Advocating for a Strong Post-2015 MDG Agenda

Client: NGO Committee on Financing for Development at the UN

In September 2015, the United Nations will host a meeting of heads of state and government who will commit to a new global “Agenda for Development.” They will endorse a set of “Sustainable Development Goals” which will most likely encompass successors to the current “Millennium Development Goals” plus new economic and environmental goals. There will be specific targets and quantitative indicators to measure progress. But how is the world supposed to organize and finance their realization? That’s a question on which civil society groups have begun to focus. The proposed Practicum would assist civil society organizations at the UN as they work out their advocacy strategies related to the “post-2015 agenda.”

There is already an intergovernmental framework and set of policy commitments on “financing for development” (FfD) and the next regular FfD joint UN meeting with governmental representatives at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank is next March in New York. In addition, the General Assembly created a committee at the UN that is currently working on “financing sustainable development”, which will produce recommendations next year. Furthermore, the Development Cooperation Forum, which is mainly about aid from governments (plus foundations) and is charged to make the aid process more effective, will meet next in June/July 2014 in New York. It has been organizing a series of preparatory meetings. Civil society organizations can intervene in all of these processes. There will be lots of hot air but some actual policy decisions may be agreed. What should the NGOs aim to achieve?

The NGO Committee is made up of representatives of faith-based and secular organizations that advocate for financial, trade and governance reforms that could help reduce poverty in the countries in which their networks are active (see their web page, which highlights the spring 2012 PIA at http://www.ngosonffd.org/). They are not professional lobbyists, but many have deep field experience that they can use in making their case to government representatives at the UN. What they sometimes lack is the technical background on the issues.

GPIA has had four previous PIA projects with the NGO Committee. In 2012, our students were given grounds passes to attend intergovernmental UN meetings, helping the NGO Committee to follow debates on the topics on which they were working. For a sense of the level of analysis and the type of audience that previous such projects have sought to address, see http://www.gpia.info/node/2066.

The faculty supervisor in spring semester will be Barry Herman.

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