Agenda 2030
Deliberation on Sustainable Development Goals
Deliberation on the post-2015 sustainable development agenda are taking shape and the negotiations on scope and financing of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are becoming more concrete and contentious at the same time. Sustainability has been a concern for several decades and has gained greater importance in light of increasing climate warming and continued instabilities of the social and economic sectors at global levels. Two separate UN processes are underway to determine the SDG framework namely the HLPF (High Level Political Forum) and the OWG (Open Working Group) both working on defining and negotiating the world's Sustainable Development Goals. In addition,various stakeholder groups (NGOs, Business, Civil Society, Academic Institutions) and International Organisations have started their own discussions on what issues and priorities should be core features of the coming SDGs.
To be able to agree on a single integrated framework is critical to ensure successful progress towards the definition and implementation of the SDGs. Concrete goals need to be set at national, regional and global levels and concrete financial resources need to be committed for SDG implementation. The issues and themes that will have been identified as being top priorities will set the stage for policy choices concerning sustainable development goals and determine the world's progress.
CSEND, a think tank focusing on the development nexus of trade, poverty, employment and social equity, is contributing to these deliberation through its engagement in both the global, national and regional levels.
Yiu, L., Saner, R. & Bardy, R. (2020). Business Ethics and Leadership, Volume 4, Issue 4, 2020 ISSN (online) – 2520-6311; ISSN (print) – 2520-6761
Maintaining and expanding public goods is synonymous to promoting sustainable development but discussions are needed to clarify how policies need to be coordinated to enable collective action on public goods. Collective action for Public Goods will only be successful if all who partake in such actions can gain complementary benefits that would be either more costly or impossible to achieve without the collective effort. Such complementary benefits are possible provided all stakeholders contributing to the public good of social peace and social cohesion cooperate with each other and preserve this and other public goods be they citizens, civil society organizations, all public authorities and all business firms. This concerted effort for a good cause can certainly be coined “ethics in action”.
CSEND statement by R. Saner, L. Yiu and A. Ajith on the importance of measuring sustainability of cities.
In view of challenges that countries and citizens face when attempting to create sustainable smart cities, it is of paramount importance to take into consideration how the 2030 agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals can help support the creation of sustainable smart cities. Good governance and innovation policy can help cities and countries achieve the goal of creating smart cities and sustainable human development. One of the ways to help countries and cities achieve sustainable development is the ability to measure whether sustainability has been achieved and if not, what can be undertaken to re-align policy and implementation with the 2030 agenda. The CSEND statement provides a comparative analysis of SDG implementation of cities based on the Voluntary Local Reviews (VLR) presented by cities during the HLPF 2019 in New York.
This article describes the UN Agencies that are based in Geneva as well as the major organisations which represent civil society also based in Geneva. As second step, the authors give an example of the complexity and importance of UN decision making processes exemplified with the attempts to create a universal agreement on the protection of older persons. Finally, a description of the Sustainable Development Goals is listed with possible interlinkages with the divisions of IAAP.
Raymond Saner, Lichia Yiu and Melanie Nguyen, (2019)
Abstract
This article discusses how monitoring can be used to support the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a special focus on measuring their attainment through citizen participation. The article argues why monitoring must be an integral part of managing the SDG implementation process and shows that the measurement of SDG attainment remains vague and incomplete. Countries are supposed to review their progress in SDG implementation every four years, but the method of reviewing is left open even though the first review is scheduled to take place in 2019. In addition, and even more urgent, is the inadequate definition of monitoring methods that countries are supposed to deploy. This article studies the various options currently available to conduct the four-year review and breaks down monitoring into two types: micro-monitoring and macro-monitoring, both of which are necessary to ensure effective and efficient monitoring in achieving
This policy brief discusses how UNCTAD and UNECE could meaningfully cooperate in improving the robustness of SDG 17.17.1 indicator and to find ways to improve this indicator’s status from a Tiers III to a Tiers I indicator.
Christian Kingombe & Raymond Saner, December 2018
“Organising Monitoring of SDG based on the three principles (transparency, inclusiveness, participation) and following wikipedia methods using ground truth ICT techniques” panel organised by Raymond Saner during the 2018 ITU-WSIS conference.
The organizer first explained the 2030 Agenda's description of evaluation and monitoring of the SDGs by national and subnational governments. As a next step, the method of ground truth was presented as possible approach to organise monitoring based on the 2030 Agenda's principles which are transparency, inclusiveness and participation. Panels subsequently presented their views as to how monitoring could be organised using ground truth methods such as wikipedia or other ICT based interactive methods. Questions from the floor were encouraged to broaden and deepen the discussion at the same time. As a second step, a case example of a LDC was given and panelists described their use of the Ground Trust Method. The panellists were Prof Raymond Saner, Director Diplomacy Dialogue, CSEND, Geneva, Dr Lichia Saner Yiu, President, CSEND, Geneva, Mrs Barbara Rosen Jacobson, Research & Project Associate and Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque, head of IFRC Community Engagement Unit. The session was moderated by Mrs Beris Gwynn, founder of INCITARE, Coppet, VD, Switzerland.