What budget cuts at the UN mean for development goals

The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development opens on the 30^th June and runs until the 3^rd of July, and will be held in Seville, Spain. Reforming the international finance structure to find the investment to help reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, may sound alternatively both dry and difficult. But the 17 development goals have been agreed by all UN Member States and are deemed vital to achieving the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges facing the World. In truth the 2030 goal of achieving them is increasingly unrealistic and the message from some Western countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom is a broader disengagement from providing some of the actual financial support needed to reach them. Unsurprisingly there is little or no interest from Western media in the conference, in stark contrast to the wall-to-wall coverage of the G7 Summit in Canada and the NATO conference in Holland. And yet leaders from all governments, along with international and regional organizations, financial and trade institutions, businesses, civil society and the UN system will be coming together in a bid to foster stronger international cooperation.  Representing Africa in the Preparatory Committee that will oversee the agenda is South Africa, but overall Africa is the most poorly represented Continent on the Committee, with no Maghreb State represented.

Essentially those gathering in Seville are seeking to build a renewed global financing framework that will unlock greater volumes of capital at a lower cost to boost development. The timing of the conference comes at a crucial moment as even bigger political battles take place back in New York, with the global South, with China, taking the lead and hunkering down to try and protect the whole development framework and the work of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) a Chinese directed division of the UN. In advance of swingeing planned cuts to its UN and UN Agency contributions by the Trump administration, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres is attempting to rush through what many UN Member States believe to be a hasty and ill-advised plan to get the cuts in first. Should the Secretary General get what is euphemistically called a ‘Reform’ plan through, some 20% of the UN’s budgets would be cut. Most serious observers do not believe that the UN’s all powerful budgetary committee, the Fifth Committee will achieve any consensus on this, and a big push back is being launched against any cuts to the development agenda. And away from the perpetual theatre around President Trump, the new ‘might is right’ mantra of the US, Russia and Israel alongside the myopia of the Europeans, a new global landscape is beckoning. For as the US retreats from international organisations and cuts its finding, so its declining influence is being met with the increased and arguably more constructive influence of China. But if China is to come to the rescue of the development agenda and the UN as a whole, it will want to see more of its nationals – who are historically under-estimated - in the higher reaches of the UN. The current UN Secretary-General, who has presided over an era when the UN has become less relevant, has perhaps not appreciated how the tectonic plates are shifting from West to East. This was confirmed to some that he has not, by his controversial promotion of an old Portuguese friend of his to a very senior Assistant Secretary General position in his office.

All in all, if these are tough times for multilateralism, peace and an international rules-based system, they are proving to be equally tough times for all those countries to whom the development agenda is so vital. And if the West is less interested in much of this anymore, then China and the BRICS countries seem increasingly likely to step up to the plate.

*Mark Seddon is a former Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki moon & former Adviser to the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly