Event Information

2015 is a crucial year for the international community. For the first time, all nations will converge upon a new set of Sustainable Development Goals applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries, with the experience of implementing the Millennium Development Goals to build upon. Implementation is the critical component.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development program hosted a day-long private conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC on Monday, March 30 to focus on “Governance innovations for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”

Hosted in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, this high-level conference drew on experiences from the North-South Helsinki Process on Globalization and Development carried out over the past 15 years. The Helsinki Process presaged many of the prerequisites for achieving accelerated progress by linking goal-setting to goal-implementation and by utilizing multistakeholder processes to mobilize society and financing for social and environmental goals to complement sound economic and financial policies. 

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Brookings President Strobe Talbott shakes hands with Finland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja after welcoming participants to the conference.

Former President of Finland Tarja Halonen shares insights in the conference’s opening panel.

Over 75 conference participants from governments, multilateral institutions, civil society, the private sector, and think tanks participated in a number of roundtable discussions throughout the day.

President Halonen and Minister Tuomioja share lessons from the Helsinki process as conference participants consider paths forward for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Event Materials

• 330 PostReportFinal
• Conference Agenda_FINAL
• March 30 List of Registrants
• Conference Statement Brookings Post2015 Implementation

Event Information

The year 2015 will be a milestone year, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda by world leaders in September; the Addis Ababa Accord on financing for development in July; and the conclusion of climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris in December. The draft Addis Ababa Accord, which focuses on the actions needed to attain the SDGs, highlights the key role envisaged for the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the post-2015 agenda. Paragraph 65 of the draft accord notes: “We call on the international finance institutions to establish a process to examine the role, scale, and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda.”          

Against this backdrop, on April 18, 2015, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings held a private roundtable with the leaders of the MDBs and other key stakeholders to discuss the role of the MDBs in supporting the post-2015 development agenda.

The meeting focused on four questions:

1. What does the post-2015 development agenda and the ambitions of the Addis and Paris conferences imply for the MDBs?


Given the ability of the MDBs to leverage shareholder resources, they can be efficient and effective mechanisms for scaling up development cooperation, particularly with respect to the agenda on investing in people and to the financing of sustainable infrastructure. New roles, instruments and partnerships might be needed.

2. How can MDBs best take advantage of the political attention that is being paid to the various conferences in 2015?   


The World Bank and selected regional development banks have launched a series of initiatives to optimize their balance sheets, address other constraints and enhance their catalytic role in crowding in private finance. And new institutions and mechanisms are coming to the fore. But the responses are not coordinated to best take advantage of each MDB’s comparative advantage.

3. What are the key impediments to scaling up the role and engagement of the MDBs?


Views on constraints are likely to differ but discussions should cover policy dialogue, capacity building, capital, leverage, shareholder backing on volume, instruments on leverage and risk mitigation, safeguards, and governance. 

4. How should the MDBs respond to the proposal to establish a process to examine the role, scale and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda?   


A proactive response and engagement on the part of the MDBs would facilitate a better understanding of the contribution that the MDBs can make and greater support among shareholders for a coherent and stepped-up role.

Event Materials

• Participant List
• MDB PostEvent Summary

2015 is a pivotal year. Three major workstreams among all the world’s nations are going forward this year under the auspices of the United Nations to develop goals, financing, and frameworks for the “post-2015 sustainable development agenda.” First, after two years of wide-ranging consultation, the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September will endorse a new set of global goals for 2030 to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate this year. Second, to support this effort, a financing for development (FFD) conference took place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to identify innovative ways of mobilizing private and public resources for the massive investments necessary to achieve the new goals. And third, in Paris in December the final negotiating session will complete work on a global climate change framework. 

These three landmark summits will, with luck, provide the broad strategic vision, the specific goals, and the financing modalities for addressing the full range of systemic threats. Most of all, these three summit meetings will mobilize the relevant stakeholders and actors crucial for implementing the post-2015 agenda—governments, international organizations, business, finance, civil society, and parliaments—into a concerted effort to achieve transformational outcomes. Achieving systemic sustainability is a comprehensive, inclusive effort requiring all actors and all countries to be engaged.

These three processes represent a potential historic turning point from “business-as-usual” practices and trends and to making the systemic transformations that are required to avoid transgressing planetary boundaries and critical tipping points. Missing from the global discourse so far is a realistic assessment of the political decisions and institutional innovations that would be required to implement the post-2015 sustainable development agenda (P2015).

For 2015, it is necessary is to make sure that by the end of year the three workstreams have been welded together as a singular vision for global systemic transformation involving all countries, all domestic actors, and all international institutions. The worst outcome would be that the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 are seen as simply an extension of the 2015 MDGs—as only development goals exclusively involving developing countries. This outcome would abort the broader purposes of the P2015 agenda to achieve systemic sustainability and to involve all nations and reduce it to a development agenda for the developing world that by itself would be insufficient to make the transformations required.

Systemic risks of financial instability, insufficient job-creating economic growth, increasing inequality, inadequate access to education, health, water and sanitation, and electricity, “breaking points” in planetary limits, and the stubborn prevalence of poverty along with widespread loss of confidence of people in leaders and institutions now require urgent attention and together signal the need for systemic transformation.

As a result, several significant structural changes in institution arrangements and governance are needed as prerequisites for systemic transformation. These entail (i) political decisions by country leaders and parliaments to ensure societal engagement, (ii) institutional innovations in national government processes to coordinate implementation, (iii) strengthening the existing global system of international institutions to include all actors, (iv) the creation of an international monitoring mechanism to oversee systemic sustainability trajectories, and (v) realize the benefits that would accrue to the entire P2015 agenda by the engagement of the systemically important countries through fuller utilization of  G20 leaders summits and finance ministers meetings as enhanced global steering mechanisms toward sustainable development.   Each of these changes builds on and depends on each other.

I. Each nation makes a domestic commitment to a new trajectory toward 2030

For global goal-setting to be implemented, it is essential that each nation go beyond a formal agreement at the international level to then embark on a national process of deliberation, debate, and decision-making that adapts the global goals to the domestic institutional and cultural context and commits the nation to them as a long-term trajectory around which to organize its own systemic transformation efforts. Such a process would be an explicitly political process involving national leaders, parliaments or rule-making bodies, societal leaders, business executives, and experts to increase public awareness and to guide the public conversation toward an intrinsically national decision which prioritizes the global goals in ways which fit domestic concerns and circumstances. This political process would avoid the “one-size-fits-all” approach and internalize and legitimate each national sustainability trajectory.

So far, despite widespread consultation on the SDGs, very little attention has been focused on the follow-up to a formal international agreement on them at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2015. The first step in implementation of the SDGs and the P2015 agenda more broadly is to generate a national commitment to them through a process in which relevant domestic actors modify, adapt, and adopt a national trajectory the embodies the hopes, concerns and priorities of the people of each country. Without this step, it is unlikely that national systemic sustainability trajectories will diverge significantly enough from business-as-usual trends to make a difference. More attention needs to now be given to this crucial first step.  And explicit mention of the need for it should appear in the UNGA decisions in New York in September.

II. A national government institutional innovation for systemic transformation

The key feature of systemic risks is that each risk generates spillover effects that go beyond the confines of the risk itself into other domains. This means that to manage any systemic risk requires broad, inter-disciplinary, multi-sectoral approaches. Most governments have ministries or departments that manage specific sectoral programs in agriculture, industry, energy, health, education, environment, and the like when most challenges now are inter-sectoral and hence inter-ministerial. Furthermore, spillover linkages create opportunities in which integrated approaches to problems can capture intrinsic synergies that generate higher-yield outcomes if sectoral strategies are simultaneous and coordinated.

