follow up on the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing

I was working on rural-urban linkages SDG issues when the latest IISD Sustainable Development Update arrived in my inbox. I couldn't resist in opening the email and now find myself writing a short blog as it had an  update on the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing (ICESD).

I was looking forward to at least reading the zero draft of the committee's report by now but a search of the ICESD web site found no such document - infact it didn't even have a co-chairs summary of either the third or fourth meetings of the committee. It seems that the zero draft is available but not on the web site, an annotated document will be released on the 22nd of June but its unclear who to. With comments in for the 6th of July by governments?

What I did find out is that it seems according to IISD that it: "has reached agreement regarding a structure to mobilize all financial sources – international, domestic, private and public – using the Monterrey Consensus and Doha Declaration as guides for exploring synergies and complementary between different financial flows."

This was what I was worried about and expressed concern in my previous blog. It should also be guided by Agenda 21, the JPoI and the Future We Want documents. This is NOT about replaying Monterrey it is about Sustainable Development Finance -- this is different. I made some suggestions in my previous blog where that might be worth looking at.  It was good to see in the IISD document mention of capital markets and co-create new types of PPPs.

Of course it is very difficult to actually know what has gone on in this committee as the meetings have been held in private. This goes against the spirit of the first Rio and every meeting of the CSD and the SDG OWG.

I worried, as I indicated before, about the central role that the private sector could have in the new architecture for sustainable development. Infact the report in IISD has dropped the word sustainable so maybe we really are back into a typical development finance model. I raised concerns that without the right regulatory framework for the private sector to take a larger role and put in place at the beginning of this journey that we would see serious problems as the process developed.

I hope i am wrong but from what i read today I worry that this committee will have taken us down the wrong road. Perhaps if there had been transparency and openness this wouldn't have happened.

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