On Tuesday, May 24, Nigerian Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele announced that the country will adopt a more flexible foreign exchange rate system in the near future. This move signals a major policy shift by Emefiele and President Muhammadu Buhari, who had until this point opposed calls to let the naira weaken. Many international oil-related currencies have depreciated against the dollar as oil prices began their decline in 2014. Nigeria, however, has held the naira at a peg of 197-199 per U.S. dollar since March 2015, depleting foreign reserves and deterring investors, who remain concerned about the repercussions of a potential naira devaluation. Following the announcement, Nigerian stocks jumped to a five-month high and bond prices rose in anticipation that a new flexible exchange rate regime would increase the supply of dollars and help attract foreign investors.

For now it remains unclear exactly what a more flexible system will entail for Nigeria, however, some experts suggest that the Central Bank may introduce a dual-rate system, which allows select importers in strategic industries to access foreign currency at the current fixed rate, while more generally foreign currency will be available at a weaker, market-related level. This new regime raises a number of questions, including how it will be governed and who will have access to foreign currency (and at what rate). On Wednesday, Nigeria’s parliament requested a briefing soon from Emefiele and Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun to provide additional clarity on the new system, although the date for such a meeting has not yet been set.

Earlier this month, Kenya announced plans to close the Dadaab refugee camp, located in northeast Kenya, amid security concerns. The move to close the camp has been widely criticized by international actors. United States State Department Press Relations Director Elizabeth Trudeau urged Kenya to “uphold its international obligations and not forcibly repatriate refugees.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated that the closure of the refugee camp would have “devastating consequences.” Despite these concerns, this week, at the World Humanitarian Summit, Kenya stated that it will not go back on its decision and confirmed the closure of the refugee camps within a six-month period.

The camp houses 330,000 refugees, a majority of whom fled from conflict in their home country of Somalia. Kenya insists that the camp poses a threat to its national security, as it believes the camp is used to host and train extremists from Somalia’s Islamist group al-Shabab. Kenya also argued that the developed world, notably the United Kingdom, should host its fair share of African refugees. This is not the first time Kenya has threatened to close the refugee camp. After the Garissa University attacks last April, Kenya voiced its decision to close the refugee camps, although it did not follow through with the plan.

From May 23-27, Lusaka, Zambia hosted 5,000 delegates and participants for the 2016 Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB), with the theme, “Energy and Climate Change.” Held in the wake of December’s COP21 climate agreement and in line with Sustainable Development Goals 7 (ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all) and 13 (take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts), the theme was timely and, as many speakers emphasized, urgent. Around 645 million people in Africa have no access to electricity, and only 16 percent are connected to an energy source. To that end, AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina outlined the bank’s ambitious aim: “Our goal is clear: universal access to energy for Africa within 10 years; Expand grid power by 160 gigawatts; Connect 130 million persons to grid power; Connect 75 million persons to off grid systems; And provide access to 150 million households to clean cooking energy."

As part of a push to transform Africa’s energy needs and uses, Rwandan President Paul Kagame joined Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on a panel to support the AfDB’s “New Deal on Energy” that aims to deliver electricity to all Africans by 2025. Kenyatta specifically touted the potential of geothermal energy sources. Now, 40 percent of Kenya's power needs come from geothermal energy sources, he said, but there is still room for improvement—private businesses, which make up 30 percent of Kenya’s on-grid energy needs, have not made the switch yet.

As part of the meetings, the AfDB, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) also launched their annual African Economic Outlook, with the theme “Sustainable Cities and Structural Transformation.” In general, the report’s authors predict that the continent will maintain an average growth of 3.7 percent in 2016 before increasing to 4.5 percent in 2017, assuming commodity prices recover and the global economy improves.  However, the focus was on this year’s theme: urbanization. The authors provide an overview of urbanization trends and highlight that successful urban planning can discourage pollution and waste, slow climate change, support better social safety nets, enhance service delivery, and attract investment, among other benefits.

For more on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, see Chapter 4 of Foresight Africa 2016: Capitalizing on Urbanization: The Importance of Planning, Infrastructure, and Finance for Africa’s Growing Cities.

