With over 16 million people and nearly 8.6 million jobs, America's older industrial cities remain a vital-if undervalued-part of the economy, particularly in states where they are heavily concentrated, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. They also have a range of other physical, economic, and cultural assets that, if fully leveraged, can serve as a platform for their renewal.

Read the Executive Summary  »

Across the country, cities today are becoming more attractive to certain segments of society. Meanwhile, economic trends-globalization, the demand for educated workers, the increasing role of universities-are providing cities with an unprecedented chance to capitalize upon their economic advantages and regain their competitive edge.

Many cities have exploited these assets to their advantage; the moment is ripe for older industrial cities to follow suit. But to do so, these cities need thoughtful and broad-based approaches to foster prosperity.

"Restoring Prosperity" aims to mobilize governors and legislative leaders, as well as local constituencies, behind an asset-oriented agenda for reinvigorating the market in the nation's older industrial cities. The report begins with identifications and descriptions of these cities-and the economic, demographic, and policy "drivers" behind their current condition-then makes a case for why the moment is ripe for advancing urban reform, and offers a five-part agenda and organizing plan to achieve it.

Publications & Presentations
Connecticut State Profile
Connecticut State Presentation 

Michigan State Profile
Michigan State Presentation 

New Jersey State Profile
New Jersey State Presentation 

New York State Profile
New York State Presentation 

Ohio State Profile
Ohio State Presentation
Ohio Revitalization Speech

Pennsylvania State Profile 

Downloads

• Download

Introduction

During 2006, the United States saw a considerable upswing in the number of new mortgage defaults and foreclosure filings. By 2007, that upswing had become a tidal wave. Today, national homeownership rates are falling, while more than a million American families have already lost their homes to foreclosure. Across the country, boarded houses are appearing on once stable blocks. Some of the hardest hit communities are in older industrial cities, particularly Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis.

Although most media attention has focused on the role of the federal government in stemming this crisis, states have the legal powers, financial resources, and political will to mitigate its impact. Some state governments have taken action, negotiating compacts with mortgage lenders, enacting state laws regulating mortgage lending, and creating so-called “rescue funds.” Governors such as Schwarzenegger in California, Strickland in Ohio, and Patrick in Massachusetts have taken the lead on this issue. State action so far, however, has just begun to address a still unfolding, multidimensional crisis. If the issue is to be addressed successfully and at least some of its damage mitigated, better designed, comprehensive strategies are needed.

This paper describes how state government can tackle both the immediate problems caused by the wave of mortgage foreclosures and prevent the same thing from happening again. After a short overview of the crisis and its effect on America’s towns and cities, the paper outlines options available to state government, and offers ten specific action steps, representing the most appropriate and potentially effective strategies available for coping with the varying dimensions of the problem.

Downloads

• Download

Introduction

Ohio has already taken important steps to address the state’s ongoing foreclosure crisis, yet the crisis continues, causing distress for thousands of families and individuals, and destabilizing cities, towns and neighborhoods across the state. Therefore, the state, its local governments and private stakeholders need to do still more to deal more effectively with the crisis and its impacts on the state’s housing stock, cities and neighborhoods.

What is often termed the “foreclosure crisis” is actually a multi-dimensional crisis, in which the collapse of the housing bubble, the devastation caused by the lax and often irresponsible credit practices that accompanied and perpetuated that bubble, the resulting freeze on commercial and consumer credit, and the worldwide recession are interwoven, and can only with great difficulty be untangled. In Ohio, those forces are further exacerbated by profound changes to the state’s historical economic underpinnings. Ohio cannot solve the crisis by itself, but it can significantly mitigate its impact on people, neighborhoods, and towns and cities. These mitigating efforts will also help preserve the value of homes and neighborhoods in the state, and place Ohio in a stronger position to benefit from the future economic recovery.

The paper begins with a short summary of current conditions and the actions the state has already taken to address the wave of foreclosures, followed by a discussion of areas for future action. This discussion will address mitigating both the individual and community impacts of foreclosure, but will give particular emphasis to the critical issue of softening the blow of foreclosure on communities, which up to now has been less of a focus for state action.

Downloads

• Download

Ohio, like most other states in the country and particularly its neighbors in the Great Lakes region, is still reeling from the “Great Recession.” This economic crisis, the worst in a half century, has devastated economies across the globe.

While economists have declared that the recession has abated, it will be a long time before the businesses, households, and government treasuries across the country, and specifically in the state of Ohio, shake off the effects. And when the recession’s grip finally breaks, what will Ohio’s economy and landscape look like?

The choices that Ohio’s people and its leaders make—starting now and continuing over the next few years—will determine that answer. Ohioans can decide whether to shy away from manufacturing after the loss of so many jobs, or to transform the state’s old manufacturing strengths, derived from its role in the auto supply chain, into new products, markets, and opportunities. They can decide to opt out of the national shift to a lower-carbon economy, or to be at the forefront of developing clean coal and renewable energy industries and jobs.

They can choose a workforce system that is aligned to the true metropolitan scale of the economy and oriented to the needs of workers and employers. They can choose transformative transportation networks over more roads; smaller, greener, stronger cities; collaboration and regional cooperation to save money, reduce duplication, and bolster regional competitiveness. And instead of trying to go it alone in the 21st century global marketplace, they can maximize the federal resources on offer to support Ohio’s economic transformation and choose to compete effectively for new federal investments.

This report, Restoring Prosperity: Transforming Ohio’s Communities for the Next Economy, lays out some of the specific policy options that will help Ohioans restore the prosperity that the state enjoyed for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, but that it has been struggling to regain for at least a decade, if not longer.

Full Report »

Downloads

• Full Report
• Executive Summary
• Bruce Katz's Speech in Ohio

For over 100 years, the driving force of Ohio’s economy has been the state’s so-called Big Eight cities—Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Akron, Dayton, Canton, and Youngstown. Today, though, the driving reality of these cities is sustained, long-term population loss. The central issue confronting these cities—and the state and surrounding metropolitan area—is not whether these cities will have different physical footprints and more green space than they do now, but how it will happen.

The state must adopt a different way of thinking and a different vision of its cities’ future—and so must the myriad local, civic, philanthropic, and business leaders who will also play a role in reshaping Ohio’s cities. The following seven basic premises should inform any vision for a smaller, stronger future and subsequent strategies for change in these places:

• These cities contain significant assets for future rebuilding
  
• These cities will not regain their peak population
  
• These cities have a surplus of housing
  
• These cities have far more vacant land than can be absorbed by redevelopment
  
• Impoverishment threatens the viability of these cities more than population loss as such
  
• Local resources are severely limited
  
• The fate of cities and their metropolitan areas are inextricably inter-connected
  

These premises have significant implications for the strategies that state and local governments should pursue to address the issues of shrinking cities.

Full Paper on Ohio's Cities » (PDF)
Paper on Shrinking Cities Across the United States »

Downloads

• Full Paper

Editor’s Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. This fifth installation of the NPGL Soundings provides insight on the issues facing leaders at the Seoul G-20 Summit and the coverage they received in their respective national media. Read the other commentary »

The week before the Seoul G-20 Summit was one in which the main newspapers read in Washington (The New York Times, The Washington Post and Financial Times) all focused their primary attention on the “currency war,” global imbalances, the debate on quantitative easing (QE 2), the struggle over whether there would be numerate current account targets or only words, and the US-China relationship. As early as Wednesday, November 10, The Washington Post front-page headline read: “Fed move at home trails U.S. to Seoul; Backlash from Europe; Obstacles emerge for key goals at G-20 economic summit.” By Thursday, November 11, things had gotten worse. “Deep fractures hit hopes of breakthrough; governments are unlikely to agree on a strategy to tackle economic imbalances” read the Financial Times headline on Alan Beattie’s article from Seoul. Friday, November 12, The New York Times front-page headline declared: “Obama’s Economic View is Rejected on World Stage; China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S.; Trade Talks with Seoul Fail, Too.” By Saturday, the Financial Times concluded in its lead editorial: “G-20 show how not to run the world.”

From these reports, headlines and editorials it is clear that conflicts over policy once again dwarfed the progress on other issues and the geopolitical jockeying over the currency and imbalances issues took centre stage, weakening G-20 summits rather than strengthening them. Obama was painted as losing ground, supposedly reflecting lessening U.S. influence and failing to deliver concrete results. China, Germany and Brazil were seen to beat back the U.S. initiative to quantify targets on external imbalances. Given the effort that Korean leaders had put into achieving positive results and “consolidating” G-20 summits, it was, from this optical vantage point, disappointing, to say the least.

How was the Rebalancing Issue Dealt With?

At lower levels of visibility and intensity, however, things looked a bit different and more positive. Howard Schneider and Scott Wilson in Saturday’s edition of The Washington Post (November 13) gave a more balanced view of the outcomes. Their headline read: “G-20 nations agree to agree; Pledge to heed common rules; but economic standards have yet to be set.” They discerned progress toward new terrain that went beyond the agreement among G-20 finance ministers in October at Gyeongju, which other writers missed.

“By agreeing to set economic standards, the G-20 leaders moved into uncharted waters,” they wrote. “The deal rests on the premise that countries will take steps, possibly against their own short-term interests, if their economic policies are at odds with the wider well-being of the world economy. And leaders are committing to take such steps even before there’s an agreement on what criteria would be used to evaluate their policies.”

They continued: “In most general of terms, the statement adopted by the G-20 countries says that if the eventual guidelines identify a problem, this would ‘warrant an assessment of their nature and the root causes’ and should push countries to ‘preventive and corrective actions.’”

The Schneider-Wilson rendering went beyond the words of the communiqué to an understanding of what was going on in official channels over time to push this agenda forward in real policy, rather than declarative terms. As the Saturday, November 13, Financial Times’ editorial put it, “below the headline issues, however, the G-20 grouping is not completely impotent,” listing a number of other issues on which progress was made including International Monetary Fund (IMF) reform which the Financial Times thought might actually feed back into a stronger capacity to deal with “managing the global macroeconomy.”

