What should we do with MOI and Financing for Development?

I thought I would share some suggestions on how to ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals Means of Implementation (SDG MOIs) and Financing for Development (FfD) processes could support each other.

As we all know April will be critical as the second prepcom for Financing for Development and the April Post 2015 negotiations will deal with MOI and Global partnership for Development and there will be an attempt to create more complementary text.

In previous blogs I have been very critical of the sustainable development elements – or lack of them - in the FfD process and the now zero text. I’m not going to say more in this blog posting than this has been a HUGE missed opportunity. Other than some great input from AVIVA and SDSN little of what should be reflected in the text is there. This is because the sustainable development finance world has NOT engaged with FfD and some would say was not welcome.

What I wanted to address today was what could be done to ensure a better complementarity between the two negotiating processes.

The zero draft of the FfD does contain some of the ideas that are in SDG17 but not by any means all of them, and as far as the MOIs under the different SDGs there are no corresponding paragraph in the FfD Addis Ababa Action Agenda text.

What would help enormously, and make it much clearer, is if ALL the SDG MOI text could be included in the FfD zero draft text. My suggestion is that then they would be bracketed. They would be what I would call ‘reference text’ and would be taken out at the final stage. Such a structure would do two very important things.

The first is it would ensure that member states negotiating in the FfD process would always have as a guidance the SDG OWG text and should they decide to deviate they would do so clearly knowing that. The second is that the text would HAVE to address all the SDG MOIs which at present it clearly does not.

There may be some an argument that this can be done through some generic text. But unless the reference text is there to guide negotiators then it is more likely that they will miss out some of the MOIs from the SDG OWG and that would be a mistake.

The worry some of us have is that the FfD process is in danger of producing something that does not support the Post 2015 process but something operating in a parallel universe. If this was a Dr Who episode that would be fine – but this is the real world and we need a successful FfD process and a successful Post 2015 process to support and complement each other.

Dr Who Parallel Universe