This election cycle, what will separate Democrats from Republicans on energy policy and their approach to climate change? Republicans tend to be fairly strong supporters of the fossil fuel industry, and to various degrees deny that climate change is occurring. Democratic candidates emphasize the importance of further expanding the share of renewable energy at the expense of fossil fuels, and agree that climate change is a real problem—with some saying the challenge trumps most, if not all, other U.S. security concerns.

Now that there are presumptive nominees for both major political parties, it’s an important moment to outline, in broad strokes, the positions of Secretary Hillary Clinton and businessman Donald Trump. We realize that Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has not dropped out of the race, but note that it is fairly unlikely at this point that he would clinch the nomination.

Clinton: Building on the Obama legacy 

Secretary Clinton has laid out the most comprehensive and detailed energy and climate policy proposals of the candidates to date. They are in essence a continuation, and in some cases a further expansion, of existing White House policies under President Obama. The Secretary has stated that she wants the United States to be the “clean energy superpower of the 21st century.”

This starts with the notion that climate change is an existential threat, which the global community has to address as soon as possible. In order to do that, in her view, the United States needs to continue to show leadership on the international stage, as the Obama administration sought to do surrounding the Paris agreement in December 2015. This will require substantial reforms to expand low-carbon options, including nuclear energy to some degree, while tightly regulating fossil fuels (and gradually phasing them out). 

[S]he wants the United States to be the “clean energy superpower of the 21st century.”

The first casualty of this transformation is the coal industry, which Clinton has explicitly acknowledged. She presented a $30 billion plan to revitalize communities where coal production is currently an important industry and job creator, for example, and has campaigned with this message in various state primaries. Implicitly, Secretary Clinton does not seem to believe in the economic viability of carbon capture and sequestration in the United States—this is despite the fact that most analyses, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggest that this technology could be a cost-efficient tool in a wider carbon emission mitigation portfolio. 

Clinton sees natural gas as a bridge fuel, though at this point it’s not clear how long that bridge is. Questions remain about the role that natural gas can play in scenarios of deep decarbonization in 2030 and beyond. At the moment, the gas industry is rather nervous of the Secretary’s statement that she’d increase regulations on, in particular, the fracking industry—if her conditions came to fruition, there would very few places where fracking would continue. 

Secretary Clinton believes that oil consumption has to be cut substantially in the coming years, and she has suggested that new drilling in places like the Arctic, off the Atlantic Coast, and on federal lands would be discouraged or banned. She has previously opposed crude oil exports, though we would not anticipate a roll-back of existing policies (in December 2015, the Obama administration lifted the decades-old ban). 

Clinton foresees a new energy economy built on rapidly increasing shares of renewable energy, which should comprise 25 percent of the U.S. fuel mix by 2025 according to her plan (solar energy would be a key focus, with half a billion panels to be installed by the end of her first term). To facilitate this transition, she presented an elaborate energy infrastructure plan to modernize the U.S. grid and improve efficiency in reviewing and approving projects. 

Tax credits to support renewables would be continued under a Clinton White House, whereas fossil fuel subsidies would be phased out. Increased energy efficiency, including harmonization of vehicle efficiency and fuel standards, are high on her agenda as well. The Secretary also supports the Clean Power Plan that the Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration has launched, and which is currently on hold in the Supreme Court. 

On the international stage, Clinton supports the Paris agreement on climate change. Should she win the presidency in November, she would make an effort to take this Treaty to the next step, thus continuing U.S. leadership. That would mean reinforcing U.S. leadership along the lines described above, while helping address current uncertainties about finance, transparency, and accountability, to name only a few challenges that remain.

Trump: Drill, baby, drill

Although Donald Trump’s candidacy remains highly controversial, he is now the presumptive Republican nominee for president. To the extent that we know any detailed plans, quod non, it is safe to say that his views on energy and climate change are diametrically opposed to most of Clinton’s. Broadly speaking, Mr. Trump has come out as a fervent supporter of the fossil fuel industry, and has expressed skepticism about the economic viability of renewable energy.

Mr. Trump’s views start with the belief that climate change is not man-made. In the past, the controversial businessman has suggested that climate change might be a hoax invention from China, in order to undermine U.S. industrial interests and job creation. This starting point allows Mr. Trump to be extremely supportive of existing industrial interests (if carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are not a problem, the thinking goes, then business as usual is the way to go). 