The consequence of spillovers and synergies for national governments is that “whole-of-government” coordinating committees are a necessary institutional innovation to manage effective strategies for systemic transformation. South Korea has used inter-ministerial cabinet level committees that include private business and financial executives as a means of addressing significant interconnected issues or problems requiring multi-sectoral approaches. The Korea Presidential Committee on Green Growth, which contained more than 20 ministers and agency heads with at least as many private sector leaders, proved to be an extremely effective means of implementing South Korea’s commitment to green growth.

III.  A single global system of international institutions

The need for a single mechanism for coordinating the global system of international institutions to implement the P2015 agenda of systemic transformation is clear. However, there are a number of other larger reasons why the forging of such a mechanism is crucial now.

The Brettons Woods era is over. It was over even before the initiative by China to establish the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing and the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai. It was over because of the proliferation in recent years of private and official agencies and actors in development cooperation and because of the massive growth in capital flows that not only dwarf official development assistance (concessional foreign aid) but also IMF resources in the global financial system. New donors are not just governments but charities, foundations, NGOs, celebrities, and wealthy individuals. New private sources of financing have mushroomed with new forms of sourcing and new technologies. The dominance of the IMF and the World Bank has declined because of these massive changes in the context.

The emergence of China and other emerging market economies requires acknowledgement as a fact of life, not as a marginal change. China in particular deserves to be received into the world community as a constructive participant and have its institutions be part of the global system of international institutions, not apart from it. Indeed, China’s Premier, Li Keqiang, stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.”

The economic, social and environmental imperatives of this moment are that the world’s people and the P2015 agenda require that all international institutions of consequence be part of a single coordinated effort over the next 15 years to implement the post-2015 agenda for sustainable development. The geopolitical imperatives of this moment also require that China and China’s new institutions be thoroughly involved as full participants and leaders in the post-2015 era. If nothing else, the scale of global investment and effort to build and rebuild infrastructure requires it.

It is also the case that the post-2015 era will require major replenishments in the World Bank and existing regional development banks, and significantly stronger coordination among them to address global infrastructure investment needs in which the AIIB and the NDB must now be fully involved. The American public and the U.S. Congress need to fully grasp the crucial importance for the United States, of the IMF quota increase and governance reform.  These have been agreed to by most governments but their implementation is stalled in the U.S. Congress. To preserve the IMF’s role in the global financial system and the role of the U.S. in the international community, the IMF quota increase and IMF governance reform must be passed and put into practice. Congressional action becomes all the more necessary as the effort is made to reshape the global system of international institutions to accommodate new powers and new institutions within a single system rather than stumble into a fragmented, fractured, and fractious global order where differences prevail over common interests.

The IMF cannot carry out its significant responsibility for global financial stability without more resources. Other countries cannot add to IMF resources proportionately without U.S. participation in the IMF quota increase.   Without the US contribution, IMF members will have to fund the IMF outside the regular IMF quota system, which means de-facto going around the United States and reducing dramatically the influence of the U.S. in the leadership of the IMF. This is a self-inflicted wound on the U.S., which will damage U.S. credibility, weaken the IMF, and increase the risk of global financial instability. By blocking the IMF governance reforms in the IMF agreed to by the G-20 in 2010, the U.S. is single-handedly blocking the implementation of the enlargement of voting shares commensurate with increased emerging market economic weights.  This failure to act is now widely acknowledged by American thought leaders to be encouraging divergence rather than convergence in the global system of institutions, damaging U.S. interests.

IV. Toward a single monitoring mechanism for the global system of international institutions

The P2015 agenda requires a big push toward institutionalizing a single mechanism for the coordination of the global system of international institutions.  The international coordination arrangement today, is the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation created at the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.  This arrangement, which recognizes the increasingly complex context and the heightened tensions between emerging donor countries and traditional western donors, created a loose network of country platforms, regional arrangements, building blocks and forums to pluralize the architecture to reflect the increasingly complex set of agents and actors. This was an artfully arranged compromise, responding to the contemporary force field four years ago.

Now is a different moment. The issues facing the world are both systemic and urgent; they are not confined to the development of developing countries, and still less to foreign aid. Geopolitical tensions are, if anything, higher now than then.  But they also create greater incentives to find areas of cooperation and consensus among major powers who have fundamentally different perspectives on other issues. Maximizing the sweet spots where agreement and common interest can prevail is now of geopolitical importance.  Gaining agreement on institutional innovations to guide the global system of international institutions in the P2015 era would be vital for effective outcomes but also importantly ease geopolitical tensions.

Measurement matters; monitoring and evaluation is a strategic necessity to implementing any agenda, and still more so, an agenda for systemic transformation.  As a result, the monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the P2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them.  The UN, the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF all have participated in joint data gathering efforts under the IDGs  in the 1990s and the MDGs in the 2000s.   Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play, but they need to be brought together now under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system and to help the G20 finance ministers coordinate their functional programs.   

The OECD has established a strong reputation in recent years for standard setting in a variety of dimensions of the global agenda.  Given the strong role of the OECD in relation to the G20 and its broad outreach to “Key Partners” among the emerging market economies, the OECD could be expected to take a strong role in global benchmarking and monitoring and evaluation of the P2015 Agenda.  The accession of China to the OECD Development Centre, which now has over fifty member countries, and the presence and public speech of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the OECD on July 1^st, bolsters the outreach of the OECD and its global profile.

But national reporting is the centerpiece and the critical dimension of monitoring and evaluation.  To guide the national reporting systems and evaluate their results, a  new institutional arrangement is needed that is based on national leaders with responsibility for implementation of the sustainable development agendas from each country and is undertaken within the parameters of the global SDGs and the P2015 benchmarks.

V.   Strengthening global governance and G20 roles

G-20 leaders could make a significant contribution to providing the impetus toward advancing systemic sustainability by creating a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council charged with pulling together the national statistical indicators and implementing benchmarks on the SDGs in G-20 countries.  The G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC) would consist of the heads of the presidential committees on sustainable development charged with coordinating P2015 implementation in G-20 countries.  Representing systemically important countries, they would also be charged with assessing the degree to which national policies and domestic efforts by G20 countries generate positive or negative spillover effects for the rest of the world.  This G-20 GSDC would also contribute to the setting of standards for the global monitoring effort, orchestrated perhaps by the OECD, drawing on national data bases from all countries using the capacities of the international institutions to generate understanding of global progress toward systemic sustainability. 

The UN is not in a position to coordinate the global system of international institutions in their functional roles in global sustainable development efforts.  The G-20 itself could take steps through the meetings of G-20 Finance Ministers to guide the global system of international institutions in the implementation phase of the P2015 agenda to begin in 2016. The G-20 already has a track record in coordinating international institutions in the response to the global financial crisis in 2008 and its aftermath. The G-20 created the Financial Stability Board (FSB), enlarged the resources for the IMF, agreed to reform the IMF’s governance structure, orchestrated relations between the IMF and the FSB, brought the OECD into the mainstream of G-20 responsibilities and has bridged relations with the United Nations by bringing in finance ministers to the financing for development conference in Addis under Turkey’s G-20 leadership. 

There is a clear need to coordinate the financing efforts of the IMF, with the World Bank and the other regional multilateral development banks (RMDBs), with the AIIB and the BRICS NDB, and with other public and private sector funding sources, and to assess the global institutional effort as whole in relation to the P2015 SDG trajectories.  The G-20 Finance Ministers grouping would seem to be uniquely positioned to be an effective and credible means of coordinating these otherwise disparate institutional efforts.  The ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum and the Busuan Global Partnership provide open inclusive space for knowledge sharing and consultation but need to be supplemented by smaller bodies capable of making decisions and providing strategic direction.

