Following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly, I would like to highlight a focal point of sustainable human development–utilizing natural resource revenue as a tool for sustainable human development.
“There’s only so much amount of aid countries can rely on. Indeed, often you can’t rely on aid in the sense of relying on certain amounts every single year… it goes up, it goes down… governments fall in and out of love with the donors… so it’s not so reliable,” said Mr. Nolan.
“At the end of the day, a State operates on the basis of its own revenue collection. And a developmentally-oriented State, a State that actually wants to promote development through infrastructure, health, education spending, needs to raise most of the money itself.”
He added that raising revenue does not necessarily mean going into the rural areas and heavily taxing people. “It actually means taxing the better off in the society and also taxing companies, both domestic and foreign, more effectively.”
Tax rates, he noted, are very low in many low-income countries, in some cases under 15 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). This could easily be increased by a series of reforms, as well as by better structuring of taxation in the extractive industries and greater attention to the transfer of money out of the country.
Meeting UN-backed climate goals requires leaving the vast majority of natural energy resource in the ground. But sustainable development is contingent on both the intrinsic (electricity) and market value of natural resources; one would be hard pressed to find a development practitioner that does not believe this revenue source is an essential piece of the development financing puzzle.
Developed countries have had decades, if not centuries, of using natural resources limitlessly in their pursuit of development; reliable access to energy is an indispensable part of poverty alleviation, economic growth, and modernization. We are essentially asking the worlds poorest countries to forgo the cheapest form of electricity available in the name of environmental sustainability (do as I say, not as I did). To reconcile this clear mismatch between ability to pay and necessity, the developed world must do more to reach it’s target of $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer countries fight climate.
The “Natural Resource Curse”–the misappropriation of resource revenue–robs the worlds poorest countries of a needed source of development finance. Often times the natural resource curse finances armed conflicts, which cause immeasurable human suffering, roll back development gains, and make future development much more difficult (conflict is often associated with poverty and malnutrition which stunts physical and cognitive development, can prevent children from going to school, and can cause trauma that leads to lifelong psychological issues).
The Natural Resource Curse is not inevitable, but fighting it requires good governance and the security capacity to counter those who wish to extract revenues for their own privilege. Battling the Natural Resource Curse also requires effective sanctions regimes–by driving ill-gotten natural resource revenues to the black market, and attacking that black market and related international money laundering, international criminals and terrorists would lose an important source of funding.
Sanctions, of course, require broad based cooperation. There is a risk that in this era of disorder and instability, the international community might “ease up” on bad-but-stable governments. The importance of good governance of natural resource revenues shows this would be a short-sighted and ultimately counter-productive strategy for fighting international crime and promoting sustainable human development.
If the world is to simultaneously address the needs of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and reach climate targets, we must focus on making sure LDCs leverage all the resources they do extract to maximize social welfare. Effective “South-South Cooperation“–the sharing of best practices between developing countries–would greatly enhance this effort.
Given the importance of the source, the propensity for corruption (“Resource Curse”), and the need to leave much of the existing deposits in the ground, when it comes to properly managing natural resource revenues for sustainable human development, there is little margin for error.
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Natural Resources and the SDGs:
Fortunately, proper natural resource revenue management is addressed many times throughout the proposed SDG text:
Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
1.4 by 2030 ensure that all men and women, particularly the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership, and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology, and financial services including microfinance.
Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
5.a undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance, and natural resources in accordance with national laws
Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
12.2 by 2030 achieve sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources
Goal 16.Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
16.4 by 2030 significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows, strengthen recovery and return of stolen assets, and combat all forms of organized crime
16.5 substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all its forms
16.6 develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels
16.7 ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels
Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
Finance
17.1 strengthen domestic resource mobilization, including through international support to developing countries to improve domestic capacity for tax and other revenue collection
17.3 mobilize additional financial resources for developing countries from multiple sources
As representatives from the IMF, World Bank, and the G20 converged on Washington last week, there was a sense that America may be losing its position as the main guarantor of international order:
As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
Washington’s retreat is not so much by intent, Mr. Subramanian said, but a result of dysfunction and a lack of resources to project economic power the way it once did. Because of tight budgets and competing financial demands, the United States is less able to maintain its economic power, and because of political infighting, it has been unable to formally share it either.
Other experts and historians, however, say too much can be made of the moment. Walter Russell Mead, a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College, noted that the rise of China as an economic force was inevitable, and that its establishment of a rival lending institution was far different from the international behavior of the Soviet Union and communist Chinese during the Cold War.