In a speech in North Dakota in late May, Mr. Trump laid out some broad initial ideas for his energy policy. He declared that under his presidency the United States would “accomplish complete American energy independence,” leaving unaddressed arguments about what that would mean for existing international energy trade. 

It is probably safe to say that Mr. Trump would like to further expand oil, gas, and coal production in the country. The latter, in particular, is remarkable: even coal executives have declared that market forces (particularly very competitive natural gas) have been the primary threat to the coal industry. Since Mr. Trump is also a strong supporter of the natural gas industry—and considering the challenges of building new bulk terminals for exports—it is unclear how a revitalization of the coal industry would occur. 

If climate change is a hoax, it will come as no surprise that Mr. Trump will not support efforts to mitigate carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Contrary to his opponent, Mr. Trump would also like to revoke restrictions on drilling for oil and gas, and would permit production on federal lands. He also supports further expansion of energy infrastructure, and would, if elected, ask Trans Canada to resubmit a permit application for the Keystone pipeline, which he’d approve. He has caveated his support for projects like these by demanding that a portion of the revenues from oil and gas flows be redistributed to local communities, to compensate them for intrusion on their private property. Mr. Trump has also indicated that he wants to use revenues from oil and gas production to rebuild U.S. infrastructure more broadly.

If climate change is a hoax, it will come as no surprise that Mr. Trump will not support efforts to mitigate carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. The candidate has called the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” and when asked what he would do about the Paris agreement on climate change, he said he’d cancel it. 

Though Trump says the United States must pursue all forms of energy—including renewables—he has expressed skepticism about their economic viability, calling solar energy “very expensive.” Wind energy received similar pejorative feedback, since Trump says it kills eagles and is noisy. During one of the few debates about renewable energy during the Iowa primary, he voiced his support for blending biofuels in vehicles. 

To the polls

The 2016 U.S. presidential election will have a profound impact on global affairs. Not only will it affect a range of security and economic issues in important ways, it also means a lot for global energy and climate policy. Will the United States continue on the trajectory that President Obama has started and continue a major energy transition strategy? Or will it shift course, potentially undermining existing domestic policies and investments, as well as international obligations? In November 2016, the American people will decide.

Media coverage of the Islamic State frequently refers to the group’s violent and seemingly archaic justice system without considering the institutional structures that enable this violence, or the broader function that it serves in the group’s ambitious state-building project. Legal institutions make it easier for the group to capture and retain territory by legitimizing its claim to sovereignty, justifying the expropriation of the property and land of enemies, and building goodwill with civilians by ensuring accountability.

The Islamic State’s legal system purports to strictly apply the divinely revealed body of Islamic law known as Sharia, which it regards as the only legitimate basis for governance. Although its legal system is frequently characterized as medieval, it has instrumentally supplemented the original text of the Quran with the modern rules and regulations that are needed to govern a 21st century state and punish modern day offenses—for example, traffic violations. It has the same three features that are present in any modern legal system: police, courts, and prisons.

In a region that has long been plagued by corruption, the Islamic State has attempted to ingratiate itself with civilians by claiming that its legal system is comparatively more legitimate and effective than the available alternatives. However, two emerging vulnerabilities—the system’s susceptibility to corruption and propensity for extra-legal violence—are increasingly undermining the Islamic State’s ability to obtain the trust and cooperation of civilians. Counterinsurgency efforts should be designed to undermine the legitimacy of its institutions. Long-term solutions in the region must involve a fundamental reorganization of political and legal institutions in ways that promote legitimacy and rule of law.

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• The legal foundations of the Islamic State

Media coverage of the Islamic State has focused on the group’s grotesque use of violence and archaic governance style. Less attention has been paid, however, to the institutions that make those practices possible—institutions that lend the group legitimacy, at least in the eyes of supporters, as a sovereign state. In her new Brookings Analysis Paper, “The legal foundations of the Islamic State,” Mara Revkin argues that legal institutions play a critical role in the Islamic State’s state-building project. Those structures help the group take and keep territory, as well as provide a measure of accountability to the people living under its rule.

Lesser evil?