Following the agreements reached in the three U.N. workstreams for 2015, the China G-20 could urge the creation of a formal institutionalized global monitoring and coordinating mechanism at the China G-20 Summit in September 2016. By having the G-20 create a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC), it could build on the national commitments to SDG trajectories to be made next year by U.N. members countries and on the newly formed national coordinating committees established by governments to implement the P2015 Agenda, giving the G-20 GSDC functional effectiveness, clout and credibility.   Whereas there is a clear need to compensate for the sized-biased representation of the G20 with still more intensive G-20 outreach and inclusion, including perhaps eventually considering shifting to a constituency based membership, for now the need in this pivotal year is to use the momentum to make political decisions and institutional innovations which will crystallize the P2015 strategic vision toward systemic sustainability into mechanisms and means of implementation.

By moving forward on these recommendations, the G-20 Leaders Summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered P2015 Agenda, going beyond finance to issues closer to peoples’ homes and hearts. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues.  The G-20 Finance Ministers would be seen as playing an appropriate role by serving as the mobilizing and coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the P2015 Agenda.  And the G-20 GSDC would become the effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability not only within G20 countries but also in terms of their positive and negative spillover effects on systemic sustainability paths of other countries, contributing to standard setting and benchmarking for global monitoring and evaluation.    These global governance innovations could re-energize the G20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the P2015 Agenda. 

As the MDGs culminate this year, as the three U.N. workstreams on SDGs, FFD, and UNFCC are completed, the world needs to think ahead to the implementation phase of the P2015 sustainable development agenda. Given the scale and scope of the P2015 agenda, these five governance innovations need to be focused on now so they can be put in place in 2016.

These will ensure (i) that national political commitments and engagement by all countries are made by designing, adopting, and implementing their own sustainable development trajectories and action plans; (ii) that national presidential committees are established, composed of key ministers and private sector leaders to coordinate each country’s comprehensive integrated sustainability strategy; (iii) that all governments and international institutions are accepted by and participate in a single global system of international institutions;   (iv) that a G-20 monitoring mechanism be created by the China G-20 in September 2016 that is comprised of the super-minister officials heading the national presidential coordinating committees implementing the P2015 agenda domestically in G-20 countries, as a first step;  and (v) that the G-20 Summit leaders in Antalya in November 2015 and in China in September 2016 make clear their own commitment to the P2015 agenda and their responsibility for its adaption, adoption and implementation internally in their countries but also for assessing G-20 spillover impacts on the rest of the world, as well as for deploying their G-20 finance ministers to mobilize and coordinate the global system of international institutions toward achieving the P2015 agenda.

Without these five structural changes, it will be more likely that most countries and actors will follow current trends rather than ratchet up to the transformational trajectories necessary to achieve systemic sustainability nationally and globally by 2030.

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogag, “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---With a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, UNDP, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance: Scoping Papers, (Beijing: UNDP, October 2014).

Zhang Haibing, “A Critique of the G-20’s Role in UN’s post-2015 Development Agenda”, in Catrina Schlager and Chen Dongxiao (eds), China and the G-20: The Interplay between an Emerging Power and an Emerging Institution, (Shanghai: Shanghai Institutes for International Studies [SIIS] and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung [FES], 2015) 290-208.

Global Review, (Shanghai:  SIIS, 2015,) 97-105.

Colin I. Bradford, “Global Economic Governance and the Role International Institutions”, UNDP, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance: Scoping Papers, (Beijing: UNDP, October 2014).

Colin I. Bradford, “Action implications of focusing now on implementation of the   post-2015 agenda.”, (Washington: The Brookings Institution, Global Economy and Development paper, September 2015).

Colin I. Bradford, “Systemic Sustainability as the Strategic Imperative for the Future”, (Washington: The Bookings Institution, Global Economy and Development paper; September 2015). 

Wonhyuk Lim and Richard Carey, “Connecting Up Platforms and Processes for Global Development to 2015 and Beyond:  What can the G-20 do to improve coordination and deliver development impact?”, (Paris: OECD  Paper, February 2013).

Xiaoyun Li and Richard Carey, “The BRICS and the International Development System: Challenge and Convergence”, (Sussex: Institute for Development Studies, Evidence Report No. 58, March 2014).

Xu Jiajun and Richard Carey, “China’s Development Finance: Ambition, Impact and Transparency,” (Sussex :  Institute for Development Studies, IDS Policy Brief, 2015).

Soogil Young, “Domestic Actions for Implementing Integrated Comprehensive Strategies:  Lessons from Korea’s Experience with Its Green Growth Strategy”, Washington: Paper for the Brookings conference on “Governance Innovations to Implement the Post-2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, March 30, 2015).

“The Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a ‘safe operating space’ for human beings,” concludes a paper by 18 researchers “trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world,” published in Science in January 2015. That our planetary environment seems to be approaching “breaking points” is but one of several systemic threats looming on the horizon or lurking under the surface.

Since the economic crisis in 2008, the world has learned that financial instability is a global threat to sustainable livelihoods and economic progress. The underlying dynamics of technological change seem to be more labor displacing than labor absorbing, creating increasing anxiety that employment and career trajectories are permanently threatened. These two challenges undermine public confidence in the market economy, in institutions, and in political leaders. They constitute systemic threats to the credibility of markets and democracy to generate socially and politically sustainable outcomes for societies.

The fact that one billion people still live in extreme poverty, that there are scores of countries that are considered to be “failed states,” and that genocide, virulent violence, and terrorism are fed by this human condition of extreme deprivation together constitute a social systemic threat, global in scope. These challenges together merge with a growing public awareness of global inequality between nations and of increasing inequality within nations. The power of money in public life, whether in the form of overt corruption or covert influence, disenfranchises ordinary people and feeds anger and distrust of the current economic system. 

These challenges are global in reach, systemic in scale, and urgent. They require deliberate decisions to abandon “business-as-usual” approaches, to rethink current practices and engage in actions to transform the underlying fundamentals in order to avoid the collapse and catastrophe of systems that average people depend upon for normal life.  

Systemic risks are real. Generating new pathways to systemic sustainability are the new imperatives. Holistic approaches are essential, since the economic, social, environmental, and political elements of systemic risk are interrelated.  “Sustainable development,” once the label for environmentally sensitive development paths for developing countries, is now the new imperative for systemic sustainability for the global community as a whole.

2015 is a pivotal year for global transformation. Three major work streams among all nations are going forward this year under the auspices of the United Nations to develop goals, financing, and frameworks for the “post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”  First, in New York in September—after two years of wide-ranging consultation—the U.N. General Assembly will endorse a new set of global development goals to be achieved by 2030, to build upon and replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate this year. Second, to support this effort, a Financing for Development (FFD) conference took place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to identify innovative ways to mobilize private and public resources for the massive investments necessary to achieve the new goals. And third, in Paris in December, the final negotiating session will complete work on a global climate change framework.  

These three landmark summits will, with luck, provide the broad strategic vision, the specific goals, and the financing for addressing the full range of systemic threats.  Most of all, these events, along with the G-20 summit of leaders of the major economies in November in Antalya, Turkey, will mobilize the relevant stakeholders and actors crucial for implementing the post-2015 agenda—governments, international organizations, business, finance, civil society, and parliaments—into a concerted effort to achieve transformational outcomes. Achieving systemic sustainability is a comprehensive, inclusive effort requiring all actors and all countries to be engaged. [3]

Four major elements need to be in place for this process to become a real instrument for achieving systemic sustainability across the board. 

