation to discuss the inclusiveness of the process of formulating the MDG successors and to make recommendations for participatory implementation of the new framework.
The group\’s discussion paper, outlines principles for inclusive consultation processes in general and suggests ways of ensuring that the new development framework is implemented in an inclusive and participatory way.
The report\’s main conclusions include:
Meena Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba, recruited the team of academic experts in the field of democratic theory and was lead author of the discussion paper. Describing the process, she said \”writing the paper was actually quite easy, because we all agreed on the fundamental issues of why genuinely participatory processes are important and how to begin to implement such processes.\”
Elizabeth Anderson, Professor of Philosophy and Women\’s Studies at the University of Michigan and a member of the working group, also observed broad agreement amongst the experts involved: \”I found a high degree of consensus among the members of the working group, which is not to say that we all had the same ideas coming in, but that we saw the value of the ideas everyone was putting in,\” she said.
Krishnamurthy says she does not believe that this group\’s recommendations will significantly influence the post-MDG consultation meetings organized at the UN, since this process is almost over. However, she says she believes the group\’s work could be valuable for development policy going forward.
\”The processes that we have argued for and outlined could be applied to more general international political processes and consultations. So, perhaps the document could be used as a model, more generally, for genuinely participatory discussions regarding development.\”
Looking towards next steps for the post-MDG framework, Anderson said that the time for consulting academics has passed. \”The main work going forward for the UN process is not so much to consult academics, as to consult the poor themselves, and to be responsive to their voices. We academics have contributed successfully to the extent that we have facilitated the empowerment of the poor.\”
Krishnamurthy sees an important role for participatory consultation not just in the formulation, but also in the implementation and monitoring of the new development framework.
\”I think the next step really is to think about how genuine participation can be part of the implementation and monitoring of the MDGRs [MDG replacements]. There already exists a body of work on participatory processes in the implementation and monitoring of health-related goals. Perhaps we can draw on this model as we begin to think about how participation can be realized in relation to the MDG-Rs and issues of health.\”
The members of ASAP\’s Participatory Consultations Working Group are Elizabeth Anderson, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women\’s Studies at the University of Michigan; Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Mayer Professor of Philosophy and Political Science and Director of the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University; Lyn Carson, Professor of Applied Politics, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney; John Dryzek, Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow; Meena Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of Manitoba; Vijayendra Rao, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank; Charles Sabel, Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law and Social Science at Columbia Law School; Gilad Tanay, Ph.D. Candidate in the Philosophy Department of Yale University; Catarina Tully, Director of From Over Here; Mark Warren, Professor of Political Science and Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair in the Study of Democracy, University of British Columbia; Scott Wisor, Research Fellow in the Centre for Moral, Social, and Political Theory in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University; Melissa Williams, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto; and Bettina von Lieres, Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Two new groups of ASAP volunteers — the Quick Response Team and Campaign Coordination Team — will work together to provide research, consultation, and other support services to Beyond 2015.
Beyond 2015 is a global coalition of more than 500 civil society organisations from over 80 countries calling for a strong and legitimate development framework to succeed the UN Millennium Development Goals, which are due to expire in 2015. Beyond 2015 is working closely with the UN to ensure that its work on the post-2015 development framework is inclusive, participatory, and responsive to the voices of people living in poverty. The High Level Panel appointed to advise the UN General Assembly regards Beyond 2015 as a key source of civil society input in the MDG replacement process.
ASAP is well placed to contribute research and consultation to Beyond 2015 because two ASAP projects, the Global Poverty Consensus Report and the Institutional Reform Goals, focus on co-ordinating academics\’ research and recommendations for the MDG successors. Beyond 2015 has recognised ASAP as a leading source of academic knowledge concerning poverty alleviation and other development goals.
In order to provide Beyond 2015 with the best academic input possible, ASAP has recruited volunteers from around the world to form the Quick Response Team and the Campaign Coordination Team.
The Quick Response Team consists of 25 academics who specialize in poverty alleviation from diverse disciplines, including philosophy, political science, social science, economics, international business, environmental management, medicine, and other fields. Team members are based in a wide range of countries, including Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. The diversity of the Quick Response Team leads to rich interdisciplinary analysis and research on questions concerning poverty alleviation. Specifically, the Quick Response Team offers the following services:
The Campaign Coordination Team consists of four members who are responsible for liaising between ASAP, the Quick Response Team, and Beyond 2015, and for coordinating the efforts of these groups. Specifically, the Campaign Coordination Team recruits academics from the Quick Response Team to contribute to Beyond 2015 policy briefs, delegates research tasks amongst the Quick Response Team, and synthesizes research findings.
To date, the Quick Response and Campaign Coordination Teams have worked together to provide substantive academic feedback on several Beyond 2015 policy briefs, spanning the themes of Health, Food Security and Nutrition, and Environmental Sustainability. The two teams are also collaborating to compile a list of potential contributors to the Global Poverty Consensus Report who represent a variety of nations and academic disciplines.
The development of the Quick Response and Campaign Coordination Teams marks a pivotal step for ASAP\’s work in facilitating discussion between civil society and academic researchers, and in providing an avenue for academics to engage in poverty-alleviation activism and contribute directly to the efforts to eradicate global poverty.
For more information on the Quick Response Team, please contact Brent Peterkin at brentpeterkin@gmail.com.
For more information on the Campaign Coordination Team, please contact Erin Schutte at erin.schutte@yale.edu or Monica Landy at monica.landy@yale.edu.
Some of the world\’s most prominent scholars of participatory governance and development have joined an ASAP team formed to help ensure an inclusive process in the development of replacement measures for the Millennium Development Goals.
The United Nations is holding a series of thematic consultations with academia, media, private sector, employers and trade unions, civil society and decision makers on the post-MDG development agenda. These meetings are likely to have a great impact on the new framework of international goals that will succeed the MDGs after 2015.
It is crucial that the voices of the global poor are well-represented in these consultations. Towards that end, ASAP, in collaboration with the Beyond 2015 coalition, has formed a team of experts on participatory consultation that will work to ensure that representatives of the global poor our meaningfully engaged in the upcoming UN meetings.
The team:
For more information about this project contact Gilad Tanay (gilad.tanay@yale.edu) or Meena Krishnamurthy (meena.krishnamurthy@gmail.com).
ASAP provided a background brief titled \”After 2015: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go From Here?\” to participants in a civil society dialogue on the MDG successors, held in London on November 1 and 2. The event was organized to allow civil society groups to present proposals the High Level of Eminent Persons, appointed to advise the United Nations General Assembly on the contents of the development framework that will succeed the MDGs in 2015. Prior to the meeting, the High Level Panel published a list of six discussion questions to guide the meeting, addressing themes like jobs and livelihoods, inequality, inclusive growth, and ecologically fragile areas. ASAP responded to these six questions and laid out four principles that should underlie the post-2015 framework.
ASAP\’s background brief is available for download.