The Role of President Barack Obama

Without doubt, the easy, simple, big-picture message coming out of Seoul was that Obama and the United States took a drubbing. And this did not help the G-20 either. The seeming inability of the U.S. to lead the other G-20 leaders toward an agreement in Seoul on global imbalances, the criticism of U.S. monetary easing and then, on top of it all, the inability to consummate a US-Korea trade deal, made it seem as if Obama went down swinging.

But again, below the surface of the simple, one got a different picture. Obama himself did not seem shaken or isolated at the Seoul summit by the swirl of forces around him. At his press conference, he spoke clearly and convincingly of the complexity of the task of policy coordination and the time it would take to work out the policies and the politics of adjustment.

“Naturally there’s an instinct to focus on the disagreements, otherwise these summits might not be very exciting,” he said. “In each of these successive summits we’ve made real progress,” he concluded. Tom Gjeltin, from NPR news, on the Gwen Ifyl Weekly News Roundup commented Saturday evening that the G-20 summits are different and that there is a “new pattern of leadership” emerging that is not quite there yet. Obama seems more aware of that and the time it takes for new leadership and new patterns of mutual adjustment to emerge. He may have taken a short-run hit, but he seems to have the vision it takes to connect this moment to the long-run trajectory.

Reflections on the Role of South Korea

From a U.S. vantage point, Seoul was one more stop in Asia as the president moved from India to Indonesia to Korea to Japan. It stood out, perhaps, in higher profile more as the locus of the most downbeat moments in the Asia tour, because of the combination of the apparent lack of decisive progress at the G-20 along with the needless circumstance of two presidents failing to find a path forward on something they both wanted.

From a Korean vantage point, the summit itself was an event of immense importance for Korea’s emergence on the world stage as an industrial democracy that had engineered a massive social and economic transformation in the last 50 years, culminating in being the first non-G8 country to chair the G-20 summit. No one can fault Korea’s efforts to reach significant results. However, the fact is that the Seoul Summit’s achievements, which even in the rebalancing arena were more significant than they appeared to most (see Schneider and Wilson), but included substantial progress on financial regulatory reform, international institutional reform (specifically on the IMF), on development and on global financial safety nets, were seen to be less than hoped for. This was not the legacy the Koreans were looking for, unfortunately.

Conflicts among the major players on what came to be seen as the major issue all but wiped out the serious workmanlike progress in policy channels. The leaders level interactions at G-20 summits has yet to catch up to the highly significant degree of systemic institutionalization of the policy process of the G-20 among ministers of finance, presidents of central banks, G-20 deputies and Sherpas, where the policy work really goes on. On its watch, Korea moved the agenda in the policy track forward in a myriad of significant ways. It will be left to the French and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to see if they can bring the leaders into the positive-sum game arrangements that are going on in the policy channels and raise the game level of leaders to that of G-20 senior officials.

Editor’s Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. This fifth installation of the NPGL Soundings provides insight on the issues facing leaders at the Seoul G-20 Summit and the coverage they received in their respective national media. Read the other commentary »

The fifth G-20 Summit held in Seoul seems to show signs of a gradual maturing of the process and the forum as a mechanism for communication among leaders and a means of connecting leaders and finance ministers with their national publics, judging from National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) country commentaries. These growing strengths — looking from the G-20 capitals toward the Seoul summit contrasted with looking from the summit toward the countries — seemed particularly impressive at this Seoul summit, which was characterized by the most intense policy conflicts yet at a G-20 meeting.

Policy Conflicts and the Trajectory of G-20 Summits

The responses to the first question — “Did coverage seem to threaten or enhance the viability of G-20 summits?” — seemed to indicate that, despite the conflicts over external imbalances and currency policies, these issues did not threaten the viability of the G-20 summits as much as one might have expected. Given the focus of the NPGL project on national leadership, what is interesting about this positive result is that the coverage in the media was not just of the debate itself, but the portrayal of their national leader at the summit.

With the exception of an excellent and balanced article on Saturday, November 13 in The Washington Post by Howard Schneider and Scott Wilson, the coverage in Washington and in the Financial Times would lead readers to conclude that the Seoul G-20 Summit was less successful than anticipated, and did not enhance the viability of G-20 summits as much as the Koreans hoped it would.

“Agreements did not have to be worked out,” Andrew Cooper wrote, quoting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “this month or next month in order to avert [a] cataclysm…I’m confident we will make progress over time.”

Olaf Corry reported from London that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted in The Guardian as saying that rebalancing “is being discussed in a proper multilateral way without resort to tit-for-tat measures and selfish policies.”

U.S. President Barack Obama said in his press conference that “in each of these successive summits we’ve made real progress.”

Lan Xue and Yanbing Zhang wrote that Chinese President Hu Jintao “highlighted the importance of (the) framework (for strong, sustainable and balanced growth) and also pointed out that it should be further improved,” a far cry from a rejection of it.

“In contrast to previous summits,” Peter Draper reported from Johannesburg, “President Zuma’s interventions did receive some press coverage at home…To judge from this coverage, he seems to have played his cards reasonably well and to have been visible.”

Melisa Deciancio commented from Buenos Aires that ”Cristina Fernandez’s contribution to the G-20 summits has always been substantive…She has also called the members of the (G-20) to work together, cooperate and avoid entering into conflict in relation to the ongoing currency war between China and the U.S.”

“Both (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel and (finance minister) Schaeuble spent considerable effort to explain the positive aspects of summit agreements and praised the ‘spirit of cooperation,’” reported Thomas Fues from Germany.

In each of the cases above, the leader offered a positive interpretation of the Seoul G-20 Summit and the G-20 summit process even in the context of intense policy disputes, which constrained the practical agreements that could have been reached, especially on the global economic adjustment issues. This optimistic stance indicates a forward movement by G-20 leaders on a metric of global leadership in Seoul that the four previous NPGL “Soundings” had found to be wanting at previous summits.

In some countries, the problem continued with the press focusing on the shortcomings and failures of the Seoul G-20 Summit, including the coverage in the influential Financial Times. G-20 leaders were, however, more aggressive in pushing against the media’s interpretation of weakness and failures at the G-20, advancing an alternative narrative that focused on the gradual progress being made and stronger relationships developing with each G-20 summit experience. Leaders now need to assure that the G-20 “framework” and the “mutual assessment process” (MAP) of peer review that goes with it, are able to deliver a credible way forward for global economic adjustment by the time of the French G-20 Summit in November 2011.

Global Economic Adjustment as a Visible Theme

With regard to question two — “How was the rebalancing issue dealt with?”— the common thread running through each of the country commentaries is reflected in Olaf Corry’s comment that “explicit mention of the G-20’s formal ‘framework for strong, sustainable and balance growth’ is very sparse in UK public debate, but the themes it highlights definitely shine through.” The one exception may have been the explicit, detailed understanding of the issue conveyed by Schneider and Wilson in their Washington Post article titled “G-20 nations agree to agree; Pledge to heed common rules; but economic standards have yet to be met.” (See U.S. country commentary.)

The G-20 framework and the MAP may not have received much visibility or coverage from the media, but the intensity of the currency wars, the debate about U.S. quantitative easing (QE 2) and the differences over current account targets were all widely covered, and the message communicated to most publics was that global imbalances are a real problem for all countries and a concerted global economic adjustment is essential. The G-20 leaders will, therefore, have to do far more than simply explain the process to their publics; they need to continue to push each other and their economic officials to reach agreement on a path forward by the time of the French summit in November of 2011.

The difficulty of reaching agreement is reflected in a comment by Ryozo Hayashi of Japan who wrote, “Therefore, it sounds wise to let these countries (the U.S. and China) keep their current policy paths with a political commitment to avoid a currency war and for the G-20 to agree to develop economic indicators. It may become urgent or it may become irrelevant as the situation develops. Given the difficulty of establishing agreed economic indicators, the time element would be important.”

Leadership at Summits and Its Linkages to Domestic Political Support

What emerged more clearly at this summit than in previous G-20 summits was the degree to which the role of individual countries and their leaders (or finance ministers) in G-20 processes had domestic political valence in their home countries.

“The amount of attention devoted by the media to this summit was considerably more than previous ones,” wrote Andres Rozental, “partially because the Calderón administration will host the G-20 in 2012 and Mexico is now part of the G-20 ‘troika.’”

Thomas Fues commented that “The media also appreciatively noted that Germany had been asked to co-chair the G-20 working group on the international currency system, tasked with formulating policy proposals” for the French G-20 Summit.

In South Africa, Peter Draper also found that the press paid attention to the fact that it co-chairs the G-20 working group on development with South Korea, and “the importance of this group’s work to the future of the G-20.”

“In terms of summit diplomacy,” wrote Andrew Cooper, “Harper’s main success was in gaining the role for Canada as one of the co-chairs (with India, supported by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) with respect to the process of working out a set of economic indicators that all members of the G-20 could use as guideposts for a stable global economy.”

This is all evidence that G-20 activities now generate positive repercussions in domestic public opinion.
Other dimensions of linkages between international committee positions assumed at G-20 summits and domestic political capital are beginning to emerge as the G-20 matures.

In South Africa, Finance Minister Gordhan’s strong criticism of U.S. QE2 in the international press seems “to have added to his growing reputation at home” commented Peter Draper.

German Finance Minister Schaeuble’s criticism of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s move as “clueless,” “forced Merkel to reiterate unswerving support of her key official” at the Seoul summit, Thomas Fues noted.

Cristina Fernandez has consistently and adroitly used her substantive policy positions at G-20 summits to buttress her position at home. Argentina is head of the G77, so Argentine support for development increases its status as a leader of the South and her domestic prestige. Argentine discontent with the IMF has been legend since the 1990s; support of President Fernandez for the G-20 framework and MAP process arises as an alternative to the IMF article IV exercise, which most Argentines are against, reported Melisa Deciancio.