Revkin writes that “the Islamic State has attempted to ingratiate itself with civilians by claiming that its legal system is comparatively more legitimate and effective than the available alternatives.” The Syrian and Iraqi governments, Revkin explains, are often perceived as being highly corrupt and ineffective. The Islamic State is able to gain civilians’ favor by arguing that its political and legal institutions are more legitimate than those of the Syrian and Iraqi governments or rival armed groups. She adds: “some Syrians and Iraqis seem to prefer the legal system of the Islamic State to the available alternatives not because they agree with its ideology, but simply because they regard it as the lesser evil.” 

The Syrian and Iraqi governments...are often perceived as being highly corrupt and ineffective.

Revkin writes that for the Islamic State, shariah law is “the only legitimate basis for governance.” In cases where shariah fails to address modern-day problems, she explains, religiously legitimate authorities appointed by the Islamic State—such as military commanders, police officers, and the caliph himself—can issue legal decisions as long as they do not conflict with the divine rules of shariah or harm the welfare of the greater Muslim community. Alongside this is a system of rules and regulations to “govern civilians, discipline its own officials and combatants, and control territory” in areas of rights and duties, behavior, property, trade, and warfare. 

Making the state possible

Legal institutions help the Islamic State advance three main state-building objectives, in Revkin’s view: 

1. First, they support the Islamic State’s territorial expansion by “legitimizing [its] claims to sovereignty, justifying the expropriation of the property and land of enemies, and building goodwill with civilians.” 
2. Legal institutions also allow the Islamic State to enforce compliance and accountability of its own members and maintain internal control and discipline. Revkin describes various types of punishments the Islamic State uses to discipline its own members—these punishments are important, she writes, because “no government can establish itself as legitimate and sovereign without policing the behavior of the people who are responsible for implementing its policies.”
3. Finally, Revkin explores the legal institutions surrounding the Islamic State’s tax policies, which are “critical to financing the Islamic State’s governance and military operations.” Courts and judges, she explains, are crucial to “administering and legitimizing” taxation and justifying “economic activities that might otherwise resemble theft.” 

Weaknesses in the system

Although the Islamic State claims to have legitimate governing authority, based on a defined legal system, that system faces vulnerabilities. Revkin writes, for instance, that reports of corruption and extra-legal violence are “threatening the organization’s long-term sustainability and undermining its ability to win the trust and cooperation of civilians.”

Amid recent signs that the group is losing strength, Revkin argues that it’s struggling to maintain its own moral standards. To further weaken the Islamic State, she recommends working to undermine those institutions. The trouble is, as Revkin points out: “the Islamic State came to power largely by exploiting the weakness and illegitimacy of existing institutions” in Iraq and Syria. Thus, a sustainable plan for ultimately destroying the organization must also involve strengthening political and legal institutions in those countries. 

Five years ago, my mother needed an orthopedic surgeon for a knee replacement. Unable to find any data, we went with an academic doctor that was recommended to us (she suffered surgical complications). Last month, we were again looking for an orthopedic surgeon- this time hoping that a steroid injection in her spine might allay the need for invasive back surgery. This time, thanks to a recent data dump from CMS, I was able to analyze some information about Medicare providers in her area and determine the most experienced doctor for the job.  Of 453 orthopedic surgeons in Maryland, only a handful had been paid by Medicare for the procedure more than 10 times.  The leading surgeon had done 263- as many as the next 10 combined. We figured he might be the best person to go to, and we were right- the procedure went like clockwork.

Had it been a month prior to the CMS data release, I wouldn’t have had the data at my fingertips. And I certainly wouldn’t have found the most experienced hand in less than 10 minutes.

It’s been a couple of month since the release of Medicare data by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) on the volume and cost of services billed by healthcare providers, and despite the whiff of scandal surrounding the highest paid providers (including the now-famous Florida ophthalmologist that received $21 million) the analyses so far have been somewhat unsurprising. This week, coinciding with the fifth Health DataPalooza, is a good time to take stock of the utility of this data, its limitations, and what the future may hold.

The millions of lines of data was exactly as advertised: charges and paid services under traditional Medicare “fee-for-service,” including the billing provider’s ID and the costs to Medicare. The initial headlines touting “Medicare Millionaires” relied on some basic arithmetic and some sorting.  And the cautions piled up: the data could reflect multiple providers billing under a single ID; payments are not the same as a provider’s actual take home income; it’s not complete information as it doesn’t contain information about other insurers, or even Medicare Advantage, and so on.