First, because everyone everywhere faces systemic threats, the response needs to be universal. The post-2015 agenda must be seen as involving advanced industrial countries, emerging market economies, and developing nations. Systemic sustainability is not a development agenda limited to developing countries, nor just a project to eradicate poverty, nor just an agenda for development cooperation and foreign aid. It is a high policy agenda for all countries that goes to the core of economics, governance, and society, addressing fundamental dynamics in finance, energy, employment, equity, growth, governance, and institutions.

Second, systemic threats are generated because of spillover effects from activities that used to be considered self-contained and circumscribed in their impact. The world of silos and vertical self-sufficiency has given way to an integrated world in which horizontal linkages are as important as vertical specialization. The result of these interlinkages is that synergies can be realized by taking comprehensive integrated approaches to major issues. In this new context, positive-sum benefits are potentially more easily realized, but integrated strategies are necessary for doing so. 

This new context of spillovers and synergies has two implications. The domestic dimension is that whole-of-government approaches are necessary for addressing systemic sustainability. Cross-sectoral, inter-ministerial approaches are essential.  Since markets alone are not able to realize optimal outcomes in the widespread presence of externalities, the only way to realize the positive sum potential of synergies is through coordination among related actors. On the international dimension, this new context also requires more cooperation and coordination than competition to realize synergistic, positive-sum outcomes.

Third, domestic political pressures are primary. This may be a variant of the old saying that “all politics is local.”  However, the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis has been a world of hurt in which impacted publics are feeling anger and alienation from an economic system that has threatened their jobs, incomes, pensions, homes, and livelihoods. The task of leaders is not to pander to these plights but to lead their people to understand the vital linkage between domestic conditions and external forces and the degree to which the global context inevitably impacts on domestic conditions. Leaders need to be able to explain to their people that systemic threats have inextricable global–domestic linkages that need to be managed, not ignored.

Fourth, given all this, it is absolutely necessary that the global system of international institutions be “on the same page,” share the same vision, strategy, and goals, rather than each taking its primary mandate as a writ for independence from the common agenda. 

The major challenges for global governance in this pivotal turn from goal-setting in 2015 to the beginning of implementation in 2016 are to ensure (i) that all countries adapt and adopt the post-2015 agenda in ways that are congruent with their national culture and context while at the same time committing to reporting on all aspects of the agenda; (ii) that whole-of-government institutional mechanisms and processes are put in place domestically to realize the synergies that can accrue only from comprehensive, integrated approaches and that international cooperation mechanisms gain greater traction to reap the positive-sum outcomes from global consultation, coordination, and cooperation;  (iii) that national political leaders learn new modes of domestic and international leadership that are capable of articulating the new context and new systemic risks that need to be managed both internally and globally; and (iv) that each international institution realizes the need to be part of a system-wide global effort to achieve systemic sustainability through concerted efforts of all relevant actors working together on behalf of a common global agenda. [2]

Currently under discussion are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 indicators for 2030 to extend and replace the eight MDGs for 2015, which had 21 targets and a variety of indicators, which in turn extended and replaced seven International Development Goals (IDGs) agreed to in 1995 by development cooperation ministers from OECD countries. There is much chatter now about whether the SDGs and indicators are too many, too ambitious, and too widespread.  The Economist asserts that the SDGs “would be worse than useless,” dubbing them “stupid development goals”. And Charles Kenney at the Center for Global Development in a thoughtful piece argues that “we lost the plot.” 

It may be true that there is too much detail. Two previous efforts, one by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Korean Development Institute (KDI) had 10 goals, and the other, the U.N. High Level Panel of Eminent Persons report in 2013 had 12 goals.[iii] This quibble alone does not prevent the use of political imagination to conjure a storyline that connects the 17 proposed SDGs with the vision of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda as addressing systemic threats and having comprehensive integrated strategies for addressing them. 

Fourteen of the 17 SDGs can be clustered into four overarching strategic components: poverty (2); access (6); sustainability (5); and partnership (1). The other three goals have to do with growth and governance (institutions), which were underpinnings for both the IDGs and the MDGs though not embodied in the sets of goals themselves. The four SDG components seamlessly continue the storyline of the IDGs and the MDGs, both of which included poverty as the first goal, gender equality- education-and-health as issues of access, an environmental sustainability goal, and (in the MDGs) a partnership goal. The two underpinning components of growth and governance remain crucial and, if anything, are still more important today than 20 years ago when the global goal-setting process began. 

Continuity of strategic direction in transformational change is an asset, ensuring persistence and staying power until the goal is fulfilled.

The SDGs now convey a sense of the scale and scope of systemic threats. The sustainability goals (goals 11 through 15) highlight the environmental threats from urbanization, over-consumption/production, climate change, destruction of ocean life, to ecosystems, forests, deserts, land, and biodiversity. No knowledgeable person would leave out any of these issues when considering threats to environmental sustainability. 

The fact that goal 10, to “reduce inequality within and among countries,” is on the list of SDGs signals a new fact of political life that inequality is now front-and-center on the political agenda globally and nationally in many countries, advanced, emerging, and developing. This goal is really the “chapeaux” for goals 3 through 7, which deal with health, education, gender, water and sanitation, and energy for all—the access goals that must be met to “reduce inequality within and among countries.” It is inconceivable that a group of global goals for a sustainable future in the 21st century would leave out any of these goals crucial for achieving social sustainability, and undoubtedly political sustainability as well. 

Reducing inequality is not an end in itself but a means of providing skills and livelihoods for people in a knowledge-based global economy and hence the social and political sustainability required for stable growth. Growth is both a means and an end.

The two poverty goals are now more ambitious and inclusive than earlier. “Ending poverty” is different from reducing it, as in the IDGs and MDGs. And “ending hunger” through food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture are means to the end of eliminating poverty. For the Economist, eliminating extreme poverty should be the most important goal, stating that “it would have a much better chance of being achieved if it stood at the head of a very short list.”

This observation would apply if the SDGs are again intended to be, as the IDGs and MDGs were previously, development goals for developing countries. But development for developing countries is not the primary thrust and drive of the post-2015 agenda taken as a whole.  

The world is now facing systemic risks that threaten unacceptable collapse in social, political, economic, and environmental systems. A global community under threat from systemic risks needs a strategic vision and a pathway forward with specific guideposts, benchmarks, and means of implementation. 

The SDGs, the FFD documents and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change accords will not be perfect. But, the three U.N. processes in 2015 capture the main elements, attempt to get specific in terms of priority actions and accountability, and together will provide a vision for the future for achieving systemic sustainability in its multiple, interconnected dimensions.

To think that simplifying the wording is going to simplify the problems is illusory. To narrow the vision to poor countries and poor people is to misunderstand the systemic nature of the threats and the scope and scale of them. 

This is a global agenda for all. Partnership now means we are all in the same boat, no longer acting on a global North-South axis of donor and recipient. Without the participation of all nations, all stakeholders, and all the international institutions, actual transformation will fall short of necessary transformation, and the world will reach breaking points that will inflict pain, suffering, and high costs on everyone in the future. The post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030 brings an awareness of the future into the present and makes us understand that the time for action is now. 

Endnotes:

[1] For an example of a recent multistakeholder interactive conference on this set of issues, review the related report on the Brookings-Finland private meeting on March 30, 2015 on “implementing the post 2015 sustainable development agenda.

[2] See “Action Implications of Focusing Now on the Implementation of the post-2015 Agenda,” which outlines in more detail the key elements of implementation that need to be set in motion during 2015 and 2016, emphasizing especially roles for the Turkey G-20 summit in 2015 and the China G-20 summit in 2016.  

