This intervention, co-drafted by members of the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Engagement Mechanism (AP RCEM), was delivered by Sachini Perera of RESURJ at the 11th Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development on 21 February 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand.
In this roundtable, I’d like to raise key concerns around means of implementation with a focus on financing, on behalf of the representatives of civil society and peoples’ organisations in Asia and the Pacific, and share some provocations we can dive deeper into in the breakout sessions.
While SDG 17 and Partnerships for the Goals remains crucial, and largely unrealized, to accelerate progress towards the 2030 Agenda, it is important that we take a step back from the vacuum these frameworks tend to exist in and locate this discussion in the extreme structural inequalities that are our everyday realities, and the widely disparate power dynamics between member states, civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders.
We come into the APFSD this year amidst blatant evidence of how multilateralism is failing and how rights holders’ engagement is held hostage by the political, economic and military interests of global superpowers. This is also reflective of the failure of the SDGs vis a vis a policy incoherent diversion of political will away towards the Summit of the Future. As the 2030 Agenda approaches its final years, the mainstream development model remains hinged on neoliberal macroeconomic policies that enable private corporations to consolidate power and profits at the cost of eroding human rights, public goods and natural resources. Companies in the largest economies, especially in the energy and food sector, increased their profit by 30% in the past three years. And even as the quantity and quality of Official Development Assistance (ODA) continues to dwindle, we see donor countries continue to funnel billions of dollars towards funding wars and genocide, leading to the conclusion that this is not a lack of money and rather a lack of political will.
Meanwhile a number of countries in the world continue to face a high risk of debt distress and as of 2023, UNESCAP has declared that 19 countries in Asia and the Pacific are in high risk of debt distress. With developing countries having to allocate as much as 10 percent of their GDP towards debt servicing and forced to accept debt restructuring policy conditions from international finance institutions (IFIs) including austerity measures which further limit the fiscal space to provide for people’s basic needs and services. For example, I come from Sri Lanka where we defaulted on our debt recently and the IMF bailout in essence is for debt servicing as well as to make us more palatable to other creditors. And the IMF conditionalities for this bailout have placed the highest burdens on the incomes of the poorest in the country including through regressive tax policies. And the conditionalities as well as a government doubling down on neoliberal economic policies have resulted in eroding and privatising public services and goods.
So what do we need in order to clear a path towards meaningful partnerships?
We need to urgently shift away from over-reliance on “indirect” taxes that take a disproportionate toll on the income of poorer people, increase direct taxes on high incomes, wealth, property and other assets and develop and implement more participatory approaches to budgeting such as gender budgeting.
We need to break the endless cycles of debt that developing countries are stuck in and create economic policies that put people at the center. It is incredible that we continue to prioritize economic systems that are social constructions over their very real, devastating and long term consequences on people. For example, permanently canceling sovereign external debt would be the fastest way to keep money in debtor countries and free up resources to tackle the urgent health, social and economic crises resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And debtor countries need to exercise more robust accountability and transparency in how trade and international financial agreements are assessed at country level including consulting civil society, trade unions, feminist groups, etc. We need independent mechanisms to systematically undertake civil society-led human rights assessments of loan conditions or macroeconomic policy advice of global policy institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
We need to take ODA out of its colonial framing and present it as what it actually is: decades, if not centuries, of reparations owed to developing countries by developed countries that prospered at great cost to people, natural resources and the climate, and without checks and balances.
More than 50 years after rich countries committed to spending 0.7% of their gross national income (GNI) on aid to low- and middle-income countries, only seven have ever met or exceeded it. Oxfam estimates that this has cost low and middle-income countries $6.5 trillion in undelivered aid between 1970 and 2021, thus maintaining a colonial world order that has changed very little. On the flipside, UNCTAD revealed that the illicit financial flows amounted to $7.8 trillion between 2004-2013 siphoned away from developing countries in tax evasions, profit shifting, asset stealth and trade mispricing by multinational corporations from the North.
The UN must assume its responsibility to steer the ambitious UN/Ffd-centered process to assess the crisis and agree on responses leading to an International Economic Reconstruction and Systemic Reform Summit under the aegis of the United Nations. Rather than pushing the poorest countries for economic self-reliance, AAAA and Ffd processes should help them address macro-economic pressures embodied in hegemonic trade agreements involving conditions of market deregulation, heinous privatisations, and corporate capture of resources and governance
These are just a few of the structural reforms and overhauls that are needed if we’re to understand and practice “partnerships” beyond empty rhetoric, including in how partnerships get articulated in the SOTF. In the breakout sessions, I’d like to invite each of you to reflect on what it would take for us to call for these reforms within and outside Asia and the Pacific. What are the examples and recommendations from your contexts that are advancing a development justice agenda that is based on redistribution of resources, social and gender justice, environmental justice, and focus on accountability to people in all our diversities?