Conclusion

Despite media attention being riveted on the showdown between the United States, Germany and China on currency manipulation and external imbalances at the Seoul G-20 Summit, leaders defended the G-20 processes for working through these issues over time, rather than emphasizing the failure to reach agreement at Seoul. The leaders and their finance ministers found that taking an aggressive stance on key issues paid dividends in terms of their domestic political support.

Explicit efforts by leaders to link international policies to domestic politics is a positive step forward for G-20 summits toward a greater engagement between leaders and their publics. NPGL observers have been watching this dimension of G-20 summitry in London, Pittsburgh, Toronto and now Seoul. (See: www.cigionline.org; Papers; “Soundings”)

The challenge going forward will be finding a way to align the global economic adjustment policy with domestic political linkages in a consistent and reinforcing manner, that will allow for policy convergence rather than the divergence manifested at the Seoul G-20 Summit.

Event Information

While the future impact of rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China is uncertain and the shifting political landscape in the Arab world is still playing out, the influence of these emerging nations is a central fact of geopolitics.

Already the global financial crisis, the Copenhagen climate negotiations, and the debate over Iran sanctions have illustrated the potential, the pitfalls, and above all the centrality of the relationship between American power and the influence of these rising actors and developing democracies.

In a new paper, Senior Fellow Bruce Jones, director of the Managing Global Order Project at Brookings, argues the greatest risk lies not in a single peer competitor but in the erosion of cooperation on issues vital to U.S. interests and a stable world order. U.S. power is indispensible for that purpose but not sufficient. No longer the CEO of Free World Inc., the United States is now the largest minority shareholder in Global Order LLC.

On March 15, the Brookings Institution and Foreign Policy magazine hosted the launch of Bruce Jones’s paper "Largest Minority Shareholder in Global Order LLC: The Changing Balance of Influence and U.S. Strategy." Panelists explored the prospects for cooperation on global finance and transnational threats; the need for new investments in global economic and energy diplomacy; and the case for new crisis management tools to help de-escalate inevitable tensions with emerging powers.

Susan Glasser, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, moderated the discussion. After the presentations, panelists took audience questions.

Video

• Relative Shift in U.S. Balance of Power
• Shifting Coalitions of Consensus
• Paradox of Power for U.S.
• U.S. Needs To Get Serious about Development and Energy

Audio

• Shifting Balance of Power: Has the U.S. Become the Largest Minority Shareholder in the Global Order?

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20110315_global_order

Downloads

• Table of Contents
• Sample Chapter

• {9ABF977A-E4A6-41C8-B030-0FD655E07DBF}, 978-0-8157-2145-1, $29.95 Add to Cart

The biggest news at the end of the Brisbane G-20 on Sunday will be to confirm for the first time in an official G-20 communique that China will indeed chair the G-20 Summit in 2016. 

Coming on the heals of a momentous week of great power realignments and breakthroughs at the APEC Summit in Beijing and other one-on-one meetings of heads of state, the timing of China’s presidency of the G-20 Summit in 2016 could not be a better follow-up to this week’s accomplishments. It puts China in play as a global leader at a critical moment in geopolitical relations and in terms of several global agendas that will culminate in the next two years. It also provides an unusual opportunity for the U.S. and China to collaborate on a broader set of societal issues affecting everyone everywhere building on their agreements this week.

One of the reasons why the G-20 Summits have yet to realize their full potential is that the leaders-level summits have been captured by the finance ministers’ agendas and discourse. Leaders at G-20 Summits have individually and collectively failed to connect with their publics; ordinary citizens do not see their urgent issues being dealt with. Exchange rates, current account balances, reserve ratios for banks, and the role of the IMF do not resonate with public anxieties over their lives and livelihoods.

Three streams of global issues will culminate in 2015:  the forging of a “post-2015 agenda” on sustainable development with a new set of global goals to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); the agreement on  “financing for development” (FFD) arrangements and mechanisms to support the new post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be realized in 2030; and the achievement of a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by the end of 2015, which looks more promising now than it did a week ago.

What has been learned from previous global goal setting processes is that building on the momentum for the goal-setting process in 2015 and carrying it directly into the mobilization of national political commitment, resources and policies for implementation is vital. China as a member of the G-20 troika in 2015 through 2017 will be in crucial position of bridging the goal-setting and implementation phases of the new SDGs for 2030 to be adopted at the United Nations in September of next year.

China, as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, will be in a pivotal position to create complementarities between the G-20 forum for the major economies and the U.N. as a forum for all countries for this critical period of setting the global sustainability agenda for the next fifteen years.  

The post-2015 agenda for social, economic and environmental sustainability is of high interest to the United States, and the new China-U.S. climate change agreement in Beijing this week augurs well for collaboration between the two countries on the broader agenda. White House Chief of Staff John Podesta was on the high-level panel for the post-2015 development agenda last year, which signals high U.S. policy involvement. The Shanghai Institute for International Studies has argued in a recent paper for the U.N. Development Program that “the G-20 and the U.N. could have certain complementary roles. The development issue could become the one linking the major work of both the U.N. and the G-20.”  

The world should welcome the unique role that China can now play in bringing the international community and the global system of international institutions together in charting a common path forward building on the progress made in the various summits this week. 

As the G-20 Summit concluded in Brisbane, Australia on November 16th, it set a target to achieve an incremental jump in global GDP growth of 2 percent by 2018 and made commitments to creating a Global Infrastructure Investment Initiative (GIII) to address an estimated $5 trillion per year in infrastructure needs around the world. 

It is a valid policy idea to expose the gap between current and potential rates of economic growth to the public. That the Australians put the spotlight on this growth gap was the central achievement of their G-20 Summit in Brisbane. It is a contribution to the global effort to energize the global economy and generate both greater and smarter growth. The question is, will it work? 

The gap between potential and actual growth has more to do with the patterns and sources of growth than the rates of growth. It is certainly necessary to continue to use monetary and fiscal policy to stimulate aggregate, demand-driven growth, but it will not be not sufficient.  

The people-problem in global growth has to do with structural obstacles: market dynamics of globalization tend to increase income inequality; technologies can be labor displacing rather than labor absorbing; and the knowledge-economy requires technical skills that are more sophisticated than investment-driven industrialization.  

As a result, the focus is now on structural policies and reforms, an issue on which the OECD has been an international leader. OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria jointly released an OECD report with Australia Minister of Finance Joseph Hockey in February of this year. At the G-20 Summit in Brisbane, Gurria said that it was possible that the global growth effort by the G-20, which the OECD and IMF are monitoring, could “overshoot” the 2 percent target.  

Discussing structural reforms tends to “get in the weeds” quickly, since the details vary by each country’s circumstances—as made clear by Brisbane’s G-20 Action Plan. Going from the Brisbane G-20 Summit to regional, ministerial, and national agendas and actions becomes the next phase in this effort to boost global growth by shifting the patterns and sources of growth. 

A key component in closing the growth gap will be the aforementioned Global Infrastructure Investment Initiative. The GIII is the culmination of a long discussion involving the G-20, the World Bank, the regional development banks, the private sector and others on how to accelerate much-needed investment in infrastructure—globally, and on a scale that can make a difference, especially in an era of fiscal policy constraints.  

The relationship between private and public investment in global infrastructure and other global growth projects is tricky. Just because many governments face reduced flexibility with fiscal policy at the moment does not mean that the responsibility for infrastructure investment can or will or should be picked up by private investors, much less private financial institutions and markets. The public and private sector each have a vital role. One will not work without the other.

Yet rules and norms do have to be worked out to incentivize private investment in infrastructure. This work is well underway and embodied in the Brisbane GIII. Incremental investment in global infrastructure adds up over time, and prudent direction of financing toward the most impactful projects can be a big boost to global growth and directly have an impact on peoples' lives. This is the kind of people-oriented action G-20 leaders were looking for in Brisbane.

Setting incremental “reach goals” is not just a word game or publicity play. It has proven to be a means of mobilizing resources, policies and efforts by diverse actors to stimulate higher-order results than might otherwise have happened. Just engaging in projecting likely growth outcomes can set the bar too low. In fact, all global goal setting is meant to motivate and mobilize momentum for just such incremental efforts. 

Taken together, a combination of structural reforms, infrastructure investment and continued growth-oriented monetary and fiscal policies can make a real difference in boosting global growth. This combination makes the Brisbane target of an additional 2 percent of global GDP growth by 2018 a feasible, even if ambitious, goal.

Event Information

2015 is a crucial year for the international community. For the first time, all nations will converge upon a new set of Sustainable Development Goals applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries, with the experience of implementing the Millennium Development Goals to build upon. Implementation is the critical component.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development program hosted a day-long private conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC on Monday, March 30 to focus on “Governance innovations for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”

Hosted in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, this high-level conference drew on experiences from the North-South Helsinki Process on Globalization and Development carried out over the past 15 years. The Helsinki Process presaged many of the prerequisites for achieving accelerated progress by linking goal-setting to goal-implementation and by utilizing multistakeholder processes to mobilize society and financing for social and environmental goals to complement sound economic and financial policies. 

Download the conference agenda »
Download the related report »
Download the list of registrants »
Download the conference statement »

Brookings President Strobe Talbott shakes hands with Finland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja after welcoming participants to the conference.

Former President of Finland Tarja Halonen shares insights in the conference’s opening panel.

Over 75 conference participants from governments, multilateral institutions, civil society, the private sector, and think tanks participated in a number of roundtable discussions throughout the day.

