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NEW YORK, Feb 15 (IPS) – On 10 September 2021, UN Secretary-Common (SG) Antonio Guterres launched the “Our Widespread Agenda” (OCA) report. This report was in response to a request from UN member states to “report again earlier than the tip of the seventy-fifth session of the Common Meeting with suggestions to advance our widespread agenda and to reply to present and future challenges”.
UN member states are at present assembly, as a part of a session course of on the OCA report, to debate these proposals. The report comprises many regarding suggestions in relation to the worldwide financial and monetary structure and has bigger implications for democratic international governance.
Company seize of the UN within the title of multistake-holderism
Slightly than reaffirming the function of inclusive member state led processes, the proposals made by the Secretary Common (SG) depend on new multi-stakeholder approaches, termed ‘networked multilateralism’ within the report.
This may convey to the decision-making desk international company monopolies and worldwide monetary actors which have concentrated wealth and energy, subsumed areas into debt and austerity, eroded environmental integrity, exacerbated poverty and human rights violations, actively undermined equal and simply entry to vaccines, and profited from disasters.
This modality of operation undermines the United Nations’ function in worldwide decision-making in addition to the associated accountability and transparency that’s central to its legitimacy.
Multistake-holderism conflates duty-bearers (governments), rights holders (folks) and firms as equal stakeholders, below the phantasm that each one of them are equal of their rights, obligations, and capacities. Such processes would additionally embed the UN in excessive battle of pursuits.
As an example, the SG proposes a multi-stakeholder digital expertise monitor in preparation for a ‘Summit of the Future’ to agree on a ‘World Digital Compact’. The proposal echoes the advice of the UNSG’s Excessive Stage Panel of Specialists on Digital Cooperation which was co-chaired by key personalities in international expertise platforms (Huge Tech).
As a substitute of enabling the self-serving push from Huge Tech, the UN ought to help inclusive, member state led processes to deal with the event divide that underpins the digital divide, to control and curb the rising powers and wealth of Huge Tech and make sure that human rights are revered.
The extent to which the OCA report and its “options” depend on multi-stakeholder approaches, reinforcing the function of problematic unique membership golf equipment and giving a seat on the desk to those that have preyed on catastrophe, is worrisome.
The UN must be the normative area for making choices on essential international challenges which has more and more been captured by international north led areas such because the OECD and G20 as an alternative. The UN ought to certainly be addressing all these substantive points included within the agenda.
However it must be completed by means of strengthening inclusive member state led processes. Not by surrendering to the company seize and undermining much more the likelihood to regain international democracy.
Eroding current inclusive, multilateral processes on the UN
The OCA report proposes to determine a multistakeholder ‘emergency platform’ in addition to a Biennial Summit between G20, ECOSOC, SG and IFIs noting that “we nonetheless lack pre-negotiated methods to convene related actors within the occasion of a worldwide financial disaster”. That is incorrect.
The UN’s Financing for Growth (FfD) course of already has the mandate to convene and make choices within the occasion of a worldwide financial disaster with a legitimacy spanning 20 years. In truth, an FfD disaster convention titled “UN convention on the world financial disaster and its results on creating international locations” was convened in 2009 in direct response to the worldwide financial disaster.
The FfD course of is already mandated to deal with pressing international systemic challenges on debt, worldwide tax, non-public finance, ODA, commerce, expertise and monetary regulation. The modalities of the FfD course of already recognises civil society and the non-public sector as stakeholders for inputs, along with IFIs, WTO and UNCTAD, whereas guaranteeing that negotiations are clearly intergovernmental with member states as decision-makers.
The problem just isn’t the shortage of current processes to convene however the necessity to overcome the obstinate blocking from a handful of member states within the UN preferring such decision-making to occur in undemocratic boards quite than the UN. Establishing multi-stakeholder initiatives won’t resolve this political economic system problem and can solely additional delay decision-making by strengthening the established order.
Suggestions to member states
Convene the 4th Financing for Growth (FfD) convention: UN member states ought to urgently agree on the following FfD Convention to reply to the a number of crises we face and transfer in direction of a brand new international financial structure that works for the folks and planet.
We’d like management from UN member states to bolster current member state led processes quite than inventing new boards and summits that solely delay decision-making.
Democratise international financial governance: Multilateral reforms are urgently wanted to make sure the democratisation of world financial governance reminiscent of the necessity for a worldwide debt exercise mechanism on the UN, establishing a common UN intergovernmental tax fee and a worldwide expertise evaluation mechanism on the UN.
We name on UN member states to reject multistake-holderism that reinforces the function of problematic unique membership golf equipment (OECD, G20 and so on) and allows company seize of intergovernmental decision-making and to as an alternative uphold the democratic potential of the United Nations.
Emilia Reyes is co-convener of the Ladies’s Working Group on FfD; Iolanda Fresnillo is Debt Justice Supervisor at European Community on Debt and Growth (Eurodad); Neth Dano is Asia Director of Motion Group on Erosion, Expertise and Focus (ETC Group); and Pooja Rangaprasad is Coverage Director, FfD at Society for Worldwide Growth (SID).
This text is predicated on Civil Society FfD Group’s response to the OCA report: https://csoforffd.org/2022/01/19/response-to-un-secretary-generals-our-common-agenda-report/
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