Then, he said, America’s rivals were trying to destroy and replace the economic order established by the United States and Britain after World War II. Now, emerging powers are emulating it, however imperfectly.
Sure other countries have risen in prominence since America stood as the lone super-power after the Cold War, but has this really resulted in America’s decline? I would argue that building up strong allies to help promote America’s vision of international order–one based on democracy, human rights, economic and defensive interdependence, and more recently environmentally sustainable economic development–was exactly why the U.S. took the lead in setting up the United Nations and the Brenton Woods Institutions (the World Bank, IMF, and GATT).
Therefore, in assessing America’s influence over international order, we should consider how these institutions have evolved. While they were all conceived with the best of intentions, good intentions do not always lead to good outcomes. Have these institutions been able to learn from their mistakes and make meaningful contributions to maintaining international order? Lets consider them on a case by case basis:
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The International Monetary Fund (IMF):
The IMF was originally conceived to promote currency stability and help countries overcome short-term balance of payments issues. But as technological advances made the world smaller, the IMF took on a much larger mandate, and began extending loans to help developing countries modernize. The so called “Washington Consensus” linked development loans to “ex-post” (after the fact) conditions such as hitting fiscal targets (reducing the size of government) and liberalizing trade.
While these policies by and large do promote growth in already developed countries, they ignored the historic lessons of the world’s developed countries. Every advanced country relied on some degree of protectionism to cultivate its own industries and government spending to build both physical infrastructure and a skilled workforce as it modernized.
The “Washington Consensus” programs did not allow for policy space based on the historical experiences and current realities in the countries they intended to help. As I have often written, economics–particularly development economics–is highly context-sensitive; the “Washington Consensus” was simply to rigid and narrow-sighted to work.
The “Washington Consensus” was a consensus failure, and left many countries worse off than before they accepted this “help” (see “the lost decade” in Latin America). Thankfully the IMF abandoned this flawed set of policies.
The failure of the Washington Consensus led to IMF to reconsider how it does business–the “conditionality” attached to its loans. Instead of relying on a rigid set of targets a country must meet in order to continue to receive support, the IMF now focuses on pre-set “ex ante” conditionality. If a country has a sound macroeconomic position, it can tap into IMF financing while maintaining the policy space needed to address the needs of its citizens (and ultimately maintain its legitimacy).
The IMF will have to deal with the specter of the Washington Consensus for some time, but going forward it has evolved in meaningful ways.
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The World Trade Organization (WTO):
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) officially became the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. The WTO sets rules for global trade and provides a forum for airing grievances. With membership covering 96.4% of global trade and 96.7% of global GDP, the WTO is unquestionably an important institution.
Critics often argue the WTO is ineffective, but any organization whose stated goal is the resolve international trade disputes is by definition going to be contentious. I would argue that the WTO has helped keep trade disputes trade disputes, and that without it many of these disputes could have ended in armed conflict.
There is no consensus as to whether regional free trade agreements (FTA) such as these undermine the global free trade movement, or if they are building blocks towards this goal. But one thing is for certain–free trade agreements create winners and losers. The winners tend to be the wealthy who are positioned to benefit from greater market access; the losers tend to be wage earners.
In the context of political dysfunction and simmering class-warfare in America and beyond, it is necessary that policies to transfer some of the gains from the “winners” to protect the “losers” of any FTA are baked into the agreements themselves. The ability of governments to address the inequality and environmental impacts of any FTA will greatly affect its historical legacy.
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The United Nations (UN):
The United Nations is arguably the most important of the international institutions. In addition to providing a forum for countries to address one another, the UN also serves a global policy adviser, giving it the strongest normative mandate of any of these organizations.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are 8 specific goals whose intent is to guide the trajectory of the developing world. The successes of these goals has been uneven–some countries have a great record, while others not so much. As these goals are set to expire at the end of 2015, they are commonly viewed as beneficial but imperfect. Their successors, the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aim to build on their successes while learning from their short-comings.
There are a number of ways the SDGs deviate from the MDGs. For one, they are much more inclusive and consultative. Seen as being drafted behind closed doors by the global elite, the MDGs were hampered from the start. Conversely, the SDGs are being drafted with input from numerous thematic and national consultations with the very people they are intended to benefit.
There is also greater emphasis on the roles of various stakeholders (governments, private sector, NGOs, civil society, and international organizations) with regards to both financing the agenda and being accountable for their operations in the developing world.“Who Will Be Accountable?” highlights these common but differentiated responsibilities, providing general guidelines for holding those who violate the SDGs accountable.
Between the launch of the Post-2015 Development Agenda (the SDGs) and the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris (which is expected to result in the first universal global climate treaty), 2015 will prove to be a pivotal year for sustainable human development initiatives.