President Halonen and Minister Tuomioja share lessons from the Helsinki process as conference participants consider paths forward for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Event Materials

• 330 PostReportFinal
• Conference Agenda_FINAL
• March 30 List of Registrants
• Conference Statement Brookings Post2015 Implementation

Event Information

The year 2015 will be a milestone year, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda by world leaders in September; the Addis Ababa Accord on financing for development in July; and the conclusion of climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris in December. The draft Addis Ababa Accord, which focuses on the actions needed to attain the SDGs, highlights the key role envisaged for the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the post-2015 agenda. Paragraph 65 of the draft accord notes: “We call on the international finance institutions to establish a process to examine the role, scale, and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda.”          

Against this backdrop, on April 18, 2015, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings held a private roundtable with the leaders of the MDBs and other key stakeholders to discuss the role of the MDBs in supporting the post-2015 development agenda.

The meeting focused on four questions:

1. What does the post-2015 development agenda and the ambitions of the Addis and Paris conferences imply for the MDBs?


Given the ability of the MDBs to leverage shareholder resources, they can be efficient and effective mechanisms for scaling up development cooperation, particularly with respect to the agenda on investing in people and to the financing of sustainable infrastructure. New roles, instruments and partnerships might be needed.

2. How can MDBs best take advantage of the political attention that is being paid to the various conferences in 2015?   


The World Bank and selected regional development banks have launched a series of initiatives to optimize their balance sheets, address other constraints and enhance their catalytic role in crowding in private finance. And new institutions and mechanisms are coming to the fore. But the responses are not coordinated to best take advantage of each MDB’s comparative advantage.

3. What are the key impediments to scaling up the role and engagement of the MDBs?


Views on constraints are likely to differ but discussions should cover policy dialogue, capacity building, capital, leverage, shareholder backing on volume, instruments on leverage and risk mitigation, safeguards, and governance. 

4. How should the MDBs respond to the proposal to establish a process to examine the role, scale and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda?   


A proactive response and engagement on the part of the MDBs would facilitate a better understanding of the contribution that the MDBs can make and greater support among shareholders for a coherent and stepped-up role.

Event Materials

• Participant List
• MDB PostEvent Summary

2015 is a pivotal year. Three major workstreams among all the world’s nations are going forward this year under the auspices of the United Nations to develop goals, financing, and frameworks for the “post-2015 sustainable development agenda.” First, after two years of wide-ranging consultation, the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September will endorse a new set of global goals for 2030 to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate this year. Second, to support this effort, a financing for development (FFD) conference took place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to identify innovative ways of mobilizing private and public resources for the massive investments necessary to achieve the new goals. And third, in Paris in December the final negotiating session will complete work on a global climate change framework. 

These three landmark summits will, with luck, provide the broad strategic vision, the specific goals, and the financing modalities for addressing the full range of systemic threats. Most of all, these three summit meetings will mobilize the relevant stakeholders and actors crucial for implementing the post-2015 agenda—governments, international organizations, business, finance, civil society, and parliaments—into a concerted effort to achieve transformational outcomes. Achieving systemic sustainability is a comprehensive, inclusive effort requiring all actors and all countries to be engaged.

These three processes represent a potential historic turning point from “business-as-usual” practices and trends and to making the systemic transformations that are required to avoid transgressing planetary boundaries and critical tipping points. Missing from the global discourse so far is a realistic assessment of the political decisions and institutional innovations that would be required to implement the post-2015 sustainable development agenda (P2015).

For 2015, it is necessary is to make sure that by the end of year the three workstreams have been welded together as a singular vision for global systemic transformation involving all countries, all domestic actors, and all international institutions. The worst outcome would be that the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 are seen as simply an extension of the 2015 MDGs—as only development goals exclusively involving developing countries. This outcome would abort the broader purposes of the P2015 agenda to achieve systemic sustainability and to involve all nations and reduce it to a development agenda for the developing world that by itself would be insufficient to make the transformations required.

Systemic risks of financial instability, insufficient job-creating economic growth, increasing inequality, inadequate access to education, health, water and sanitation, and electricity, “breaking points” in planetary limits, and the stubborn prevalence of poverty along with widespread loss of confidence of people in leaders and institutions now require urgent attention and together signal the need for systemic transformation.

As a result, several significant structural changes in institution arrangements and governance are needed as prerequisites for systemic transformation. These entail (i) political decisions by country leaders and parliaments to ensure societal engagement, (ii) institutional innovations in national government processes to coordinate implementation, (iii) strengthening the existing global system of international institutions to include all actors, (iv) the creation of an international monitoring mechanism to oversee systemic sustainability trajectories, and (v) realize the benefits that would accrue to the entire P2015 agenda by the engagement of the systemically important countries through fuller utilization of  G20 leaders summits and finance ministers meetings as enhanced global steering mechanisms toward sustainable development.   Each of these changes builds on and depends on each other.

I. Each nation makes a domestic commitment to a new trajectory toward 2030

For global goal-setting to be implemented, it is essential that each nation go beyond a formal agreement at the international level to then embark on a national process of deliberation, debate, and decision-making that adapts the global goals to the domestic institutional and cultural context and commits the nation to them as a long-term trajectory around which to organize its own systemic transformation efforts. Such a process would be an explicitly political process involving national leaders, parliaments or rule-making bodies, societal leaders, business executives, and experts to increase public awareness and to guide the public conversation toward an intrinsically national decision which prioritizes the global goals in ways which fit domestic concerns and circumstances. This political process would avoid the “one-size-fits-all” approach and internalize and legitimate each national sustainability trajectory.

So far, despite widespread consultation on the SDGs, very little attention has been focused on the follow-up to a formal international agreement on them at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2015. The first step in implementation of the SDGs and the P2015 agenda more broadly is to generate a national commitment to them through a process in which relevant domestic actors modify, adapt, and adopt a national trajectory the embodies the hopes, concerns and priorities of the people of each country. Without this step, it is unlikely that national systemic sustainability trajectories will diverge significantly enough from business-as-usual trends to make a difference. More attention needs to now be given to this crucial first step.  And explicit mention of the need for it should appear in the UNGA decisions in New York in September.

II. A national government institutional innovation for systemic transformation

The key feature of systemic risks is that each risk generates spillover effects that go beyond the confines of the risk itself into other domains. This means that to manage any systemic risk requires broad, inter-disciplinary, multi-sectoral approaches. Most governments have ministries or departments that manage specific sectoral programs in agriculture, industry, energy, health, education, environment, and the like when most challenges now are inter-sectoral and hence inter-ministerial. Furthermore, spillover linkages create opportunities in which integrated approaches to problems can capture intrinsic synergies that generate higher-yield outcomes if sectoral strategies are simultaneous and coordinated.

The consequence of spillovers and synergies for national governments is that “whole-of-government” coordinating committees are a necessary institutional innovation to manage effective strategies for systemic transformation. South Korea has used inter-ministerial cabinet level committees that include private business and financial executives as a means of addressing significant interconnected issues or problems requiring multi-sectoral approaches. The Korea Presidential Committee on Green Growth, which contained more than 20 ministers and agency heads with at least as many private sector leaders, proved to be an extremely effective means of implementing South Korea’s commitment to green growth.

III.  A single global system of international institutions

The need for a single mechanism for coordinating the global system of international institutions to implement the P2015 agenda of systemic transformation is clear. However, there are a number of other larger reasons why the forging of such a mechanism is crucial now.

The Brettons Woods era is over. It was over even before the initiative by China to establish the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing and the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai. It was over because of the proliferation in recent years of private and official agencies and actors in development cooperation and because of the massive growth in capital flows that not only dwarf official development assistance (concessional foreign aid) but also IMF resources in the global financial system. New donors are not just governments but charities, foundations, NGOs, celebrities, and wealthy individuals. New private sources of financing have mushroomed with new forms of sourcing and new technologies. The dominance of the IMF and the World Bank has declined because of these massive changes in the context.

The emergence of China and other emerging market economies requires acknowledgement as a fact of life, not as a marginal change. China in particular deserves to be received into the world community as a constructive participant and have its institutions be part of the global system of international institutions, not apart from it. Indeed, China’s Premier, Li Keqiang, stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.”

The economic, social and environmental imperatives of this moment are that the world’s people and the P2015 agenda require that all international institutions of consequence be part of a single coordinated effort over the next 15 years to implement the post-2015 agenda for sustainable development. The geopolitical imperatives of this moment also require that China and China’s new institutions be thoroughly involved as full participants and leaders in the post-2015 era. If nothing else, the scale of global investment and effort to build and rebuild infrastructure requires it.

It is also the case that the post-2015 era will require major replenishments in the World Bank and existing regional development banks, and significantly stronger coordination among them to address global infrastructure investment needs in which the AIIB and the NDB must now be fully involved. The American public and the U.S. Congress need to fully grasp the crucial importance for the United States, of the IMF quota increase and governance reform.  These have been agreed to by most governments but their implementation is stalled in the U.S. Congress. To preserve the IMF’s role in the global financial system and the role of the U.S. in the international community, the IMF quota increase and IMF governance reform must be passed and put into practice. Congressional action becomes all the more necessary as the effort is made to reshape the global system of international institutions to accommodate new powers and new institutions within a single system rather than stumble into a fragmented, fractured, and fractious global order where differences prevail over common interests.

The IMF cannot carry out its significant responsibility for global financial stability without more resources. Other countries cannot add to IMF resources proportionately without U.S. participation in the IMF quota increase.   Without the US contribution, IMF members will have to fund the IMF outside the regular IMF quota system, which means de-facto going around the United States and reducing dramatically the influence of the U.S. in the leadership of the IMF. This is a self-inflicted wound on the U.S., which will damage U.S. credibility, weaken the IMF, and increase the risk of global financial instability. By blocking the IMF governance reforms in the IMF agreed to by the G-20 in 2010, the U.S. is single-handedly blocking the implementation of the enlargement of voting shares commensurate with increased emerging market economic weights.  This failure to act is now widely acknowledged by American thought leaders to be encouraging divergence rather than convergence in the global system of institutions, damaging U.S. interests.