But perhaps most damning was how little insight the data seemed to provide on the quality or value of care provided, as opposed to volume of services.  As Lisa Rosenbaum wrote in the New Yorker, “So much of that good isn’t captured by these numbers. You don’t bill for talking to a patient about how he wants to die. There’s no code for providing reassurance rather than ordering a test.”

Where is the value in the data?

Data bear witness to the fundamental flaw of the payment system that generates them. The absence of information on quality, safety, appropriateness, or outcomes appears to have been a genuine revelation to many, but it is in fact exactly the type of output that we should expect from this volume-based system that we have built. This is not a critique of the data release. It is an indictment of our payment system.

Data is revealing important trends in how we pay doctors differently. Not all physician payments are created equal, and the data certainly shows the disparities across specialties, primary care, and others. For example, the average total annual Medicare payment to geriatricians was less than $100,000, while dermatologists and radiation oncologists (who presumably also see non-elderly patients) received on average $200,000 and $360,000 respectively. The important question will be why and should it continue?

Figure 1: Distribution of Total Medicare Pay by Provider Type, 2012 

Source: Author's calculations based on Medicare data released in April 2014

Data is revealing important indicators of cost and pricing – a major contributor to rising health care costs. Why is it that a brief visit with a geriatrician is worth $13; a 45-minute visit with a geriatrician sorting through medications, educating family members, and developing a quality of life plan with a terminal cancer patient is worth $79; and a dermatologist treating suspected skin cancer can earn upwards of $600 for a procedure that takes them minutes?

Data sheds light on practice patterns. The data is also revealing important variances in utilization of drugs and treatments. For example, a block apart on Park Avenue, two ophalmologists differ significantly in their use of treatments for macular degeneration. One uses expensive injectable drugs and gets paid over $10,000 per injection, while the other receives less than $500 for the lower-cost equivalent.

A CBS News report looked at spinal fusion surgeries—a procedure where there is almost no evidence demonstrating a net benefit to patients compared to other conservative therapies. They observed that “while the average spine surgeon performed them on 7 percent of patients they saw, some did so on 35 percent.”

At the extremes, outlier “practice pattern” begins to raise questions of potential improper billing or outright fraud and abuse. For example, simply looking at the frequency and volume of services provided to individual beneficiaries can identify concerning outliers. This laboratory company billed for 28,954 blood glucose reagent strips in 2012- for 88 patients. And yes, that’s highly unusual.

Figure 2: "Outlier" Medicare Billing for Blood Glucose Reagent Strips, 2012

Source: Author's calculations based on Medicare data released in April 2014

One clinical social worker billed for 1,697 separate days of service on 28 patients (the size of the bubble is proportional to the total amount of reimbursement by Medicare in 2012).

Figure 3: "Outlier" Medicare Billing for Days of Service, 2012

Source: Author's calculations based on Medicare data released in April 2014

The most extreme outlier, Dr. Gary Ordog, was named by NPR and ProPublica in their examination of providers who are outliers on their pattern of coding for the highest intensity office. Ordog had previously lost the right to bill California’s state Medicaid program, and yet continued to charge Medicare for over $500,000 in billing in 2012. It’s important to caution however, that even in these extreme outliers, statistics alone cannot provide definitive evidence of abuse. There is a need for formal investigation.

Medicare and law enforcement officials will need to create new processes for dealing with a potential flood of outlier reports from amateur sleuths like me.

What's Next for Medicare Data?

Data can be trended. Updates of data releases can begin to show us not just snapshots, but moving pictures of our healthcare system as it undergoes rapid changes. The New York Times reported on the increase in charges for certain frequent causes of hospitalization between 2011 and 2012. It will be interesting to see whether the data release itself, and the Steven Brill landmark Time article on hospital charges, have an impact on reversing these trends.  

Data can be “mashed up”.  The value of open data is hugely greater than the sum of its parts. As more and more data becomes available, the files can be cross-linked and “mashed up” to be able to answer questions no one database could have.  ProPublica linked together cobbled together data on state actions and sanctions on physicians with the Medicare data release to ask why these physicians are still being paid by Medicare.

What does the future hold? Correlations with drug prescribing data, meaningful use, and referral patterns are possible today, Sunshine Act disclosures and quality reporting, and much more is soon to come.

