SDGs are designed to leave no one behind

On February 17-18, 2016, I was privileged to be invited, as one of the discussants, in the UN Expert Group meeting that was held at its Headquarters in New York, in which we discussed a wide range of topics that drive to meaningful realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The theme of the meeting was “moving from commitments to results in building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”. All topics discussed were directly or indirectly contributing to the ways for promoting the quality of life. Ideally, SDGs offer a supremely ambitious and transformational vision for our common future till 2030. SDGs are universally applicable to all countries while taking into account the specifics of different national policies, priorities, and their capacities and levels of development. First, the session focused chiefly on sharing responsibilities and resources among levels of governments: localizing the SDGs. The main issue was to determine the roles that various governmental actors, from central to local, should and can play in pursuing sustainable development. To achieve SDGs, requires that all actors have the powers, resources, and capacities they need to play an appropriate and productive role. Localising these goals has been underscored in the UN Secretary General’s 2014 synthesis report which states that “many of the investments to achieve the sustainable development goals will take place at the subnational level and be led by local authorities”. Since all countries (developed and developing countries) are currently committed to sustainable development, attention thus should be put at policy level needs to turn to implementation. This implementation, however, faces a myriad of overarching challenges, such as identifying SDG gaps and needs in a particular country, determining roles of central government and subnational authorities, lack of powers, resources and capacities of all stakeholders, corruption in public sector, lack of open government performance et cetera. In order to achieve SDGs at all levels of government, the following need to be taken into account: first, each country will have to determine its own SDG priorities in the light of its context. Second, many countries need more robust national frameworks to improve working relationships across government levels and nongovernmental actors. Third, many countries need stronger subnational governments with greater capacity for sustainable development. Fourth, subnational priorities need to be aligned with SDGs. If the preceding steps are taken, no doubt, SDGs will contribute to solving urgent global crises and challenges―climate change, energy shortages, health crises, food security etc. The core belief of SDGs is “no one left behind, especially vulnerable group”. The second most important topic was “the normalization of corruption: why it occurs and what can be done to minimise it”? To begin with, corruption has been defined as the misuse of public or private power, office or authority for private benefit”. Corruption can be normalized when it is a way of life rather than a fact of life. Whether it is ‘petty’ or ‘survival’ or ‘grand’ corruption remains evil to an individual and a bottleneck to economic development of the state, including achieving SDGs. Corruption is obviously caused by multiple factors, including low salaries of civil servants, red tape, low risk of detection and punishment, cultural values and practices, and difficult governance environment. Of course, corruption scuppers realization of SDGs and thus needs a holistic approach to stamp it out. No single approach is a panacea to corruption but rather multifarious approaches with the mind of zero tolerance. As noted elsewhere, the rationale for SGDs is to ‘leave no one behind, especially vulnerable group’ by promoting the quality of life. It is extremely impossible to promote the quality of life, ‘where no one is left behind’, while corruption is deeply-seated in the fabric of society. The last key point discussed was evaluation of open government and its objective. The core values of open government are openness, transparency and accountability in government. It was noted that measuring results of open government is still low, as it’s a contemporary trend that is yet to be conceived by all countries. For open government to be successful, political will and civil participation are vitally important. However, policy guidance at the international level is needed; otherwise each country does it in its own context. Another big challenge lies in balancing open government data and other competing values. In essence, open government data is at clash with other competing values, which include: the protection of privacy, national security and the protection of confidential business information. A fundamental question is: to what extent should the government data be open? In principle, there’s a right of access to information possessed public bodies and relevant private entities, but, in this sense, government has to proactively disclose information it chooses to make public, including personal information. On this note, it was recommended to adopt international standards to act as a lodestar for countries to adopt their own legal and policy frameworks that strike a right balance embracing the goals of open government data with legitimate restrictions, e.g. privacy issues. Lastly, it was recommended to promote the exchange of information in countries with similar contexts in order to spread best practices. The writer is an international law expert

Opinions

SDGs are designed to leave no one behind