IV. Toward a single monitoring mechanism for the global system of international institutions

The P2015 agenda requires a big push toward institutionalizing a single mechanism for the coordination of the global system of international institutions.  The international coordination arrangement today, is the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation created at the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.  This arrangement, which recognizes the increasingly complex context and the heightened tensions between emerging donor countries and traditional western donors, created a loose network of country platforms, regional arrangements, building blocks and forums to pluralize the architecture to reflect the increasingly complex set of agents and actors. This was an artfully arranged compromise, responding to the contemporary force field four years ago.

Now is a different moment. The issues facing the world are both systemic and urgent; they are not confined to the development of developing countries, and still less to foreign aid. Geopolitical tensions are, if anything, higher now than then.  But they also create greater incentives to find areas of cooperation and consensus among major powers who have fundamentally different perspectives on other issues. Maximizing the sweet spots where agreement and common interest can prevail is now of geopolitical importance.  Gaining agreement on institutional innovations to guide the global system of international institutions in the P2015 era would be vital for effective outcomes but also importantly ease geopolitical tensions.

Measurement matters; monitoring and evaluation is a strategic necessity to implementing any agenda, and still more so, an agenda for systemic transformation.  As a result, the monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the P2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them.  The UN, the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF all have participated in joint data gathering efforts under the IDGs  in the 1990s and the MDGs in the 2000s.   Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play, but they need to be brought together now under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system and to help the G20 finance ministers coordinate their functional programs.   

The OECD has established a strong reputation in recent years for standard setting in a variety of dimensions of the global agenda.  Given the strong role of the OECD in relation to the G20 and its broad outreach to “Key Partners” among the emerging market economies, the OECD could be expected to take a strong role in global benchmarking and monitoring and evaluation of the P2015 Agenda.  The accession of China to the OECD Development Centre, which now has over fifty member countries, and the presence and public speech of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the OECD on July 1^st, bolsters the outreach of the OECD and its global profile.

But national reporting is the centerpiece and the critical dimension of monitoring and evaluation.  To guide the national reporting systems and evaluate their results, a  new institutional arrangement is needed that is based on national leaders with responsibility for implementation of the sustainable development agendas from each country and is undertaken within the parameters of the global SDGs and the P2015 benchmarks.

V.   Strengthening global governance and G20 roles

G-20 leaders could make a significant contribution to providing the impetus toward advancing systemic sustainability by creating a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council charged with pulling together the national statistical indicators and implementing benchmarks on the SDGs in G-20 countries.  The G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC) would consist of the heads of the presidential committees on sustainable development charged with coordinating P2015 implementation in G-20 countries.  Representing systemically important countries, they would also be charged with assessing the degree to which national policies and domestic efforts by G20 countries generate positive or negative spillover effects for the rest of the world.  This G-20 GSDC would also contribute to the setting of standards for the global monitoring effort, orchestrated perhaps by the OECD, drawing on national data bases from all countries using the capacities of the international institutions to generate understanding of global progress toward systemic sustainability. 

The UN is not in a position to coordinate the global system of international institutions in their functional roles in global sustainable development efforts.  The G-20 itself could take steps through the meetings of G-20 Finance Ministers to guide the global system of international institutions in the implementation phase of the P2015 agenda to begin in 2016. The G-20 already has a track record in coordinating international institutions in the response to the global financial crisis in 2008 and its aftermath. The G-20 created the Financial Stability Board (FSB), enlarged the resources for the IMF, agreed to reform the IMF’s governance structure, orchestrated relations between the IMF and the FSB, brought the OECD into the mainstream of G-20 responsibilities and has bridged relations with the United Nations by bringing in finance ministers to the financing for development conference in Addis under Turkey’s G-20 leadership. 

There is a clear need to coordinate the financing efforts of the IMF, with the World Bank and the other regional multilateral development banks (RMDBs), with the AIIB and the BRICS NDB, and with other public and private sector funding sources, and to assess the global institutional effort as whole in relation to the P2015 SDG trajectories.  The G-20 Finance Ministers grouping would seem to be uniquely positioned to be an effective and credible means of coordinating these otherwise disparate institutional efforts.  The ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum and the Busuan Global Partnership provide open inclusive space for knowledge sharing and consultation but need to be supplemented by smaller bodies capable of making decisions and providing strategic direction.

Following the agreements reached in the three U.N. workstreams for 2015, the China G-20 could urge the creation of a formal institutionalized global monitoring and coordinating mechanism at the China G-20 Summit in September 2016. By having the G-20 create a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC), it could build on the national commitments to SDG trajectories to be made next year by U.N. members countries and on the newly formed national coordinating committees established by governments to implement the P2015 Agenda, giving the G-20 GSDC functional effectiveness, clout and credibility.   Whereas there is a clear need to compensate for the sized-biased representation of the G20 with still more intensive G-20 outreach and inclusion, including perhaps eventually considering shifting to a constituency based membership, for now the need in this pivotal year is to use the momentum to make political decisions and institutional innovations which will crystallize the P2015 strategic vision toward systemic sustainability into mechanisms and means of implementation.

By moving forward on these recommendations, the G-20 Leaders Summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered P2015 Agenda, going beyond finance to issues closer to peoples’ homes and hearts. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues.  The G-20 Finance Ministers would be seen as playing an appropriate role by serving as the mobilizing and coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the P2015 Agenda.  And the G-20 GSDC would become the effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability not only within G20 countries but also in terms of their positive and negative spillover effects on systemic sustainability paths of other countries, contributing to standard setting and benchmarking for global monitoring and evaluation.    These global governance innovations could re-energize the G20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the P2015 Agenda. 

As the MDGs culminate this year, as the three U.N. workstreams on SDGs, FFD, and UNFCC are completed, the world needs to think ahead to the implementation phase of the P2015 sustainable development agenda. Given the scale and scope of the P2015 agenda, these five governance innovations need to be focused on now so they can be put in place in 2016.

These will ensure (i) that national political commitments and engagement by all countries are made by designing, adopting, and implementing their own sustainable development trajectories and action plans; (ii) that national presidential committees are established, composed of key ministers and private sector leaders to coordinate each country’s comprehensive integrated sustainability strategy; (iii) that all governments and international institutions are accepted by and participate in a single global system of international institutions;   (iv) that a G-20 monitoring mechanism be created by the China G-20 in September 2016 that is comprised of the super-minister officials heading the national presidential coordinating committees implementing the P2015 agenda domestically in G-20 countries, as a first step;  and (v) that the G-20 Summit leaders in Antalya in November 2015 and in China in September 2016 make clear their own commitment to the P2015 agenda and their responsibility for its adaption, adoption and implementation internally in their countries but also for assessing G-20 spillover impacts on the rest of the world, as well as for deploying their G-20 finance ministers to mobilize and coordinate the global system of international institutions toward achieving the P2015 agenda.

Without these five structural changes, it will be more likely that most countries and actors will follow current trends rather than ratchet up to the transformational trajectories necessary to achieve systemic sustainability nationally and globally by 2030.

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogag, “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---With a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, UNDP, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance: Scoping Papers, (Beijing: UNDP, October 2014).

Zhang Haibing, “A Critique of the G-20’s Role in UN’s post-2015 Development Agenda”, in Catrina Schlager and Chen Dongxiao (eds), China and the G-20: The Interplay between an Emerging Power and an Emerging Institution, (Shanghai: Shanghai Institutes for International Studies [SIIS] and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung [FES], 2015) 290-208.

Global Review, (Shanghai:  SIIS, 2015,) 97-105.

Colin I. Bradford, “Global Economic Governance and the Role International Institutions”, UNDP, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance: Scoping Papers, (Beijing: UNDP, October 2014).

Colin I. Bradford, “Action implications of focusing now on implementation of the   post-2015 agenda.”, (Washington: The Brookings Institution, Global Economy and Development paper, September 2015).

Colin I. Bradford, “Systemic Sustainability as the Strategic Imperative for the Future”, (Washington: The Bookings Institution, Global Economy and Development paper; September 2015). 

Wonhyuk Lim and Richard Carey, “Connecting Up Platforms and Processes for Global Development to 2015 and Beyond:  What can the G-20 do to improve coordination and deliver development impact?”, (Paris: OECD  Paper, February 2013).

Xiaoyun Li and Richard Carey, “The BRICS and the International Development System: Challenge and Convergence”, (Sussex: Institute for Development Studies, Evidence Report No. 58, March 2014).

Xu Jiajun and Richard Carey, “China’s Development Finance: Ambition, Impact and Transparency,” (Sussex :  Institute for Development Studies, IDS Policy Brief, 2015).

Soogil Young, “Domestic Actions for Implementing Integrated Comprehensive Strategies:  Lessons from Korea’s Experience with Its Green Growth Strategy”, Washington: Paper for the Brookings conference on “Governance Innovations to Implement the Post-2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, March 30, 2015).

“The Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a ‘safe operating space’ for human beings,” concludes a paper by 18 researchers “trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world,” published in Science in January 2015. That our planetary environment seems to be approaching “breaking points” is but one of several systemic threats looming on the horizon or lurking under the surface.

Since the economic crisis in 2008, the world has learned that financial instability is a global threat to sustainable livelihoods and economic progress. The underlying dynamics of technological change seem to be more labor displacing than labor absorbing, creating increasing anxiety that employment and career trajectories are permanently threatened. These two challenges undermine public confidence in the market economy, in institutions, and in political leaders. They constitute systemic threats to the credibility of markets and democracy to generate socially and politically sustainable outcomes for societies.

The fact that one billion people still live in extreme poverty, that there are scores of countries that are considered to be “failed states,” and that genocide, virulent violence, and terrorism are fed by this human condition of extreme deprivation together constitute a social systemic threat, global in scope. These challenges together merge with a growing public awareness of global inequality between nations and of increasing inequality within nations. The power of money in public life, whether in the form of overt corruption or covert influence, disenfranchises ordinary people and feeds anger and distrust of the current economic system. 

