Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Felix Dodds - Stakeholder participation in PPPs This is a presentation I made on May the 8th at the 8th UNECE International Public-Private Partnerships Forum in Istanbul as part of the Panel 'Stakeholder participation in PPPs: Enhancing stakeholder engagement in PPPs for the SDGs'.  Thanks – this is a subject close to my heart perhaps understandable as for twenty years I ran an organization called Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future that took seriously Agenda 21 and the nine chapters that identified key stakeholders and their rights and responsibilities. We are here today to offer ideas for what might be in a guide to engage stakeholders in PPP projects. My comments are based on work undertaken by two of my students at the University of North Carolina Elisabeth Butler and Ranger Ruffins who developed for the UN Sendai Review a similar guide which hasalso been used for the Voluntary National Reviews for the SDGs. First and foremost, the engagement of stakeholders in...

The Project Team on the  People-first PPP Impact Assessment Tool  has great pleasure to present the  draft version 1.0 of the People-first PPP Impact Assessment Tool  that we would like to enter the Public Review phase as of today. We hope that this Public Review phase can last until 12 August 2020 in order to allow all parties to have enough time to comment. We request that all comments during Public Review use the "Template for Comments and Observations" which can be downloaded from  here .   The Team has not planned to consider any comments which do not use this template and which do not propose changes to allow to comply with the comments / observations made. As we have made conscious efforts to reach out to many organizations and have attempted to make a fully transparent development and drafting process, we hope to have addressed most serious comments during this phase we have just finalised. Please let us ...

By Christian Kingombe (Managing Partner at 4IP Group and Research Associate at CSEND) and Raymond Saner (Professor of International Relations & International Management at the University of Basle, Switzerland and Director of the Centre for Socio-Eco-Nomic Development (CSEND) in Geneva). On 25 October 2018, two synergistic United Nations agencies based in Geneva – UNCTAD and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) – joined forces at the World Investment Forum’s 10th Anniversary in Geneva to address how Public-Private (PPPs) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) could contribute to the implementation of the SDGs.(1) . Since the agreements on the 2030 Agenda and the Financing of development (AAAA) in 2015, the member countries of the United Nations have agreed that domestic and foreign direct investment and PPPs are expected to be aligned with the 2030 Agenda. The 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda are supposed to be achieved in an integrated manner focusing at the s...

Guest blog by Harris Gleckman is Senior Fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston and Director of Benchmark Environmental Consulting.  He is the former Chief of the NY Office of UNCTAD, Senior Officer for the first Financing for Development Conference, and Chief of the Environmental Unit of the Centre on Transnational Corporations. Over a period of 30 years, he undertook policy oriented research on multinational corporations, global environmental management, financing for development, global governance institutions, and the economics of climate change.  Dr Gleckman’s latest study: Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge was published by Routledge on Oct 2018. This was originally published in Open Democracy here. A new agreement with the World Economic Forum gives multinational corporations influence over matters of global governance. A new corporate and government marriage quietly took place last week when the leadershi...

The five United Nations Regional Commissions to work together to make PPP ‘fit for purpose’ for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development I have argued for well over a year that NGOs and other stakeholders should be engaging in the People First PPP work that has been undertaken in the UNECE. As I have said in previous blogs the push for a global agreement on Principles for PPPs as was envisioned in the Addis Agreement through something I supported should not stop an approach that was developing at the European UN Regional Commission. I took the view to be a positive critic and offer suggestions on what those Principles should be and their accompanying support material. I have found the process open and frank. The more I became involved the more I felt we would a better set of principles might be developed through each UN Regional Commission developing their own more regional sensitive and regionally informed set of Principles. A bottom-up approach --- one that does not preclude th...

Thank you, Geoffrey I'm, happy to contribute to this panel on People-first PPPs (f ull video of side event available here ). In 2015 and 2016 the multi-stakeholder Communitas Coalition which had worked on securing SDG 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities followed up that work in a number of areas to input to Habitat III, One of those under my colleague J ames Goldstein, who worked with stakeholders to produce a set of draft Principles of Public-Private Partnerships. This was recognizing that PPPs would play a role in implementing the SDGs and New Urban Agenda and that in the past they had a very bad record, particularly at the sub-national level. AS we know there is both tremendous enthusiasm for and skepticism about the role and impact of PPPs for sustainable development. The challenges of our urban areas are where we may win or fail in delivering the SDGs.  There are huge urban infrastructure investment requirements in developing countries over the coming years. ...

a Ralph Steadman cartoon originally done for Rio'92 I had the pleasure to present my views on the opening panel at the UNECE International Forum on people-first PPPs for the Sustainable Development Goals on the Guiding Principles on the People-First Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) Part I & II.  the moderator was  Geoffrey Hamilton Chief of the PPP Programme at UNECE, asked a number of question. My comments were as follows: 1.  Do the 8 Guiding Principles on People-First PPPs reflect the new model that is needed for the UN Sustainable Development Goals? One of my colleagues on the panel here did make a comment about regulation. I would remind everyone that the lack of regulation around the banks saw them privatize the profits and socialized the losses. We cant see the same with PPPs. I would comment on what Geoffrey said  in his opening about someone from the EU commenting that too many ...

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE SDGs IMPLEMENTATION? There is a lot of discussion about the role of PPPs being used to advance the implementation of the SDGs. This report should inform that discussion and the need for a set of Principles and Guidelines to be developed by the UN Finance for Development Forum for the promotion of the use of PPPs for implementing the SDGs. The work of UNECE in this area is a first step but it needs to be a system wide approach. How can it be that the same governments that are supporting the development of Principles for PPPs in the UNECE are opposing the development of them at the UN in New York? A BOUT THE AUDIT The ECA assessed whether EU-funded Public Private Partnerships (PPP) projects had been effectively managed and provided adequate value for money, account being taken of the trend towards more intensively leveraging public funds with private finance through PPPs. The auditors assessed 12 EU co-financed PPPs in France, Greece, Ireland and Spain ...

This is my presentation to the UNECE  First session of the Working Party on Public-Private Partnerships on their draft paper on Principles for PPPs I wanted to start by thanking UNECE for the opportunity to share my thoughts on this important work they have undertaken. My engagement in the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) discussion has been mostly through the Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (MSP) window. There has been some confusion between the role that MSPs might play, PPPs should play and Voluntary Initiatives (VI) might contribute to the delivery of the SDGs. My work on MSPs has been since their initial inception through the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002. I would share with you that the same conversation around the need for Principles and Guidelines is happening around the MSP discussions in New York as it is here in Geneva on PPPs. The recent academic research on the MSPs that were launched at WSSD or just afterwards is that around 70% o...