As we get comfortable with the data, analysts can move past the basics of arithmetic and sorting, we have an opportunity to make more ‘meaningful use’ of this data. We can begin to identify practice patterns, overuse, variations in geography or demographics, and potentially even fraud and abuse. As more and more data becomes available, the files can be cross-linked and “mashed up” to be able to answer questions no one database could have addressed. What will determine the value of the Medicare data release will be the creativity of those data scientists, epidemiologists, and health services researchers (amateur as well as professional) who can ask the challenging questions that must be answered.

Event Information

Over the past few years, more than 600 Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) have formed across the country, charged with the dual goals of improving health while also reducing health care costs. Increasingly, evidence on how public and private ACOs are progressing toward these goals is beginning to emerge. Based on these results, major regulatory changes are anticipated in the months ahead that will impact accountable care programs in Medicare, as well as future uptake within the private sector.

On October 20, the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform hosted a half day forum to assess the latest evidence on accountable care, discuss strategies to overcome unique ACO challenges, and provide an overview of accountable care reforms. Sean Cavanaugh of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provided keynote remarks on the latest Medicare ACO results and potential changes to the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). Panel sessions featured leading experts in ACO research, implementation and health care policy.

 Join the conversation on Twitter using #ACOFuture or follow @BrookingsMed

Video

• The Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP): Looking Ahead
• Big Issues for ACOs Going Forward
• ACO Policy Issues and Solutions on the Horizon

Audio

• The State of Accountable Care: Evidence to Date and Next Steps

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• ACO Public Event full deck FINAL
• 102014_Accountable Care_Transcript

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.

Editor's note: This blog piece is based on findings from the new book Governance in an Age of Abundance: Experiences from the Extractive Industries in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will be launched at a Brookings public event later today. A Spanish version of this post is available on the Inter-American Development Bank's website. 

The myth of Sisyphus represents in Greek mythology a metaphor for pointless and interminable efforts. Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to push a huge boulder up a steep hill. Every time he was close to reaching the top, the boulder was made to roll back down the hill and to the starting point, so that Sisyphus had to start all over again, in perpetuity.    

This metaphor may sound familiar to countries rich in natural resources. In many of these countries, citizens have hoped for generations that the revenue derived from extractive industries (oil, gas and mining) would translate into concrete benefits. Instead, rents from extractive industries have frequently been misused, either through wasteful state spending or public and private corruption. In many countries, heavy dependence on revenues from extractive industries has produced economic and political distortions. Also, revenues are all too often centralized at the national level, leaving local communities to wonder about the benefits of hosting extractive industries.

Overcoming the ‘Resource Curse’

The good news is that there are countries that have found a way to overcome the so-called "resource curse." In Norway, for example, the revenue deriving from the extractive industries supports a majority of government investment in education and health, as well as the pension system. While many resource-rich states can make the same claim, what makes Norway unusual is that it has been able to do so while minimizing corruption, mitigating economic distortions and ensuring efficiency in government spending at the same time.  

How did Norway do it? A look at the Natural Resources Governance Index (NRGI), developed by the Natural Resource Governance Institute, provides a possible explanation: by strengthening governance in the extractive sector. This implies establishing a robust legal and regulatory framework, agile mechanisms to promote transparency and disseminate information, effective safeguards and rigorous controls, and an overall institutional environment that is business-friendly and conducive to greater accountability in the public sector. And this is not a phenomenon unique to Norway, but it is replicated in other countries with large extractive sectors, such as Australia, Botswana and Canada.

Extractive Industries in Latin America and the Caribbean

Latin American and the Caribbean are at a crucial juncture in their effort to strengthen governance in the management of natural resources. On the one hand the above-mentioned NRGI, which measures the quality of extractives governance in 58 resource-rich countries, shows that among the eleven world leaders in quality of extractives governance, more than half are countries from the region (Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago and Peru). This is especially good news if one considers that Latin America and the Caribbean is the main source of metals at a global level, and that it holds the second largest oil reserves in the world. Latin America and the Caribbean are also remarkable because many countries have managed to develop large extractive sectors while at the same time avoiding the secessionist conflicts over extractives that plague resource-rich countries in other regions of the world.