These challenges are global in reach, systemic in scale, and urgent. They require deliberate decisions to abandon “business-as-usual” approaches, to rethink current practices and engage in actions to transform the underlying fundamentals in order to avoid the collapse and catastrophe of systems that average people depend upon for normal life.  

Systemic risks are real. Generating new pathways to systemic sustainability are the new imperatives. Holistic approaches are essential, since the economic, social, environmental, and political elements of systemic risk are interrelated.  “Sustainable development,” once the label for environmentally sensitive development paths for developing countries, is now the new imperative for systemic sustainability for the global community as a whole.

2015 is a pivotal year for global transformation. Three major work streams among all nations are going forward this year under the auspices of the United Nations to develop goals, financing, and frameworks for the “post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”  First, in New York in September—after two years of wide-ranging consultation—the U.N. General Assembly will endorse a new set of global development goals to be achieved by 2030, to build upon and replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate this year. Second, to support this effort, a Financing for Development (FFD) conference took place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to identify innovative ways to mobilize private and public resources for the massive investments necessary to achieve the new goals. And third, in Paris in December, the final negotiating session will complete work on a global climate change framework.  

These three landmark summits will, with luck, provide the broad strategic vision, the specific goals, and the financing for addressing the full range of systemic threats.  Most of all, these events, along with the G-20 summit of leaders of the major economies in November in Antalya, Turkey, will mobilize the relevant stakeholders and actors crucial for implementing the post-2015 agenda—governments, international organizations, business, finance, civil society, and parliaments—into a concerted effort to achieve transformational outcomes. Achieving systemic sustainability is a comprehensive, inclusive effort requiring all actors and all countries to be engaged. [3]

Four major elements need to be in place for this process to become a real instrument for achieving systemic sustainability across the board. 

First, because everyone everywhere faces systemic threats, the response needs to be universal. The post-2015 agenda must be seen as involving advanced industrial countries, emerging market economies, and developing nations. Systemic sustainability is not a development agenda limited to developing countries, nor just a project to eradicate poverty, nor just an agenda for development cooperation and foreign aid. It is a high policy agenda for all countries that goes to the core of economics, governance, and society, addressing fundamental dynamics in finance, energy, employment, equity, growth, governance, and institutions.

Second, systemic threats are generated because of spillover effects from activities that used to be considered self-contained and circumscribed in their impact. The world of silos and vertical self-sufficiency has given way to an integrated world in which horizontal linkages are as important as vertical specialization. The result of these interlinkages is that synergies can be realized by taking comprehensive integrated approaches to major issues. In this new context, positive-sum benefits are potentially more easily realized, but integrated strategies are necessary for doing so. 

This new context of spillovers and synergies has two implications. The domestic dimension is that whole-of-government approaches are necessary for addressing systemic sustainability. Cross-sectoral, inter-ministerial approaches are essential.  Since markets alone are not able to realize optimal outcomes in the widespread presence of externalities, the only way to realize the positive sum potential of synergies is through coordination among related actors. On the international dimension, this new context also requires more cooperation and coordination than competition to realize synergistic, positive-sum outcomes.

Third, domestic political pressures are primary. This may be a variant of the old saying that “all politics is local.”  However, the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis has been a world of hurt in which impacted publics are feeling anger and alienation from an economic system that has threatened their jobs, incomes, pensions, homes, and livelihoods. The task of leaders is not to pander to these plights but to lead their people to understand the vital linkage between domestic conditions and external forces and the degree to which the global context inevitably impacts on domestic conditions. Leaders need to be able to explain to their people that systemic threats have inextricable global–domestic linkages that need to be managed, not ignored.

Fourth, given all this, it is absolutely necessary that the global system of international institutions be “on the same page,” share the same vision, strategy, and goals, rather than each taking its primary mandate as a writ for independence from the common agenda. 

The major challenges for global governance in this pivotal turn from goal-setting in 2015 to the beginning of implementation in 2016 are to ensure (i) that all countries adapt and adopt the post-2015 agenda in ways that are congruent with their national culture and context while at the same time committing to reporting on all aspects of the agenda; (ii) that whole-of-government institutional mechanisms and processes are put in place domestically to realize the synergies that can accrue only from comprehensive, integrated approaches and that international cooperation mechanisms gain greater traction to reap the positive-sum outcomes from global consultation, coordination, and cooperation;  (iii) that national political leaders learn new modes of domestic and international leadership that are capable of articulating the new context and new systemic risks that need to be managed both internally and globally; and (iv) that each international institution realizes the need to be part of a system-wide global effort to achieve systemic sustainability through concerted efforts of all relevant actors working together on behalf of a common global agenda. [2]

Currently under discussion are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 indicators for 2030 to extend and replace the eight MDGs for 2015, which had 21 targets and a variety of indicators, which in turn extended and replaced seven International Development Goals (IDGs) agreed to in 1995 by development cooperation ministers from OECD countries. There is much chatter now about whether the SDGs and indicators are too many, too ambitious, and too widespread.  The Economist asserts that the SDGs “would be worse than useless,” dubbing them “stupid development goals”. And Charles Kenney at the Center for Global Development in a thoughtful piece argues that “we lost the plot.” 

It may be true that there is too much detail. Two previous efforts, one by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and the Korean Development Institute (KDI) had 10 goals, and the other, the U.N. High Level Panel of Eminent Persons report in 2013 had 12 goals.[iii] This quibble alone does not prevent the use of political imagination to conjure a storyline that connects the 17 proposed SDGs with the vision of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda as addressing systemic threats and having comprehensive integrated strategies for addressing them. 

Fourteen of the 17 SDGs can be clustered into four overarching strategic components: poverty (2); access (6); sustainability (5); and partnership (1). The other three goals have to do with growth and governance (institutions), which were underpinnings for both the IDGs and the MDGs though not embodied in the sets of goals themselves. The four SDG components seamlessly continue the storyline of the IDGs and the MDGs, both of which included poverty as the first goal, gender equality- education-and-health as issues of access, an environmental sustainability goal, and (in the MDGs) a partnership goal. The two underpinning components of growth and governance remain crucial and, if anything, are still more important today than 20 years ago when the global goal-setting process began. 

Continuity of strategic direction in transformational change is an asset, ensuring persistence and staying power until the goal is fulfilled.

The SDGs now convey a sense of the scale and scope of systemic threats. The sustainability goals (goals 11 through 15) highlight the environmental threats from urbanization, over-consumption/production, climate change, destruction of ocean life, to ecosystems, forests, deserts, land, and biodiversity. No knowledgeable person would leave out any of these issues when considering threats to environmental sustainability. 

The fact that goal 10, to “reduce inequality within and among countries,” is on the list of SDGs signals a new fact of political life that inequality is now front-and-center on the political agenda globally and nationally in many countries, advanced, emerging, and developing. This goal is really the “chapeaux” for goals 3 through 7, which deal with health, education, gender, water and sanitation, and energy for all—the access goals that must be met to “reduce inequality within and among countries.” It is inconceivable that a group of global goals for a sustainable future in the 21st century would leave out any of these goals crucial for achieving social sustainability, and undoubtedly political sustainability as well. 

Reducing inequality is not an end in itself but a means of providing skills and livelihoods for people in a knowledge-based global economy and hence the social and political sustainability required for stable growth. Growth is both a means and an end.

The two poverty goals are now more ambitious and inclusive than earlier. “Ending poverty” is different from reducing it, as in the IDGs and MDGs. And “ending hunger” through food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture are means to the end of eliminating poverty. For the Economist, eliminating extreme poverty should be the most important goal, stating that “it would have a much better chance of being achieved if it stood at the head of a very short list.”

This observation would apply if the SDGs are again intended to be, as the IDGs and MDGs were previously, development goals for developing countries. But development for developing countries is not the primary thrust and drive of the post-2015 agenda taken as a whole.  

The world is now facing systemic risks that threaten unacceptable collapse in social, political, economic, and environmental systems. A global community under threat from systemic risks needs a strategic vision and a pathway forward with specific guideposts, benchmarks, and means of implementation. 

The SDGs, the FFD documents and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change accords will not be perfect. But, the three U.N. processes in 2015 capture the main elements, attempt to get specific in terms of priority actions and accountability, and together will provide a vision for the future for achieving systemic sustainability in its multiple, interconnected dimensions.

To think that simplifying the wording is going to simplify the problems is illusory. To narrow the vision to poor countries and poor people is to misunderstand the systemic nature of the threats and the scope and scale of them. 

This is a global agenda for all. Partnership now means we are all in the same boat, no longer acting on a global North-South axis of donor and recipient. Without the participation of all nations, all stakeholders, and all the international institutions, actual transformation will fall short of necessary transformation, and the world will reach breaking points that will inflict pain, suffering, and high costs on everyone in the future. The post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda for 2030 brings an awareness of the future into the present and makes us understand that the time for action is now. 

Endnotes:

[1] For an example of a recent multistakeholder interactive conference on this set of issues, review the related report on the Brookings-Finland private meeting on March 30, 2015 on “implementing the post 2015 sustainable development agenda.

[2] See “Action Implications of Focusing Now on the Implementation of the post-2015 Agenda,” which outlines in more detail the key elements of implementation that need to be set in motion during 2015 and 2016, emphasizing especially roles for the Turkey G-20 summit in 2015 and the China G-20 summit in 2016.  

The consequences of the global financial crisis still ripple through the international system after the initial surge in global economic cooperation and governance immediately following the crisis. The ultimate effects have been that, while some elements of the international system of institutions have gotten stronger, the system as a whole is now seen as weaker, fractured, and driven more by geopolitical conflict than by institutional norms and frameworks.

