Global Goals Yearbook 2018
The future of the United Nations is more uncertain than at any time before. Like his predecessors, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has promised to reform the United Nations. Drivers are two major agreements: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Accord. Both stand for a move away from statal top-down multilateralism towards new form of partnership between the public and the private sector as well as the civil society. The Global Goals Yearbook, published under the auspices of the macondo foundation, therefore covers „Partnership for the Goals“ as its 2018 main topic. Our world is truly not sustainable at this time. To make the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a success story, we need an enormous increase in effort. This cannot happen without help from the private sector. But businesses need a reason to contribute as well as attractive partnerships that are based on win-win constellations. We have no alternative but to rethink the role that public–private partnerships can play in this effort. That is why United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is calling upon UN entities to strengthen and better align their private-sector engagement. In every change there is a new chance. The Global Goals Yearbook 2018 discusses the multiple aspects of how private sector engagement can be improved. Recommendations are, among others, to revise multilaterism, partnership models and processes and to invest more in trust, a failure culture as well as metrics and monitoring. When businesses engage in partnerships for the Goals, this is more than just signing checks. It means inserting the “do good” imperative of the SDGs into corporate culture, business cases, innovation cycles, investor relationships, and, of course, the daily management processes and (extra-)financial reporting. The Yearbook includes arguments from academic and business experts, the World Bank and the Club of Rome as well as UN entities, among them UNDP, UNSSC, UNOPS, UN JIU, and UN DESA.
The future of the United Nations is more uncertain than at any time before. Like his predecessors, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has promised to reform the United Nations. Drivers are two major agreements: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Accord. Both stand for a move away from statal top-down multilateralism towards new form of partnership between the public and the private sector as well as the civil society. The Global Goals Yearbook, published under the auspices of the macondo foundation, therefore covers „Partnership for the Goals“ as its 2018 main topic.
Our world is truly not sustainable at this time. To make the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a success story, we need an enormous increase in effort. This cannot happen without help from the private sector. But businesses need a reason to contribute as well as attractive partnerships that are based on win-win constellations.
We have no alternative but to rethink the role that public–private partnerships can play in this effort. That is why United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is calling upon UN entities to strengthen and better align their private-sector engagement. In every change there is a new chance.
The Global Goals Yearbook 2018 discusses the multiple aspects of how private sector engagement can be improved. Recommendations are, among others, to revise multilaterism, partnership models and processes and to invest more in trust, a failure culture as well as metrics and monitoring.
When businesses engage in partnerships for the Goals, this is more than just signing checks. It means inserting the “do good” imperative of the SDGs into corporate culture, business cases, innovation cycles, investor relationships, and, of course, the daily management processes and (extra-)financial reporting.
The Yearbook includes arguments from academic and business experts, the World Bank and the Club of Rome as well as UN entities, among them UNDP, UNSSC, UNOPS, UN JIU, and UN DESA.
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REALIGNING PARTNERSHIPS<br />
Act<br />
Plan<br />
Check<br />
Do<br />
Clear criteria are needed – deficit of<br />
market forces<br />
Dill and his staff interviewed some 25<br />
investors, from the Abu Dhabi Investment<br />
Fund to UBS and the Sustainable<br />
Finance Initiative in Geneva. “Because<br />
the institutional professionals from<br />
AGI to Blackrock could not even invest,<br />
even if they wanted to, we have a huge<br />
deficit of capitalism,” says Dill.<br />
He explains by way of an example:<br />
Unilever emphasizes that it does not<br />
employ child labor, does not trade in<br />
weapons, that it produces solar energy<br />
itself, and conducts an audit based on<br />
selected SDGs in order to be considered<br />
an SDG investment for investors.<br />
“But the purpose of the SDGs is not to<br />
provide Unilever with a fresh injection<br />
of money; they exist in order to help<br />
countries with big problems.”<br />
Dill is a member of the UN working<br />
group Inter-agency Task Force on Financing<br />
for Development (IATF). His<br />
task is to make suggestions on how<br />
to improve financing possibilities for<br />
poor countries. Furthermore, he has to<br />
report on what is going wrong in the<br />
SDG process and provide facts, data,<br />
and sources pertaining to obstacles that<br />
could affect the SDG progress report in<br />
2019. Dill is one of only four members<br />
who are currently publishing IATF reports<br />
and who are not representatives of<br />
countries or international/supranational<br />
organizations.<br />
Peace as a business case<br />
“But I speak as a UN stakeholder and not<br />
as an internal critic,” he emphasizes.<br />
What he finds fault with has already<br />
been in his reports for two years – most<br />
recently in this year’s The Impact of<br />
Social Capital on Financing Development,<br />
one of five IATF reports about<br />
development finance. Although his<br />
points of critique are discussed some in<br />
the political arena, they are not taken<br />
up for political innovations.<br />
“We have to turn SDGs into a business<br />
case in developing countries and not just<br />
misuse them for audits of multinational<br />
enterprises,” he says.<br />
He is not the only one who thinks this<br />
way: “In Africa, only business helps,”<br />
says the non-profit Foundation managerswithoutborders.<br />
“Local business run<br />
by the people here.” One might compare<br />
it with the European small and mediumsized<br />
enterprise sector. “Without commitment<br />
and essential groundwork based<br />
on an entrepreneurial spirit, there will<br />
be neither peace nor financial markets<br />
in Africa,” says Helene Prölß, founder of<br />
the foundation. According to information<br />
provided by the foundation, it has<br />
implemented more than 150 projects<br />
since 2005 that support businesses in<br />
entrepreneurship in more than 40 countries,<br />
mainly in Africa.<br />
>><br />
COUNTRY COMPARISONS LAG<br />
BEHIND<br />
Standards other than conventional GDP give different<br />
impressions of countries, as shown through a<br />
comparison of 10 country indices in the <strong>Global</strong> Index<br />
Benchmark of the Basel Institute of Commons.<br />
The ratings are very different. For example, New<br />
Zealand ranks 32nd in its GDP, 22nd in the Bertelsmann<br />
SDG Index, but 2nd in the corruption index.<br />
According to the Happy Planet Index, the Dutch are<br />
not so happy about the things that matter, whereas<br />
they are ranked fourth according to the Human Development<br />
Index. Indonesia ranks 100th in the GDP<br />
and SDG indexes, but much higher (13th place) in the<br />
World Giving Index.<br />
<strong>Global</strong> <strong>Goals</strong> <strong>Yearbook</strong> <strong>2018</strong><br />
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