On the other hand, Latin America still has to resolve some important issues. Overall, the region still falls short on rule of law and corruption measures in comparison to OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Social conflicts related to the exploitation of natural resources remain a sensitive issue in the region, especially when extractive industries operate in territories where indigenous communities have a significant interest and presence. Citizen demands regarding the control and mitigation of environmental impacts by governments and corporations are increasing, especially in terms of land use and conservation of water resources and forests. And many Latin Americans are increasingly demanding good governance and transparency in state spending.

Transparency is Key to Improving Governance

The recent IDB book Governance in an Age of Abundance: Experiences from the Extractive Industries in Latin America and the Caribbean (IDB, 2014), edited by Juan Cruz Vieyra and Malaika Masson, analyzes these challenges, particularly in light of recent initiatives to strengthen transparency in the governance of natural resources in the region.

The book focuses on two main themes. The first is on how best to improve governance in the extractives sector, especially in a way that promotes inclusive growth and takes into account the concerns of citizens. The key to this is governance mechanisms that include checks and balances to ensure that the needs of local communities are taken into account. The second theme of the book is a focus on evaluating concrete governance proposals, which include improved legislation, licensing arrangements, contracting procedures, and fiscal regimes. Underlying these two themes is a strong argument in favor of strengthened government capacity to produce, use, and disseminate accurate and timely information about the extractive sector.

The book identifies transparency as a key tool to improve the quality of governance in the extractive sector. This is not an easy task, because effective governance of this sector requires states to manage across a complex set of policy domains. Transparency is part of the solution to this problem by making data available to a wider set of stakeholders. This allows for improved coordination inside of government and helps civil society and the private sector to make informed contributions to public policy and hold governments accountable. For example, Colombia, through its Maparegalías initiative, is putting all the information about how money from extractive industry royalties are being spent, community by community, with everything placed online on an interactive map for easy access. But to make the most out of transparency, states need to address shortfalls in human capacity to use newly available data effectively in the public sector. This is particularly true at the sub-national level in many Latin American and Caribbean countries. Ultimately, as transparency improves and governments use data to operate more effectively and efficiently, citizen trust and confidence in the ability of the public sector to manage the wealth produced by extractive industries will improve. 

The findings of the book point towards two key challenges for governments related to designing and implementing transparency initiatives:

1. Governments need to make data more easily available and more accessible to stakeholders. This includes addressing the quality and timeliness of information. It also means improving the ease of use of data, both in terms of the formatting of data and navigability of the platforms that present it.
2. Governments need to be creative about soliciting feedback from stakeholders in the extractive sector. It is not enough to merely present data to the public. Governments should actively seek out input from citizens. This will ultimately mean investing in public and private capacity to analyze available data so that stakeholders can make informed contributions to governance.

These recommendations present the best way for governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to emerge from the paradoxical Sisyphean trap that resource abundance has all too often posed.

The authors are grateful to Pablo Bachelet, Juan Cruz Vieyra, Francesco De Simone and Martin Walter for their comments. 

Now that that the initial revelations regarding the VW scandal have sunk in it’s time to begin assessing the larger significance of those revelations. While the case and, we predict, VW, will continue for years (we are only at the end of the beginning, and far from the beginning of the end), we are far enough along to see five large questions emerging. These questions will tell us much about the economic, corporate and cultural future of VW and German enterprise. 

1) VW was an integral component of Germany's industrial reputation in Europe, across the Atlantic in the United States, and around the world. Now, that hard-won reputation is at risk. How broad will the damage be to German businesses' reputation not just for quality, but for "premium quality?"

2) Turning from the German business sector to the German economy as a whole, the VW scandal has many ironies, not least of which is that the company was a key driver (so to speak) of the famous German Wirthschaftswunder. Economic health propelled a vanquished Germany to the forefront of Europe’s post-WWII recovery and then made post-Cold War reunification a success. Does the VW scandal have the potential to slow down the overall growth of the German economy, and what are the European and global implications of that at a time when the Chinese economy is also sputtering?

3) From a corporate governance perspective, the scandal represents some of the most boneheaded thinking ever. Following disclosure of the fraud, €14bn (£10bn; $15.6bn) was wiped off VW's stock market value. Whoever knew/orchestrated the scheme thought they would get away with it, but did they really not foresee the consequences or even the likelihood of getting caught? We will long be studying the abnormal “fraud psychology" of this case.