The consequences of the global financial crisis still ripple through the international system after the initial surge in global economic cooperation and governance immediately following the crisis. The ultimate effects have been that, while some elements of the international system of institutions have gotten stronger, the system as a whole is now seen as weaker, fractured, and driven more by geopolitical conflict than by institutional norms and frameworks.

The issue is how to move the global policy agenda forward in such a way that substantive progress induces institutional strengthening. The next two years offer new opportunities for creating a positive symbiosis between policy advance and systemic improvements.

I. The U.N. global agenda

The United Nations global agenda has three tracks that relate to each other and provide opportunities to pull the world together around an integrated, comprehensive strategic vision for the world’s people and strengthen the international system in the process.

The first track is the elaboration of a sustainable development agenda for each and all countries, not just developing countries, but advanced industrial economies and emerging market countries too. This effort is already well underway and will result in a summit of global leaders in September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. This process entails a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 to be developed and affirmed by and for all countries, and which succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate in 2015 and applied only to developing countries. This post-2015 goal-setting process will provide the substantive, cross-cutting, multidimensional agenda for the next 15 years. It is simultaneously a social, economic, and environmental agenda that relates goals to each other in functional terms requiring coordination among public and private sectors, ministries, civil society groups, and international institutions.

The second track is the financing for development (FFD) track, which goes well beyond reliance conceptually and practically on foreign aid or official development assistance as in the past. FFD for the SDGs includes a focus, first and foremost, on domestic sources of finance beyond government revenues. FFD is engaged in searches for innovative sources of finance, private sector mobilization of resources, creative market incentives and mechanisms, initiatives by civil society organizations, and development of entrepreneurial and small- and medium-size business opportunities that address global issues. This effort resulted in a global leaders meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July of 2015 that reached agreement on the major thrusts for mobilizing resources for the post-2015 agenda (Kharas and MacArthur (2014)).

The third track is the global climate change negotiations currently under way to achieve a global agreement on the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), which will result in a global summit in Paris in December of 2015. While these detailed negotiations on climate are a separate track, it is clear that the sustainable human development trajectories being put forward in the post-2015 agenda impact and are crucially affected by the efficacy of the climate change arrangements worked out in the UNFCCC agreements in 2015.

Whereas these three tracks operationally are going forward separately, the substantive aspects of each track affect and are affected by the content of the other two. The ultimate convergence of these three streams of activities and actions will have to occur in the beginning of 2016 at the global, regional, and national levels if the implementation phase is to be successful. A business-as-usual approach will not be satisfactory if at the global level, for example, the international institutions are unable to coordinate their work, or if at the national level ministries remain within their “silos” of sectoral expertise and responsibility.

Synergies exist between goal areas that cannot be realized without coordination across sectors and institutions, impacting goal achievement (see OECD 2014 PCD). A systemic approach is necessary at all levels to address the global challenges identified in the post-2015 agenda.

II. The G-20 summits for 2015 and 2016

A major opportunity presents itself in terms of providing impetus, momentum, and leadership for these large work streams and their convergence by linking the G-20 presidency of Turkey for 2015 with the G-20 leadership of China in 2016. Turkey and China working together in tandem within the G-20 Troika over the next two years to explain, support, and sustain the mobilization effort toward the post-2015 agenda could be a major contribution to it but also strengthen the global system of international institutions in the process. For the Turkish G-20 summit, scheduled to take place in November 2015 in Antalya, between UNGA in New York in September and the UNFCCC in Paris in December, Turkey could use part of its G-20 summit to have the leaders of the world’s largest advanced and emerging market economies explain to the world the nature, importance, and relevance of the SDGs to domestic concerns and priorities of ordinary people.

A weakness of G-20 summits thus far has been that G-20 leaders have become trapped by finance ministers’ issues and discourse and have failed to connect with their publics on larger issues of direct concern to people everywhere. The post-2015 agenda provides an opportunity for G-20 leaders to lead their people in understanding how global efforts relate to domestic conditions and why dealing only domestically with issues will not suffice to advance the human agenda where the global interface is extremely palpable. G-20 leaders, under Turkey’s leadership, could step out beyond the technical jargon of finance ministries and central banks, as important as those issues continue to be, and directly address the longer-term, fundamental conditions that affect the lives and livelihoods of all people. They would thereby strengthen their own leadership profile internally by explaining the global dimensions of domestic issues as means of creating public support for the sustainability issues in the post-2015 agenda.

Past experience with the International Development Goals (IDGs) of the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals since the early 2000s  demonstrates that linking the goal-setting effort to the implementation phase yields powerful results by capturing the political momentum of the goal setting phase and carrying that energy forward directly into implementation efforts. If Turkey and China were to work together in 2015 and 2016, thereby bridging the goal-setting year in 2015 to the beginning of the implementation phase in 2016, they could provide the catalytic leadership and continuity that would maximize the staying power of the momentum from one phase to the next.

China, for its G-20 summit preparations in 2016, could focus on developing a road map, in concert with the other countries and international organizations and especially with the United Nations, that would explicitly keep alive the activities, groups, and initiatives manifested in the goal-setting phase into the next phase of implementation beginning in 2016. These combined efforts by Turkey and China could jump-start societies focusing on accelerating efforts to transform their societies by mobilizing policies and resources for highly related goal areas of direct benefit to their people.

The immediate effects of coordinated sequential efforts by Turkey and China in their respective G-20 years to advance the post-2015 agenda would be to strengthen the relationship between the G-20 and the United Nations on the agenda itself and to strengthen the G-20 summits by having leaders lead on issues of central concern to their people, strengthening the G-20 as a leadership forum in the process. For these results to occur, Turkey and China would need to begin to work together now to develop concordance in their individual efforts and initiate activities that would benefit greatly by beginning now and running through 2016 and beyond.

Accelerating implementation: Several initiatives could be undertaken now that would set up the dynamics for accelerated implementation in 2016 and beyond.

• National strategies for achieving the SDGs: Encourage countries to adapt and adopt the SDGs to their respective priorities and social, political, and cultural contexts through deliberate decision processes and wide societal engagement.
• The role of parliaments: Bring parliamentarians and parliaments into the goal-setting process so that they are aware of the legislative, regulatory, and budgetary implications of the post-2015 agenda.
• The role of domestic ministries: Bring finance ministers and other domestic ministries and agencies together with foreign ministers in the goal-setting year to set in motion mutually involved functional relationships and operational guidelines to enhance implementation across sectors.
• The G-20 as broker and mobilizer: The G-20 could act as a broker between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and regional development banks and the U.N. and its agencies to assure not just coordination but more intensive interactions that would be designed to accelerate the mobilization of resources and as well as policies and private sector activities that would enhance implementation.
• The policy role of the OECD: The strong, substantive role of the OECD in G-20 summits on issues high on the G-20 agenda—such as structural reform, tax base erosion, development, environment, energy, employment, and social issues—position the OECD to continue to provide important substantive inputs to the G-20 in 2015 and 2016. The OECD would enhance the relationship of its 34 members with G-20 emerging market economies by OECD involvement in both the G-20 and the U.N. post-2015 agenda.
• Financial stability and the SDGs: Encouraged by the G-20 summits, the IMF, the Financial Stability Board, and the OECD could work together to integrate the financial regulatory reform agenda into the post-2015 U.N. process by clarifying the linkages between financial stability, regulatory reform, and incentives for long-term private investment in infrastructure (crucial to all the SDGs) and in productive activities which generate greater employment and growth.
• Multi-stakeholder participation in implementation: G-20 summits can facilitate multi-stakeholder processes for engaging civil society, labor, private sector, religious, academic, and expert communities not only in the G-20 summits, as is the current practice, but also in the post-2015 agenda and its implementation, connecting societal leaders with the SDG agenda.