The issue is how to move the global policy agenda forward in such a way that substantive progress induces institutional strengthening. The next two years offer new opportunities for creating a positive symbiosis between policy advance and systemic improvements.

I. The U.N. global agenda

The United Nations global agenda has three tracks that relate to each other and provide opportunities to pull the world together around an integrated, comprehensive strategic vision for the world’s people and strengthen the international system in the process.

The first track is the elaboration of a sustainable development agenda for each and all countries, not just developing countries, but advanced industrial economies and emerging market countries too. This effort is already well underway and will result in a summit of global leaders in September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. This process entails a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 to be developed and affirmed by and for all countries, and which succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate in 2015 and applied only to developing countries. This post-2015 goal-setting process will provide the substantive, cross-cutting, multidimensional agenda for the next 15 years. It is simultaneously a social, economic, and environmental agenda that relates goals to each other in functional terms requiring coordination among public and private sectors, ministries, civil society groups, and international institutions.

The second track is the financing for development (FFD) track, which goes well beyond reliance conceptually and practically on foreign aid or official development assistance as in the past. FFD for the SDGs includes a focus, first and foremost, on domestic sources of finance beyond government revenues. FFD is engaged in searches for innovative sources of finance, private sector mobilization of resources, creative market incentives and mechanisms, initiatives by civil society organizations, and development of entrepreneurial and small- and medium-size business opportunities that address global issues. This effort resulted in a global leaders meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July of 2015 that reached agreement on the major thrusts for mobilizing resources for the post-2015 agenda (Kharas and MacArthur (2014)).

The third track is the global climate change negotiations currently under way to achieve a global agreement on the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), which will result in a global summit in Paris in December of 2015. While these detailed negotiations on climate are a separate track, it is clear that the sustainable human development trajectories being put forward in the post-2015 agenda impact and are crucially affected by the efficacy of the climate change arrangements worked out in the UNFCCC agreements in 2015.

Whereas these three tracks operationally are going forward separately, the substantive aspects of each track affect and are affected by the content of the other two. The ultimate convergence of these three streams of activities and actions will have to occur in the beginning of 2016 at the global, regional, and national levels if the implementation phase is to be successful. A business-as-usual approach will not be satisfactory if at the global level, for example, the international institutions are unable to coordinate their work, or if at the national level ministries remain within their “silos” of sectoral expertise and responsibility.

Synergies exist between goal areas that cannot be realized without coordination across sectors and institutions, impacting goal achievement (see OECD 2014 PCD). A systemic approach is necessary at all levels to address the global challenges identified in the post-2015 agenda.

II. The G-20 summits for 2015 and 2016

A major opportunity presents itself in terms of providing impetus, momentum, and leadership for these large work streams and their convergence by linking the G-20 presidency of Turkey for 2015 with the G-20 leadership of China in 2016. Turkey and China working together in tandem within the G-20 Troika over the next two years to explain, support, and sustain the mobilization effort toward the post-2015 agenda could be a major contribution to it but also strengthen the global system of international institutions in the process. For the Turkish G-20 summit, scheduled to take place in November 2015 in Antalya, between UNGA in New York in September and the UNFCCC in Paris in December, Turkey could use part of its G-20 summit to have the leaders of the world’s largest advanced and emerging market economies explain to the world the nature, importance, and relevance of the SDGs to domestic concerns and priorities of ordinary people.

A weakness of G-20 summits thus far has been that G-20 leaders have become trapped by finance ministers’ issues and discourse and have failed to connect with their publics on larger issues of direct concern to people everywhere. The post-2015 agenda provides an opportunity for G-20 leaders to lead their people in understanding how global efforts relate to domestic conditions and why dealing only domestically with issues will not suffice to advance the human agenda where the global interface is extremely palpable. G-20 leaders, under Turkey’s leadership, could step out beyond the technical jargon of finance ministries and central banks, as important as those issues continue to be, and directly address the longer-term, fundamental conditions that affect the lives and livelihoods of all people. They would thereby strengthen their own leadership profile internally by explaining the global dimensions of domestic issues as means of creating public support for the sustainability issues in the post-2015 agenda.

Past experience with the International Development Goals (IDGs) of the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals since the early 2000s  demonstrates that linking the goal-setting effort to the implementation phase yields powerful results by capturing the political momentum of the goal setting phase and carrying that energy forward directly into implementation efforts. If Turkey and China were to work together in 2015 and 2016, thereby bridging the goal-setting year in 2015 to the beginning of the implementation phase in 2016, they could provide the catalytic leadership and continuity that would maximize the staying power of the momentum from one phase to the next.

China, for its G-20 summit preparations in 2016, could focus on developing a road map, in concert with the other countries and international organizations and especially with the United Nations, that would explicitly keep alive the activities, groups, and initiatives manifested in the goal-setting phase into the next phase of implementation beginning in 2016. These combined efforts by Turkey and China could jump-start societies focusing on accelerating efforts to transform their societies by mobilizing policies and resources for highly related goal areas of direct benefit to their people.

The immediate effects of coordinated sequential efforts by Turkey and China in their respective G-20 years to advance the post-2015 agenda would be to strengthen the relationship between the G-20 and the United Nations on the agenda itself and to strengthen the G-20 summits by having leaders lead on issues of central concern to their people, strengthening the G-20 as a leadership forum in the process. For these results to occur, Turkey and China would need to begin to work together now to develop concordance in their individual efforts and initiate activities that would benefit greatly by beginning now and running through 2016 and beyond.

Accelerating implementation: Several initiatives could be undertaken now that would set up the dynamics for accelerated implementation in 2016 and beyond.

• National strategies for achieving the SDGs: Encourage countries to adapt and adopt the SDGs to their respective priorities and social, political, and cultural contexts through deliberate decision processes and wide societal engagement.
• The role of parliaments: Bring parliamentarians and parliaments into the goal-setting process so that they are aware of the legislative, regulatory, and budgetary implications of the post-2015 agenda.
• The role of domestic ministries: Bring finance ministers and other domestic ministries and agencies together with foreign ministers in the goal-setting year to set in motion mutually involved functional relationships and operational guidelines to enhance implementation across sectors.
• The G-20 as broker and mobilizer: The G-20 could act as a broker between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and regional development banks and the U.N. and its agencies to assure not just coordination but more intensive interactions that would be designed to accelerate the mobilization of resources and as well as policies and private sector activities that would enhance implementation.
• The policy role of the OECD: The strong, substantive role of the OECD in G-20 summits on issues high on the G-20 agenda—such as structural reform, tax base erosion, development, environment, energy, employment, and social issues—position the OECD to continue to provide important substantive inputs to the G-20 in 2015 and 2016. The OECD would enhance the relationship of its 34 members with G-20 emerging market economies by OECD involvement in both the G-20 and the U.N. post-2015 agenda.
• Financial stability and the SDGs: Encouraged by the G-20 summits, the IMF, the Financial Stability Board, and the OECD could work together to integrate the financial regulatory reform agenda into the post-2015 U.N. process by clarifying the linkages between financial stability, regulatory reform, and incentives for long-term private investment in infrastructure (crucial to all the SDGs) and in productive activities which generate greater employment and growth.
• Multi-stakeholder participation in implementation: G-20 summits can facilitate multi-stakeholder processes for engaging civil society, labor, private sector, religious, academic, and expert communities not only in the G-20 summits, as is the current practice, but also in the post-2015 agenda and its implementation, connecting societal leaders with the SDG agenda.

III. The overarching importance of a single global agenda

If these efforts to bring together a wide cross-section of domestic and international agencies, public and private sector leaders, stakeholders, and civil society actors are to translate into actions that are meaningful to the lives and livelihoods of people, a single set of goals is essential. The lesson learned from the IDG-MDG experience was that the tendency to differentiate roles by identifying different institutions with different sets of goals was real. The United Nations had inadvertently put forward the Millennium Declaration at the September 2000 U.N. General Assembly that had “millennium targets” which were similar but not identical to the International Development Goals (IDGs). The IDGs had been developed in the mid-1990s by OECD development ministers and subsequently were endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF, the U.N. and the OECD. In fact, in 2000, for the first time ever, the heads of those four institutions signed, and the institutions themselves published, a joint report, A Better World For All: Progress towards the International Development Goals.

Despite the appearance of unity and in part because there was a lack of concordance between the Millennium Declaration Targets (MDTs) and the IDGs, there was a moment in March 2001 when it looked like there might be a decisive divergence between the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions, with the U.N. taking the lead on the MDTs and the World Bank and IMF taking the lead on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process (PRSPs), leaving the IDGs marginalized altogether. This potential division of labor was thwarted by a decision to reconcile the differences between the MDTs and the IDGs by forging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which embodied the principal elements of both. The MDGs surfaced and were endorsed by the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development in March of 2002, keeping the major global institutions on the same page with bilateral donors and the same path moving toward achieving the MDGs in 2015.

Most people who know about the MDGs think their origins began at the U.N. in the year 2000. It is an often overlooked fact that the MDGs only came forward in 2002 to bridge the potential divide between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. If that divide had occurred, it would have been disastrous from a goal setting-goal implementation point-of-view. This history is quite important to bring forward into public light now because it illustrates divisive dangers that currently lurk under the surface threatening unity if not squarely addressed.

From the perspective of prioritizing implementation, the truth is that multiple sets of goals blur the strategic vision, fail to communicate direction, weaken effective leadership, and encourage special pleading for differentiated interests instead focusing on the common, public interest. The U.N. has the lead role in global goal setting and has strengthened its own role in the global system in recent years. However, looking forward now to the SDG implementation phase, a danger might be that the Post-2015 agenda could be seen as the creature and captive of the United Nations, whereas it must be fully endorsed and internalized within the global system of international institutions as a whole. For that to happen, it would be necessary to move now, during the goal-setting year, to include all the relevant international and domestic actors that are crucial to the implementation phase of the post-2015 agenda.