4) Germany ranks among the top ten countries for low corruption according to Transparency International. Yet VW is not alone among German companies in making major headlines with massive ethics failures in recent years, joining Siemens, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, and many others. What does this mean for the future of Germany’s role as a force for anti-corruption at home and internationally?

5) Former VW CEO Winterkorn resigned but claimed he knew nothing about the scandal. What does this say about the structure and management culture of Germany’s largest companies? How widespread is “plausible deniability” in German business culture--and in all business culture everywhere? If so, what are the dangers of this going forward, and what should be done to address them?

Since September of 2014, Jordan has joined other Western and Arab coalition partners in striking Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria, with the country’s King Abdullah framing the war against IS as a “third world war.” How have conflicts on Jordan’s borders and now the country’s direct intervention strained the country’s resources? How have the country’s leaders presented their participation at home and abroad?

In a timely Policy Briefing based on field research, Sultan Barakat and Andrew Leber assess Jordan’s vulnerabilities to regional conflicts and domestic pressures. Despite broad public support for action against IS, they note a growing gap between state and society only exacerbated by adverse events such as the capture and uncertain fate of a downed Jordanian pilot.

Read "Fortress Jordan: Putting the Money to Work"

Ultimately, Barakat and Leber note Jordan’s strategic importance to its allies but caution against it playing a front-line combat role. The authors contend that reducing threats to Jordanian stability lies not in “taking the fight to IS” abroad, but in strengthening Jordanian society at home.

While calling for improved governance in the Kingdom, the authors note reluctance on the part of Jordan’s ruling elites and their allies to promote full-scale political reforms. Barakat and Leber contend that they should therefore channel their fears about regional instability and extremism into productive action on Jordan’s economy. This will entail restructuring aid flows to the country toward productive investment, selectively incorporating Syrian refugees into the workforce, and putting forward a credible vision for the country’s economic future.

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The Muslim Brotherhood has faced a great deal of opposition in the Middle East in recent years, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all declaring it to be a terrorist organization. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has historically operated as a loyal opposition to the palace, has also come under fire as regional instability has dampened Jordanians’ appetite for protest and reform. While the group still enjoys significant public support, it is facing a number of internal tensions, culminating in its recent split. How can the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood retain its political clout? Can it play a role in stabilizing and strengthening Jordan?

Read The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan: Time to reform

In this new Policy Briefing, Neven Bondokji discusses the various reform efforts undertaken by Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood since 2010, and argues that it urgently needs to see them through. She identifies key challenges, including the division over the Zamzam reform initiative, overlap between the movement and its affiliated political party, the inclusion of women, the ongoing ideological shifts in the movement’s political discourse, and generational tensions. Additionally, Bondokji examines how Jordan’s East Banker-Palestinian fault line is manifested within the Brotherhood.

Bondokji makes a series of recommendations, including that the Muslim Brotherhood ensure the independence of its political party’s leadership and decision-making, actively engage in and disseminate discourse on plural politics and policy debates, and introduce new leaders and styles of communication. She also asserts that Jordan’s government must empower political parties and allow for a more representative parliament. The application of such reforms, Bondokji concludes, would allow Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood to be an asset in the country’s efforts against destabilizing extremism.

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International jihad has undergone a wholesale internal revolution in recent years. The dramatic emergence of the Islamic State (IS) and its proclamation of a Caliphate means that the world no longer faces one Sunni jihadi threat, but two, as IS and al-Qaida compete on the global stage. What is the relationship between the groups and how do their models differ? Is IS’s rapid organizational expansion sustainable? Can al-Qaida adapt and respond?

Read "Jihadi Rivalry: The Islamic State Challenges al-Qaida"

In a new Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper, Charles Lister explores al-Qaida and IS’s respective evolutions and strategies. He argues that al-Qaida and its affiliates are now playing a long game by seeking to build alliances and develop deep roots within unstable and repressed societies. IS, on the other hand, looks to destabilize local dynamics so it can quickly seize control over territory.

Lister finds that the competition between IS and al-Qaida for jihadi supremacy will continue, and will likely include more terrorist attacks on the West. Accordingly, he calls for the continued targeting of al-Qaida leaders, the disruption of jihadi financial activities, and greater domestic intelligence and counter-radicalization efforts. Lister concludes, however, that state instability across the Muslim world must be addressed or jihadis will continue to thrive.

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• Arabic PDF