Financing Sustainable Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond - An analysis and assessment of innovative policy options
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations (UN) estimated that developing countries needed an extra US$ 2.5 trillion in external finance to cope with the consequences of the crisis. This vast sum is needed because additional spending needs – for example on health services and social protection – coincide with a simultaneous collapse of all traditional sources of development finance: tax revenue, export earnings, migrant remittances, foreign direct investment and, to a lesser extent, also official development assistance (ODA). In order to discuss how these finances could be [...]
Shifting policies for systemic change
Lessons from the global COVID-19 crisis
This is the fifth edition of the report Spotlight on Sustainable Development. Since 2016, we have published this report annually to assess not only the implementation of the 2030 Agenda but also the structural obstacles in its realization.
When we started to plan for this year’s report in Autumn 2019, mass protests were shaking a growing number of countries in various regions of the world. In Ecuador, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, in Egypt, Lebanon, and in India, millions of people took to the streets to demonstrate against the prevailing policies.
[...]Important step for the human rights and ecological orientation of the global economy
Berlin, September 2020
In June 2014, the Human Rights Council of the United Nations (UNHRC) mandated an intergovernmental working group (Resolution 26/9) to develop an interna-tional instrument to regulate the activities of transnational and other corporations. The aim of the process is to close the legal gaps in the protection of human rights in the global economy that have emerged in the course of globali-zation. So far, in five rounds of negotiations, governments, legal experts and representatives of civil society and busi-ness have debated the legal content of the treaty. Based on these [...]