Nowhere has this problem been more acute than in the Middle East, where armed conflict has left 1 in 4 children out of school, led to immeasurable economic, physical, and psychological damage, and has completely overwhelmed the international humanitarian assistance network. The inability to protect children is especially alarming, as it plants the seeds for future conflicts.
The United Nations needs to respond more decisively against regimes that commit gross human rights violations. The concept of national sovereignty is meant to protect a country from outside invasion, not act as a shield for human rights abusers.
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was supposed to put peoples rights before national sovereignty, but it has proven to lack the teeth needed to provide meaningful protection. The need is clear, as I have called for in the past, for the UN General Assembly to have a mechanism for overruling UN Security Council vetoes. Such a reform would give the R2P the power it needs to fulfill its important mandate to prevent / end gross human rights violations.
The World Bank Group is responsible for financing development projects in the developing world. While its existence has been a “net benefit” for developing countries, the World Bank has had issues enforcing “good governance” standards on its projects, often resulting in adverse consequences for the worlds most vulnerable people:
The World Bank regularly fails to enforce its own rules protecting people in the path of the projects it bankrolls, with devastating consequences for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet, a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post and more than 20 other media partners have found.
The investigation’s key findings include:
Over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods.
The World Bank has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances.
The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture. In some cases the lenders have continued to bankroll these borrowers after evidence of abuses emerged.
Ethiopian authorities diverted millions of dollars from a World Bank-supported project to fund a violent campaign of mass evictions, according to former officials who carried out the forced resettlement program.
From 2009 to 2013, World Bank Group lenders pumped $50 billion into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span.
Days after ICIJ informed the World Bank that the team’s investigation had found “systemic gaps” in the bank’s enforcement of its “social safeguard” rules, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged “major problems” with the bank’s resettlement policies and vowed to seek reforms.
Being a “net benefit” for the developing world is not a high enough standard for the World Bank, it must adopt a “do no harm” principle in all its projects. To achieve this goal, the World Bank should emulate the UN in consulting with those who will be affected by their projects.
The World Bank has an important role to play in promoting the SDGs, but first it must get its own house in order.
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Some may point to the recent rise of parallel international organizations such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB) as further signs of the deterioration of an American led international order. Indeed, there are serious governance questions these institutions must address, lest they be counter-productive in the pursuits of promoting peace and eradicating extreme poverty.
It would be most constructive to have the UN promote these values (accountability, good governance, etc.) to emerging international institutions, not the US. The UN has international legitimacy; the same message coming from the UN would likely be much more well received.
US-centric international organizations are free to work with these parallel institutions or not, and their positions can evolve as these new institutions reveal their values through their actions. But as professor Walter Mead aptly points out, these institutions are not challenging America’s Post WWII vision of international order, they are doubling-down on it. As the saying goes, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Visitor Center in Seattle, WA
While finishing up my first business trip in Seattle, WA, I walked by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Due to my studies and interests, I was familiar with the organization’s important work in the related fields of Education, Healthcare, and Poverty Eradication both in the US and abroad. Intrigued, I went in.
While walking around the visitors center, I was struck by something I read. Explaining the origins of the foundation, a plaque stated that Bill and Melinda gates started their mission by providing Internet access to public libraries in America. Then, in the 1990s, Bill and Melinda “learned” of the extreme poverty affecting children around the world (specifically lack of access to medical care), and expanded the scope of their work.
This line took me a while to comprehend. Growing up during the age of globalization and global news coverage, the plight of people in the developing world was something I had always taken as obvious. How could it be that someone, let alone one of the smartest people in the world, would have to “learn” about these injustices later in life?
Then I began to think about what growing up in a hyper-connected world meant. For those who grew-up in previous generations, understanding the plight of people in the developing world required an active and time consuming search for information. Conversely, growing up in generations Y / Z, with globalized news coverage and internet access, not knowing about the existence of extreme poverty requires willful ignorance.
There are many self-interested reasons for wanting to promote sustainable human development and end poverty, including: stopping violent extremism, stemming the “offshoring” of jobs to lower income countries through economic convergence, and creating new markets for sustainable trade-based growth (the Great Recession was a perfect example of the unsustainability of relying too heavily on financial innovations for growth).
But universal awareness will also play a large role in ending poverty (much like the first step to finding a solution is admitting there is a problem). The “silent majority” of the global community believes in basic rights and human dignity for all. It is in the long run interests of the global community, and resonates with mankind’s central tenets as ethical, social beings. Ultimately, it is this awareness which will galvanize the global effort to end poverty.