The implications of including the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summits in 2015 and 2016:

• It would make clear to relevant publics and actors that this set of global goals is universal, applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries; it is not a “development agenda” but a “sustainability agenda,” which is broader, more strategic, and higher on the policy agenda of most countries.
• It would make clear the inextricable dynamics between domestic priorities and global goals; the SDGs are not foreign policy objectives or aid targets for development; they are domestic priorities affected by global impacts and generating global spillovers that need to be managed, not neglected.
• It would make the incorporation of finance ministers and domestic ministers with foreign ministers, along with international institutions, an imperative, rather than a utopian, ideal.
• It would make obvious the need to have a wide range of international institutions dealing with health, labor, education, women, climate, and the environment on the same page with the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions working together toward the SDGs.
• It would link the need for multi-stakeholder participation in goal setting to the goal implementation phase to mobilize support, policies, and resources but also to reveal and work on the interconnectedness of the goals themselves taken as a whole. 

Hence, the critical imperative is that there be a single narrative, a single set of goals, for all the domestic and global players to relate to, affirm, and implement. Otherwise, a fractured global order will produce lower-yield outcomes, and competition among priorities, sectors, and actors will result in poorer goal performance than would be possible with an integrated, concerted approach where all actors are working toward the same ends.

IV. Possible G-20 Actions by Turkey and China

Turkey has developed a process for the G-20 summit scheduled for November 14-15, 2015 in Antalya. Implementation, inclusion, and investment—the three “I’s”—are the overarching themes already established. The three “I’s” ties are tightly tied to the Australian G-20 outcomes—implementing action plans to achieve the incremental growth target of an additional 2 percentage points of GDP by 2018; including lower-income people in growth and lower-income countries in the global economy; and investing in infrastructure.

Each of these priorities is supportive of and compatible with the post-2015 agenda, even though they are not yet directly addressed to it. A decision by Turkey to include the post-2015 agenda in the 2015 G-20 would be easily achieved by cross-walking the SDGs over to and into the three “I’s” and vice versa. The central priority of the post-2015 agenda is, after all, “implementation.” The overarching meaning of the six elements of the post-2015 agenda (dignity, prosperity, justice, partnership, planet, and people (U.N. SG Synthesis Report December 2014)) is their impact on “inclusion.” And “investment” in infrastructure is crucial to all of the 17 SDGs.

The three pillars for Turkey’s 2015 agenda are: (i) strengthening the global recovery and lifting potential growth (the 2 percent target); (ii) enhancing resilience (financial regulatory reform]; and (iii) buttressing sustainability. Clearly, the third pillar on sustainability opens the door for the incorporation of the post-2015 agenda into the Turkey G-20, if Turkey wishes to do so. And the other two pillars fully support the sustainability agenda and are linked to it, or need to be.

For China, the post-2015 agenda presents a unique opportunity for the Chinese government to seize on a global agenda that has specific, strong, and visible links to the domestic concerns of the Chinese people. China could use the 2016 G-20 summit both to provide international leadership for global cooperation and to demonstrate the connection of global issues to domestic conditions through their impact and spillover effects. Because the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda, by prioritizing it in its G-20 summit, China would be embracing the multiplicity of its own identity as a developing country but also as a dynamic emerging market economy that is destined to eventually play a global leadership role equivalent to advanced countries.

Furthermore, China seems intent on being a competitive nation in various spheres while at the same time being cooperative in others. The G-20 summit presidency for China in 2016 provides China with an opportunity to strengthen its role in international cooperation by being ambitious in the reach of its agenda for the G-20 in 2016, by its conduct as a member of the G-20 Troika for the next three years, and as the host government for the G-20 in 2016. By choosing to support Turkey in its consideration of incorporating the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summit in 2015 and by China itself addressing the implementation issues in 2016, China would be reaping the demonstrably higher-yield gains generated by linking the SDG goal-setting phase in 2015 to the implementation phase in 2016.

Integrating the three tracks of SDG goal setting, financing for development, and progress on climate change actions is complementary but complex. While challenging, China has sufficiently high stakes in the outcomes of all three of these tracks to have a national interest in leading a global effort over the next three years to energize the convergence of agendas and institutional mandates necessary to generate bigger outcomes for people everywhere, including in China.

V. Results: Strengthening global governance and leadership

What follows from the analysis here is that the decision to include the post-2015 agenda in the Turkey and China G-20 summits would be a choice about the substance but also about the process of global economic governance, in which the G-20 has a leadership role. To do so in the way outlined here, would:

• Strengthen the global system of international institutions by bringing them together around a single comprehensive, integrated sustainability agenda;
• Create synergies between the United Nations and the other international institutions rather than identifying the post-2015 agenda with the U.N. alone and relying unnecessarily on the U.N. for its implementation;
• Connect G-20 leaders with a broader human and planetary agenda beyond economics and finance, which in turn would connect G-20 leaders with their publics as they visibly address the domestic concerns of their people in their global context; and
• Strengthen the role of the G-20 in global economic governance by putting the G-20 out in front as a broker among stakeholders, a catalytic coordinator of relevant domestic and international actors, and a leader on behalf of the concerns, lives, and livelihoods of people.

Selected References

Colin I. Bradford (2002), “Toward 2015: From Consensus Formation to Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. Issues for the Future: The Implementation Phase”, Development Economics Department (DEC), The World Bank, December 2002.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “The Changing World Economy and Global Economic Governance”, power point presentation at the Korean Delegation seminar “The OECD and Global Governance”, OECD, Paris, December 11, 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “Global Economic Governance and the Role of International Institutions”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2015), “Governance Innovations for Implementing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: Conference Report”,  Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2015.  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Events/2015/03/30-post-2015-sustainable-development-agenda/330-PostReportFinal.pdf?la=en   

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogang (2014), “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---with a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014. Authors are from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies.

Homi Kharas and John McArthur (2014), “Nine Priority Commitments to be Made at the UN’s July 2015 Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” October 2014. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/02/united-nations-financing-for-development-kharas-mcarthur

OECD (2014), “Policy Coherence for Development and the Sustainable Development Goals”, Paris: OECD, 10 December 2014, prepared for the 8^th Meeting of the National Focal Points for Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) held at the OECD on 17-18 December 2014. 

2015 is a pivotal year for global development; this fall is a pivotal moment. Meetings this fall will determine the global vision for sustainable development for 2030.

Three papers being released today—“Action implications focusing now on implementation of the post-2015 agenda,” “Systemic sustainability as the strategic imperative for the post-2015 agenda,” and “Political decisions and institutional innovations required for systemic transformations envisioned in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda”—set out some foundational ideas and specific proposals for political decisions and institutional innovations, which focus now on the implementation of the new global vision for 2030. This blog summarizes the key points in the three papers listed below.

Fundamentals for guiding actions, reforms and decisions

1) Managing systemic risks needs to be the foundational idea for implementing the post-2015 agenda.

The key political idea latent but not yet fully visible in the post-2015 agenda is that it is not a developing country poverty agenda for global development in the traditional North-South axis but a universal agenda based on the perception of urgent challenges that constitute systemic threats.

The term “sustainable development” by itself as the headline for the P-2015 agenda creates the danger of inheriting terminology from the past to guide the future.

2) Goal-setting and implementation must be effectively linked.

The international community learned from the previous two sets of goal-setting experiences that linking implementation to goal-setting is critical to goal achievement.  G-20 leader engagement in the post-2015 agenda and linking the success of the G-20 presidencies of Turkey (2015), China (2016), and Germany (2017) would provide global leadership for continuity of global awareness and commitment.

3) Focus on the Sustainable Development Goals must be clear.

Criticism of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as being too defuse and too detailed is ill-founded and reveals a lack of political imagination. It is a simple task to group the 17 goals into a few clusters that clearly communicate their focus on poverty, access, sustainability, partnership, growth, and institutions and their linkages to the social, economic, and environmental systemic threats that are the real and present dangers.

The Bretton Woods era is over. It was over before China initiated the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). Never has it been clearer than now that maintaining a single global system of international institutions is essential for geopolitical reasons. For the implementation of the post-2015 agenda, all the major international institutions need to commit to them.

In a joint paper with Zhang Haibing from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies (SIIS), we make five specific governance proposals for decision-makers: 

The implementation of the post-2015 agenda requires that nations internalize the SDGs by debating, adapting and adopting them in terms of their own domestic cultural, institutional, and political circumstances. It will be important for the U.N. declarations in September to urge all countries to undertake domestic decision-making processes toward this end.

2) Presidential coordination committees should be established.

To adequately address systemic risks and to implement the P-2015 agenda requires comprehensive, integrated, cross-sectoral, whole-of-government approaches.  South Korea’s experience with presidential committees composed of ministers with diverse portfolios, private sector and civil society leaders provides an example of how governments could break the “silos” and meet the holistic nature of systemic threats.

3) There needs to be a single global system of international institutions.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.” Together with a speech Li gave at the OECD on July 1st after signing an expanded work program agreement with the OECD and becoming a member of the OECD Development Center, clearly signals of China’s intention to cooperate within the current institutional system. The West needs to reciprocate with clear signals of respect for the increasing roles and influence of China and other emerging market economies in global affairs.

4) We must move toward a single global monitoring system for development targets.

The monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the post-2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them. The U.N., the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF have all participated in joint data gathering efforts under the International Development Goals  (IDGs) in the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the 2000s. Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play now, but they need to be brought together under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system.

By engaging in the post-2015 agenda, the G-20 leaders’ summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered post-2015 agenda. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues. The G-20 finance ministers can play an appropriate role by serving as the coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the post-2015 agenda. A G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council, composed of the heads of the presidential committees for sustainable development from G20 countries, could become an effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability.

These governance innovations could re-energize the G-20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination, and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the post-2015 agenda.