III. The overarching importance of a single global agenda

If these efforts to bring together a wide cross-section of domestic and international agencies, public and private sector leaders, stakeholders, and civil society actors are to translate into actions that are meaningful to the lives and livelihoods of people, a single set of goals is essential. The lesson learned from the IDG-MDG experience was that the tendency to differentiate roles by identifying different institutions with different sets of goals was real. The United Nations had inadvertently put forward the Millennium Declaration at the September 2000 U.N. General Assembly that had “millennium targets” which were similar but not identical to the International Development Goals (IDGs). The IDGs had been developed in the mid-1990s by OECD development ministers and subsequently were endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF, the U.N. and the OECD. In fact, in 2000, for the first time ever, the heads of those four institutions signed, and the institutions themselves published, a joint report, A Better World For All: Progress towards the International Development Goals.

Despite the appearance of unity and in part because there was a lack of concordance between the Millennium Declaration Targets (MDTs) and the IDGs, there was a moment in March 2001 when it looked like there might be a decisive divergence between the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions, with the U.N. taking the lead on the MDTs and the World Bank and IMF taking the lead on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process (PRSPs), leaving the IDGs marginalized altogether. This potential division of labor was thwarted by a decision to reconcile the differences between the MDTs and the IDGs by forging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which embodied the principal elements of both. The MDGs surfaced and were endorsed by the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development in March of 2002, keeping the major global institutions on the same page with bilateral donors and the same path moving toward achieving the MDGs in 2015.

Most people who know about the MDGs think their origins began at the U.N. in the year 2000. It is an often overlooked fact that the MDGs only came forward in 2002 to bridge the potential divide between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. If that divide had occurred, it would have been disastrous from a goal setting-goal implementation point-of-view. This history is quite important to bring forward into public light now because it illustrates divisive dangers that currently lurk under the surface threatening unity if not squarely addressed.

From the perspective of prioritizing implementation, the truth is that multiple sets of goals blur the strategic vision, fail to communicate direction, weaken effective leadership, and encourage special pleading for differentiated interests instead focusing on the common, public interest. The U.N. has the lead role in global goal setting and has strengthened its own role in the global system in recent years. However, looking forward now to the SDG implementation phase, a danger might be that the Post-2015 agenda could be seen as the creature and captive of the United Nations, whereas it must be fully endorsed and internalized within the global system of international institutions as a whole. For that to happen, it would be necessary to move now, during the goal-setting year, to include all the relevant international and domestic actors that are crucial to the implementation phase of the post-2015 agenda.

The implications of including the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summits in 2015 and 2016:

• It would make clear to relevant publics and actors that this set of global goals is universal, applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries; it is not a “development agenda” but a “sustainability agenda,” which is broader, more strategic, and higher on the policy agenda of most countries.
• It would make clear the inextricable dynamics between domestic priorities and global goals; the SDGs are not foreign policy objectives or aid targets for development; they are domestic priorities affected by global impacts and generating global spillovers that need to be managed, not neglected.
• It would make the incorporation of finance ministers and domestic ministers with foreign ministers, along with international institutions, an imperative, rather than a utopian, ideal.
• It would make obvious the need to have a wide range of international institutions dealing with health, labor, education, women, climate, and the environment on the same page with the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions working together toward the SDGs.
• It would link the need for multi-stakeholder participation in goal setting to the goal implementation phase to mobilize support, policies, and resources but also to reveal and work on the interconnectedness of the goals themselves taken as a whole. 

Hence, the critical imperative is that there be a single narrative, a single set of goals, for all the domestic and global players to relate to, affirm, and implement. Otherwise, a fractured global order will produce lower-yield outcomes, and competition among priorities, sectors, and actors will result in poorer goal performance than would be possible with an integrated, concerted approach where all actors are working toward the same ends.

IV. Possible G-20 Actions by Turkey and China

Turkey has developed a process for the G-20 summit scheduled for November 14-15, 2015 in Antalya. Implementation, inclusion, and investment—the three “I’s”—are the overarching themes already established. The three “I’s” ties are tightly tied to the Australian G-20 outcomes—implementing action plans to achieve the incremental growth target of an additional 2 percentage points of GDP by 2018; including lower-income people in growth and lower-income countries in the global economy; and investing in infrastructure.

Each of these priorities is supportive of and compatible with the post-2015 agenda, even though they are not yet directly addressed to it. A decision by Turkey to include the post-2015 agenda in the 2015 G-20 would be easily achieved by cross-walking the SDGs over to and into the three “I’s” and vice versa. The central priority of the post-2015 agenda is, after all, “implementation.” The overarching meaning of the six elements of the post-2015 agenda (dignity, prosperity, justice, partnership, planet, and people (U.N. SG Synthesis Report December 2014)) is their impact on “inclusion.” And “investment” in infrastructure is crucial to all of the 17 SDGs.

The three pillars for Turkey’s 2015 agenda are: (i) strengthening the global recovery and lifting potential growth (the 2 percent target); (ii) enhancing resilience (financial regulatory reform]; and (iii) buttressing sustainability. Clearly, the third pillar on sustainability opens the door for the incorporation of the post-2015 agenda into the Turkey G-20, if Turkey wishes to do so. And the other two pillars fully support the sustainability agenda and are linked to it, or need to be.

For China, the post-2015 agenda presents a unique opportunity for the Chinese government to seize on a global agenda that has specific, strong, and visible links to the domestic concerns of the Chinese people. China could use the 2016 G-20 summit both to provide international leadership for global cooperation and to demonstrate the connection of global issues to domestic conditions through their impact and spillover effects. Because the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda, by prioritizing it in its G-20 summit, China would be embracing the multiplicity of its own identity as a developing country but also as a dynamic emerging market economy that is destined to eventually play a global leadership role equivalent to advanced countries.

Furthermore, China seems intent on being a competitive nation in various spheres while at the same time being cooperative in others. The G-20 summit presidency for China in 2016 provides China with an opportunity to strengthen its role in international cooperation by being ambitious in the reach of its agenda for the G-20 in 2016, by its conduct as a member of the G-20 Troika for the next three years, and as the host government for the G-20 in 2016. By choosing to support Turkey in its consideration of incorporating the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summit in 2015 and by China itself addressing the implementation issues in 2016, China would be reaping the demonstrably higher-yield gains generated by linking the SDG goal-setting phase in 2015 to the implementation phase in 2016.

Integrating the three tracks of SDG goal setting, financing for development, and progress on climate change actions is complementary but complex. While challenging, China has sufficiently high stakes in the outcomes of all three of these tracks to have a national interest in leading a global effort over the next three years to energize the convergence of agendas and institutional mandates necessary to generate bigger outcomes for people everywhere, including in China.

V. Results: Strengthening global governance and leadership

What follows from the analysis here is that the decision to include the post-2015 agenda in the Turkey and China G-20 summits would be a choice about the substance but also about the process of global economic governance, in which the G-20 has a leadership role. To do so in the way outlined here, would:

• Strengthen the global system of international institutions by bringing them together around a single comprehensive, integrated sustainability agenda;
• Create synergies between the United Nations and the other international institutions rather than identifying the post-2015 agenda with the U.N. alone and relying unnecessarily on the U.N. for its implementation;
• Connect G-20 leaders with a broader human and planetary agenda beyond economics and finance, which in turn would connect G-20 leaders with their publics as they visibly address the domestic concerns of their people in their global context; and
• Strengthen the role of the G-20 in global economic governance by putting the G-20 out in front as a broker among stakeholders, a catalytic coordinator of relevant domestic and international actors, and a leader on behalf of the concerns, lives, and livelihoods of people.

