A year ago, I was excited about what the September 2023 UN Summits would achieve. This September, I’ve given up hope they will deliver any progress. Why? Because there’s no pathway to deliver results. Here are five things we urgently need to fix.
The problem, and the cause
In May 2023, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, published a draft “alarm” report on the SDGs.
“It’s time to sound the alarm. At the mid-way point on our way to 2030, the SDGs are in deep trouble… of the roughly 140 targets with data show
only about 12% are on track; close to half, though showing progress, are moderately
or severely off track and some 30% have either seen no movement or regressed
below the 2015 baseline.” SDG Progress Report 2023
The UN SG also summarised the cause of these problems: “If ever there was an illumination of the short sightedness of our prevailing economic and political systems, it is the ratcheting up of the war on nature.”
The solution in July’s final reports and published as the UN Secretary General’s SDG Stimulus is for countries to have “clear plans and pledges to strengthen action” by 2030, marking a “new phase of accelerated progress” and “to reignite a sense of hope, optimism, and enthusiasm for the 2030 Agenda” (SDG Summit webpage).
No action
A year ago, I began working on the health-related UN High-level meetings, which will take place from 20-22 September. I was hopeful that we, as a global health community, could help drive action and progress at the highest political levels – in all 193 countries.
As the zero drafts of the political declarations (the legally non-binding political commitments that come out from UN High-level meetings) were published, I lost hope. As has been summarised well by many people since and explicitly stated by many government representatives, the political declarations offer “little hope for strengthening” action or progress.
Instead of clear action plans – clear signposts that indicate a direction and speed required to get to a destination, the political declarations are like maps with hundreds of arrows that point everywhere – and ultimately nowhere. As a few government representatives have stated in public, they are useless.
As a former government staffer who has negotiated international agreements, I knew that once a draft is out, iterative changes – and possibly one or two larger substantive changes – are possible in the negotiation process. However, I also knew that a draft is like an architectural design for a building: if you copy-paste the design from the last shed you built, you don’t end up with a palace.
Although many international agreements, in particular at the UN level, are negotiated through an iterative process (making minor tweaks or including passages from other previously negotiated resolutions), UNGA resolutions as legally non-binding resolutions offer room for political ambition – and change. This is why the health-related high-level meetings were established with the first UN special session on HIV/AIDS in 2001.
As we are seeing not only at the UN level but also in recent G7 and G20 fora, convenors (rotating Presidencies or co-facilitators) currently prefer presenting something – a messy, meaningless consensus – rather than a few (or even one) toughly negotiated actions. A few ministerial communiqués (such as the recent G20 health one) fail to come through, but heads of state prefer to issue something (as an annex to a leadership photo) rather than nothing.
Delivering results?
It’s not an easy feat to deliver results. Even if you have a great strategy (or something messy, but generally pointing in the right direction like the SDGs), you need to figure out how to get your plan implemented. You need funding (SDG costing plans were thrown out early in the negotiation process, due to a worry that no one would sign off if the SDGs had a price tag). You need broad political support (the SDGs are still viewed primarily as support for low- and middle-income countries, and for high-income countries as a development aid issue). And you need focused action (the world is complex, with multiple new crises each way, and to achieve a strategic target, you need to be agile and fast in the face of these obstacles). You also need to be crystal clear on what results you are aiming for (preferably quantifiable, backed up by disaggregated data).
The 2023 September draft political declarations do not include any of the above. They will not help deliver results – or get us closer to achieving SDG goals, because the ingredients are wrong.
Going back to the Secretary-General’s problem analysis, the political declarations are a reflection of the “short sightedness of our prevailing economic and political systems“. There’s no long-term transformative vision to tackle today’s problems and regress. There’s no actionable, realistic pathway to delivering results, and to achieving long-term goals. Yes, geopolitical tensions and increased political polarisation is driving declarations to land at their lowest common denominator (the status quo, or in the case of regress only watered down versions thereof). But as this year’s political declarations show, already the zero drafts started with the lowest ambition possible.
5 essential preconditions to deliver results
I have been working in this sector for twenty years, and have had the privilege to see how results are delivered – in a way that reaches real people, to serve their real needs. I’ve also seen how results and plans fall apart. Here are five ingredients I believe are essential to deliver results – equitably, so that we do not fail billions of people:
- Leadership at the highest levels. If the issue is not on the highest agenda, or not even listed on the main menu, you won’t see broad-based support for implementation, not to mention funding at scale. For advocates, this means, your job is to convince and build bridges to leaders. For everyone this means, voting for the right leaders.
- Clear needs-based asks; clear actions. Most people can remember a maximum of 7 issues. The majority can, in busy times, remember 3. In crisis times, 1 ask may get through and resonate. Not a single politician or policymaker will take you seriously if your list of asks is 17 pages long and you tinker with grammar, or if you add 13 more asks across 24 paragraphs in a zero draft. Not a single budget holder or policymaker will implement 23 pages of priorities. Focus and prioritise transformative asks while building a broad needs-based coalition, don’t tinker and add and further fragment the community you work in.
- Serve all people, not power. In our era of increasing inequality, the lines between politics, advocacy, and power (money) are increasingly blurring. If we have voted in the wrong leaders (or boards have selected wrong leaders to head organizations or companies), we are likely to get the wrong policies. If we as advocates take money from invested funders, our asks are likely to reflected those invested interests. But even more important is what politicians and leaders who claim to serve all people do when they gain power. Do they fall prey to “power corrupts” or manage to retain a moral compass?
- Mandate, not mission creep. Focus on what you do well. Learn. Deliver. Repeat. Teach and help others to deliver.
- Honesty and integrity. Speak out. Sound the alarm. Call out facts. But most importantly, don’t claim the failed status quo, and business as usual will deliver what it clearly hasn’t delivered so far. Celebrate results, not claims, photos, and processes. Hope and optimism are not strategies.
Katri Bertram 