The Post 2015 Development Agenda is an important element of the fight to end poverty, as it will help direct trillions of dollars of public and private development resources over the next 15 years. Building on the successes (and learning from the shortcomings) of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Post 2015 Development Agenda is being drafted in an inclusive and consultary manner. Incorporating input from the very people it is intended to help, the agenda recognizes the importance of civil / political rights, good governance, multi-sectoral accountability, and self-determination in ending poverty. With human rights and empowering the world’s most vulnerable people at its core, the Post 2015 Development Agenda is poised to make great strides in poverty eradication.
As the world continues to get “smaller” and more interconnected, the costs of environmental degradation, human rights abuses (in relation to terrorism and protracted social conflict / genocide), and economic inequality will more acutely impact not only to the world’s most vulnerable, but also people in first-world countries (who have historically have considered themselves largely immune to such issues).
While it will not be easy, ours is the generation that must make meaningful strides towards ending poverty and promoting sustainable human development in the worlds least developed countries (LDCs). Failure to do so would gravely affect us all, and this (now) common knowledge is (slowly) creating unstoppable momentum towards positive, sustainable change.
“Streets, airwaves, entire countries are buzzing with demands for economic, social and political justice,”
Setting out this agenda and acknowledging the hard work that lay ahead in ensuring that all people enjoyed equal rights, Ms. Pillay emphasized the important role of civil society in those efforts. “We need to work together to ensure that the space, voice and knowledge of civil society is nurtured in all our countries,” she stressed.
[General Assembly President John Ashe] drawing attention to upcoming initiatives on human rights issues in the General Assembly, stressed the human rights relevance of his body’s work in setting the stage for a new international development agenda following the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals.
Overcoming the rise in inequality around the world and the increasing marginalization of people living in poverty is particularly important in that light, he said.
He too pointed to the importance of civil society in pursuing those goals, given “how much courage and fortitude is required by those who champion human rights, when it is so easy to look the other way or take a less courageous stand.”
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In related news, the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) announced it will hold 50 new national level consultations as part of its efforts to build local support for the Post-2015 Development Agenda:
The consultations will take the form of public meetings and discussions where policy planners, civil society representatives, community and private sector leaders will discuss how to best deliver the next sustainable development agenda that will build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
“We are committed to changing the way multilateral development diplomacy works,” said Olav Kjorven, Special Advisor to the UNDP Administrator on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. “We will continue to expand the areas where people will be able to engage with the work of the United Nations.”
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Sustainable human development begins and ends with people. The human rights based approach (HRBA) to development champions both the political and civil rights needed for people to be active participants in change, as well as the economic, social and cultural rights people need to live dignified lives. The HRBA recognizes that these rights are interrelated and interdependent; for example, political reform cannot be put off in the name of economic growth.
There are universal means to improving standard of living; education, food, rule of law, responsive governance, healthcare, sanitation, access to energy, employment to name a few. How these means can be best implemented is context-sensitive; thinking we know better than those at a local level is an exercise in hubris, not development.
“Social Accountability (p 44-45) “is used to refer to a broad range of activities in which individuals and CSOs act directly or indirectly to mobilize demand for accountability…Social accountability has worked best when the rules and frameworks in place provide legal sanctions in the event of wrongdoing and permit civil society to monitor effectively and access essential information.”
Without avenues for redress, the transformative value of social accountability activities ultimately depends on the willingness of duty bearers to engage with them. For this reason, social accountability may be more effective when its objective is to complement and strengthen the horizontal accountability mechanisms discussed earlier. Social accountability activities might aim, for example, to reveal the inadequacies of these mechanisms, lobby for their reform or seek to improve their effectiveness through greater public participation. Such interventions can encourage the formation of new “diagonal” accountability mechanisms, such as citizen oversight committees or grievance redress mechanisms (with varying degrees of formality and legal authority).
While social accountability can be a powerful tool, it is most effective when complemented by governments committed to human rights accountability and willing to cede some control over the legal process to CSOs. Essentially, social accountability mechanisms can be made as (in)effective as a government is willing to make them. If governments are ultimately accountable to people, they should do everything in their power to empower their citizenry, enabling effective social accountability.
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Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aside, the Post 2015 Development Agenda is a blueprint; a way to show governments how effective inclusive and consultative governance can be. It is not enough to remember the role of regular people in bringing about change while drafting development agendas, or during times of election or revolution. The roles of civil society activism and social accountability must be promoted and protected everyday.
Ultimately, progress is brought about by and for people; governments, institutions, declarations, and development agendas play an enabling/complementary role.
Normative Narratives 