Selected References

Colin I. Bradford (2002), “Toward 2015: From Consensus Formation to Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. Issues for the Future: The Implementation Phase”, Development Economics Department (DEC), The World Bank, December 2002.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “The Changing World Economy and Global Economic Governance”, power point presentation at the Korean Delegation seminar “The OECD and Global Governance”, OECD, Paris, December 11, 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “Global Economic Governance and the Role of International Institutions”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2015), “Governance Innovations for Implementing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: Conference Report”,  Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2015.  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Events/2015/03/30-post-2015-sustainable-development-agenda/330-PostReportFinal.pdf?la=en   

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogang (2014), “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---with a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014. Authors are from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies.

Homi Kharas and John McArthur (2014), “Nine Priority Commitments to be Made at the UN’s July 2015 Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” October 2014. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/02/united-nations-financing-for-development-kharas-mcarthur

OECD (2014), “Policy Coherence for Development and the Sustainable Development Goals”, Paris: OECD, 10 December 2014, prepared for the 8^th Meeting of the National Focal Points for Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) held at the OECD on 17-18 December 2014. 

2015 is a pivotal year for global development; this fall is a pivotal moment. Meetings this fall will determine the global vision for sustainable development for 2030.

Three papers being released today—“Action implications focusing now on implementation of the post-2015 agenda,” “Systemic sustainability as the strategic imperative for the post-2015 agenda,” and “Political decisions and institutional innovations required for systemic transformations envisioned in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda”—set out some foundational ideas and specific proposals for political decisions and institutional innovations, which focus now on the implementation of the new global vision for 2030. This blog summarizes the key points in the three papers listed below.

Fundamentals for guiding actions, reforms and decisions

1) Managing systemic risks needs to be the foundational idea for implementing the post-2015 agenda.

The key political idea latent but not yet fully visible in the post-2015 agenda is that it is not a developing country poverty agenda for global development in the traditional North-South axis but a universal agenda based on the perception of urgent challenges that constitute systemic threats.

The term “sustainable development” by itself as the headline for the P-2015 agenda creates the danger of inheriting terminology from the past to guide the future.

2) Goal-setting and implementation must be effectively linked.

The international community learned from the previous two sets of goal-setting experiences that linking implementation to goal-setting is critical to goal achievement.  G-20 leader engagement in the post-2015 agenda and linking the success of the G-20 presidencies of Turkey (2015), China (2016), and Germany (2017) would provide global leadership for continuity of global awareness and commitment.

3) Focus on the Sustainable Development Goals must be clear.

Criticism of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as being too defuse and too detailed is ill-founded and reveals a lack of political imagination. It is a simple task to group the 17 goals into a few clusters that clearly communicate their focus on poverty, access, sustainability, partnership, growth, and institutions and their linkages to the social, economic, and environmental systemic threats that are the real and present dangers.

The Bretton Woods era is over. It was over before China initiated the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). Never has it been clearer than now that maintaining a single global system of international institutions is essential for geopolitical reasons. For the implementation of the post-2015 agenda, all the major international institutions need to commit to them.

In a joint paper with Zhang Haibing from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS), we make five specific governance proposals for decision-makers: 

The implementation of the post-2015 agenda requires that nations internalize the SDGs by debating, adapting and adopting them in terms of their own domestic cultural, institutional, and political circumstances. It will be important for the U.N. declarations in September to urge all countries to undertake domestic decision-making processes toward this end.

2) Presidential coordination committees should be established.

To adequately address systemic risks and to implement the P-2015 agenda requires comprehensive, integrated, cross-sectoral, whole-of-government approaches.  South Korea’s experience with presidential committees composed of ministers with diverse portfolios, private sector and civil society leaders provides an example of how governments could break the “silos” and meet the holistic nature of systemic threats.

3) There needs to be a single global system of international institutions.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.” Together with a speech Li gave at the OECD on July 1st after signing an expanded work program agreement with the OECD and becoming a member of the OECD Development Center, clearly signals of China’s intention to cooperate within the current institutional system. The West needs to reciprocate with clear signals of respect for the increasing roles and influence of China and other emerging market economies in global affairs.

4) We must move toward a single global monitoring system for development targets.

The monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the post-2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them. The U.N., the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF have all participated in joint data gathering efforts under the International Development Goals  (IDGs) in the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the 2000s. Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play now, but they need to be brought together under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system.

By engaging in the post-2015 agenda, the G-20 leaders’ summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered post-2015 agenda. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues. The G-20 finance ministers can play an appropriate role by serving as the coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the post-2015 agenda. A G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council, composed of the heads of the presidential committees for sustainable development from G20 countries, could become an effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability.

These governance innovations could re-energize the G-20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination, and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the post-2015 agenda.

Event Information

With ongoing crises in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world, U.S. global leadership is arguably as critical now as it has ever been. However, many question how the United States should exercise its leadership, what foreign policy agenda it should pursue, and how it should configure its military and security agencies going forward. In a recent speech at West Point, President Obama laid out his foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency. While the Obama Administration will pursue the president’s agenda as laid out at West Point, others in Washington have different views on how best to manage U.S. foreign policy going forward.

On June 11, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings will host Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for an address on the future of U.S. foreign and security policy. The address will be introduced by Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon, and the discussion following the Senator’s address will be moderated by Senior Fellow Robert Kagan.

After the program, Senator McCain will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #McCain

Earlier this summer, we examined how the Big Four banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo – performed before, during, and after the 2007-09 financial crisis.  We also blogged about the lending trends within these large banks, expressing concern about the growing gap between deposits taken and loans made by the Big Four, and calling on policymakers to explore the issue further.  We have conducted a similar analysis on the regional banks - The regional banks: The evolution of the financial sector, Part II - and find that these smaller banks are actually faring somewhat better than their bigger counterparts.

Despite the mergers and acquisitions that happened during the crisis, the Big Four banks are a smaller share of banking today than they were in 2007.  The 15 regionals we evaluated, on the other hand, are thriving in the post-crisis environment and have a slightly larger share of total bank assets than they had in 2007.  The Big Four experienced rapid growth in the years leading up to the crisis but much slower growth in the years since.  The regionals, however, have been chugging along: with the exception of a small downward trend during the crisis, they have enjoyed slow but steady growth since 2003.

There is a gap between deposits and loans among the regionals, but it is smaller than the Big Four’s gap.  Tellingly, the regionals’ gap has remained basically constant in size during the recovery, unlike the Big Four’s gap, which is growing.  Bank loans are important to economic growth, and the regional banks are growing their loan portfolios faster than the biggest banks.  That may be a good sign for the future if the regional banks provide more competition for the big banks and a more competitive banking sector overall.

Community banks play a key role in their local communities by offering traditional banking services to households and lending to nearby small businesses in the commercial, agriculture, and real estate sectors. Because of their close relationship with small businesses, they drive an important segment of economic growth. In fact, compared to all other banks (and to credit unions), small banks devote the greatest share of their assets to small business loans.

In this paper, titled "The community banks: The evolution of the financial sector, Part III," (PDF) Baily and Montalbano examine the evolution of community banks before, through, and after the financial crisis to assess their recovery.

The authors find that despite concerns about the long-term survival of community banks due a decline in the number of banks and increased Dodd-Frank regulations, they continue to recover from the financial crisis and are in fact out-performing the Big Four banks in several key measures.

Although the number of community banks has been steadily declining since before 2003, most of the decline has come from the steep drop in the smallest banking organizations—those with total consolidated assets of less than $100 million. Community banks with total consolidated assets that exceed $300 million have in fact increased in number. Most of the decline in community banks can be attributed to the lack of entry into commercial banking.

In a previous paper, Baily and Montalbano showed that the gap in loans and leases among the Big Four has widened since the financial crisis, but the new research finds that community banks seem to be returning to their pre-crisis pattern, although slowly, with the gap between deposits and loans shrinking since 2011. While total deposits grew gradually after 2011, though at a pace slower than their pre-crisis rate, loans and leases bottomed out in 2011 at $1.219 trillion.

The authors also examine community banks' return on assets (ROA), finding it was lower overall than for the Big Four or for the regionals, and has come back to a level closer to the pre-crisis level than was the case for the larger banks. The level of profitability was slightly lower for community banks in 2003 than it was for the larger banks—about 1.1 percent compared to 1.7 percent for the regional banks—but it did not dip as low, reaching a bottom of about -0.1 percent compared to -0.8 percent for the regional banks.

Baily and Montalbano also find that total assets of the community banks increased 22.5 percent (adjusted for inflation, the increase was 7 percent); the average size of community banks has increased substantially; total bank liabilities grew steadily from 2003-2014; the composition of liabilities in post-crisis years looked largely similar to the composition in the pre-crisis years; and securitization—which plays a relatively small role in the community banking model—has been steadily increasing in the time period both before and after the crisis. 

To read more, download the full paper here.

The paper is the third in a series that examines how the financial sector has evolved over the periods both before and after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The first paper examines the Big Four banks, and the second takes a closer look at regional banks.

Downloads

• Download "The community banks: The evolution of the financial sector, Part III"

Event Information

The year 2015 will be a milestone year, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda by world leaders in September; the Addis Ababa Accord on financing for development in July; and the conclusion of climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris in December. The draft Addis Ababa Accord, which focuses on the actions needed to attain the SDGs, highlights the key role envisaged for the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the post-2015 agenda. Paragraph 65 of the draft accord notes: “We call on the international finance institutions to establish a process to examine the role, scale, and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda.”          

Against this backdrop, on April 18, 2015, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings held a private roundtable with the leaders of the MDBs and other key stakeholders to discuss the role of the MDBs in supporting the post-2015 development agenda.

The meeting focused on four questions:

1. What does the post-2015 development agenda and the ambitions of the Addis and Paris conferences imply for the MDBs?


Given the ability of the MDBs to leverage shareholder resources, they can be efficient and effective mechanisms for scaling up development cooperation, particularly with respect to the agenda on investing in people and to the financing of sustainable infrastructure. New roles, instruments and partnerships might be needed.

2. How can MDBs best take advantage of the political attention that is being paid to the various conferences in 2015?   


The World Bank and selected regional development banks have launched a series of initiatives to optimize their balance sheets, address other constraints and enhance their catalytic role in crowding in private finance. And new institutions and mechanisms are coming to the fore. But the responses are not coordinated to best take advantage of each MDB’s comparative advantage.

3. What are the key impediments to scaling up the role and engagement of the MDBs?


Views on constraints are likely to differ but discussions should cover policy dialogue, capacity building, capital, leverage, shareholder backing on volume, instruments on leverage and risk mitigation, safeguards, and governance. 

4. How should the MDBs respond to the proposal to establish a process to examine the role, scale and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda?   


A proactive response and engagement on the part of the MDBs would facilitate a better understanding of the contribution that the MDBs can make and greater support among shareholders for a coherent and stepped-up role.

Event Materials

• Participant List
• MDB PostEvent Summary

Editors’ Note: The odds of wringing short-term concessions from Cuba's proud and nationalist leaders are stacked against Obama, Richard Feinberg and Ted Piccone believe. They argue the trip should be judged by its ability to expand constituencies in both countries who want a more open and prosperous Cuba. This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

President Obama's decision to make a historic visit to Cuba later this month is about more than U.S. politics or business opportunities on the island. It's a bold bet that

presidential diplomacy can secure a new normal in U.S.-Cuba relations after over five decades of hostilities, embargoes and gridlock.

Based on our years of analysis and policymaking in and out of government, we believe the odds of wringing short-term concessions from Cuba's proud and nationalist leaders are stacked against Obama. We also believe, however, that that is the wrong metric. Rather, this trip should be judged by its ability to expand constituencies in both countries who want a more open and prosperous Cuba.

To that end, Obama should draw on his extraordinary rhetorical skills to paint a vision for both Cubans and Americans of a future attractive enough to persuade the island's citizens, especially its ambitious and talented millennials to remain on the island and for the resourceful Cuban American diaspora to invest in that vision. This promise of a Cuban renaissance should include one where citizens freely exercise their chosen professions, engage directly with a transparent and accountable government, have access to the global internet, and travel abroad routinely for family and business purposes.

To help shape such a future, the U.S. delegation should engage not only with Cuba's historic revolutionaries but also with its next generations of public and private leaders from across Cuban society. The White House can also use the visit to leverage Obama's immense popularity on the island to speak directly to the Cuban people about their aspirations for a brighter future.

Given the longstanding feuds between our two countries, however, it will take longer than a year or two to unwind the accumulated distrust and build support for this new normalcy. On the U.S. side, major sectors have swung clearly in favor of normalization - business and agricultural interests, human rights and religious groups, and the broad swath of U.S. citizens keen to know Cuba after decades of isolation. Even majorities of Cuban-Americans and Hispanic voters favor engagement over the embargo.

These constituencies, however, are not yet strong enough to persuade Congress to lift the embargo. And Havana has done little so far to address the major sticking points in Washington's list of legitimate grievances, particularly in the key areas of human rights and economic reforms.

On the Cuban side, Raúl Castro recognizes that Cuba's ability to protect the social gains of the revolution depends on normalizing its participation in the global economy. Its economy badly needs the injection of U.S. commerce, professional exchanges and tourism that would flow readily once the embargo is lifted. Family-run businesses, farmers, young people and professionals in sectors like software and biotechnology also stand to gain from these changes.

Notably, many of those fighting for a more pluralistic Cuba applaud Obama's decision to declaw the embargo as a political shield for government hard-liners; it helps their cause for a more honest debate at home about how to reform Cuba's outdated model of state-centric development and to make government more accountable to its citizens.

The visit offers both presidents a rare opportunity to demonstrate to these various stakeholders that change is not one-sided but a mutual accommodation. There is nothing like a presidential visit to move bureaucracies and catalyze action.

For example, the visit could accelerate progress toward easing the embargo. Already, new rules encourage trade with the emerging private sector and with some state-owned enterprises. Cuba should now take steps to facilitate such commerce and stop insisting that all sanctions be lifted first.

As important, the two sides should expedite resolution of outstanding U.S. property claims dating back to the early 1960s, a key congressional condition for lifting sanctions. Prompt resolution of these cases would automatically create powerful constituencies in the United States for repealing the embargo and signal to foreign investors that Cuba is prepared to respect property rights and the rule of law. They could also demonstrate a willingness to resolve longstanding claims for compensation for citizens killed in hostilities during the Cold War.

In anticipation of next month's Cuban Communist Party Congress, President Castro can detail his plans to decentralize power, empower the legislature and reform the electoral system.

The precise timing of Obama's visit - just one month before the Party Congress - may signal that Raúl Castro and his pragmatic followers welcome a friendly nudge to recharge the reform process they launched in 2008. It also underscores how little time remains before Americans elect a new president who could reverse steps taken so far with the stroke of a pen. That is the kind of marriage of short and long-term interests that allow wise presidents to make history, and the ultimate test for assessing whether the Obamas' trip is serious business, or just family fun.