It is essential to complement traditional funding for peacebuilding with blended finance, which in turn can support employment generation, economic inclusion, and more equitable access to social services.

In addition to increased voluntary and assessed contributions, it is important that new financing options continue to be explored, and that efforts to generate adequate and predictable funding for peacebuilding be renewed.

Can vaccines be classified as a global public good? While the overall numbers of those being vaccinated are heartening, they are also heavily skewed, with 90% of this global drive confined to the European Union, along with 11 other countries. In Asia and the Pacific, the numbers vaccinated remain very low – given current rates, it will take bold new measures if global herd immunity is to be achieved by the end of 2022.

Félix Fernández-Shaw presents a European perspective on the global recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and asks questions on the way forward. He also touches on the increasing importance of the partnership between the EU, its member states, and the UN, stressing the need for effective multilateralism. In this regard, he singles out the need for an effective UN and for strong EU support for the Secretary-General’s development system reforms.

In the first contribution, Ambassador Omar Hilale explores the challenges currently confronting the climate agenda. Specifically, he focuses on the interactions between the COVID-19 pandemic, the global financial crisis and climate change. He argues the world must make the transition towards sustainable modes of production and consumption, and that financing must be made available for the restructuring necessary to make this leap.

In the second contribution to Part Three, the UN’s Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office writes a coming-of-age story on the UN pooled fund mechanism. It traces the evolution of the concept of pooled funding from its inception in 2004 to a mechanism which has a central role to play in making the current UN reform a success. While aggregate trends are positive, funding to pooled mechanisms is largely restricted to a handful of contributors. The paper makes the case that, in order for a quantum leap in funding to take place, a corresponding leap in quality is needed.

In the third contribution, John Hendra and Silke Weinlich ask if the transformational potential of the UN Joint SDG Fund can be turned into reality. They explain that the significance of the Joint SDG Fund lies in the fact that it provides a unique financial instrument to the newly empowered resident coordinators, in turn one of the outstanding features of the Secretary-General’s reforms in the development system.

Henriette Keijzers touches on the important work being done to strengthen the timeliness and quality of UN data and its use in decision-making. She emphasizes the fact that the UN has taken a major leap forward by developing a system-wide data strategy. This strategy focuses on the importance of making change happen through data use cases. She concludes that the UN’s success in realising its ambitious vision on data will depend on the grit and leadership of the entire UN family.

In the final chapter in this section, Navid Hanif and Philipp Erfurth focus on the nexus of new technologies and investment in sustainable development, asking if they are reinforcing forces which can generate synergies and unlock new funding for development. The authors argue that investment in emerging technologies can help accelerate achievement of the SDGs, while grasping the benefits of new technologies can help accelerate investment in sustainable development.

This contribution by Orria Goni, Emily Davis and Thomas Beloe explores how to build back from COVID-19 with a focus on financing strategies, including integrated national financing frameworks (INFFs). The authors argue that financing strategies that put the SDGs at the heart of recovery are crucial.

This contribution by Homi Kharas discusses the financing of the SDGs but widens the horizon to look at, for example, the contributions of private financing of public investment. He stresses that economic growth, and associated increases in domestic revenues, is far and away the largest driver of new financing for the SDGs, estimating that spending on the SDGs by developing countries could increase by US$ 7 trillion as a result.

Cross-border financing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), when defined as the flows to developing countries of financing that likely finance investments directly related to the SDGs, rose to US$ 675 billion in 2017, up by 17.1% in nominal terms from 2016. The increase was largely due to private flows that rose by almost US$ 100 billion (Figure 1).

In 2030 when the world assesses whether the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate agreement should be hailed as multilateralism’s greatest triumph or failure, achievements will be evaluated in real terms against SDG indicators, and in financial terms against SDG investments. If the world was to measure progress on key financial indicators related to the SDGs and the Paris Agreement today, how would we fare?

Searching for ‘SDG investment gap’ on a popular online search engine yields over a thousand results, a search of ‘SDG investment opportunity’ only seven. Omitting ‘SDG’ from this search, yields a reverse result: Investment opportunity produces a multiple of the results of investment gap. If we take this as an indication of perceptions on investing in sustainable development, what conclusions can we draw from these results?

The spectre of devastating global climate change darkens the prospects for development in both industrial and developing countries. The global climate system has already entered dangerous territory, with the impacts of man-made emissions increasing the probability of extreme weather events and irreversible damage to the global environment. During 2018, deaths from extreme weather events exceeded 5,000 people and more than 28 million required emergency or humanitarian aid. Munich Re, a global leader in the reinsurance sector, estimates that disasters, including tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes and droughts, cost the global economy approximately US$ 160 billion last year.

If trying to grow a plant in the Sahara, it is no help to track the world’s total rainfall. Likewise, investing to protect a Caribbean farm from a hurricane has little bearing on a Pacific island’s resilience to typhoons. For most people, the intuition is clear. International precipitation aggregates are simply not meaningful for specific places and communities grappling with too little rain, too much rain or the wrong type of rain.

A long-held tenant of development policy is that economic growth is of prime importance. Growth expands incomes, and without a growing national income there is little or nothing to redistribute. Without a growing pie, the political and social dynamics would revert to a zero-sum game and thus, an expanding income makes it politically more feasible to redress inequality. Also, growth drives poverty reduction, and that is the overriding objective of development – and of social policies around the world.

The 2030 Agenda has brought not only a new paradigm about how governments address sustainable development for their citizens’ present and future, but it has also triggered a reinvigorated and rare appetite for a new generation of partnerships around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): true multi-stakeholder partnerships where governments, investors, international organisations, private sector and civil society can come together to tackle complex problems. The United Nations development system entities with different mandates have been instrumental in germinating and bringing about SDGs and thus are particularly well-placed to articulate and convene these types of partnerships.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched an ambitious five-year strategic plan through its 13th General Programme of Work (GPW) 2019-2023, which was approved by the Seventy-First World Health Assembly in May 2018 (resolution WHA71.1). With its mission to ‘Promote health, keep the world safe, serve the vulnerable’, the GPW 13 outlines a clear vision for achieving three strategic priorities through its triple billion targets:
- achieving universal health coverage – 1 billion more people benefiting from universal health coverage;
- addressing health emergencies – 1 billion more people better protected from health emergencies; and
- promoting healthier populations – 1 billion more people enjoying better health and wellbeing.

Do we know enough about the various forms of ear-marked funding arrangements to inform decision-making? What positive and negative marks have three decades of earmarked contributions left on the UN development system (UNDS)? What challenges do donors face in managing earmarked funding? And what perspectives on the earmarking conundrum at the UNDS are helpful in identifying entry points for reform? This contribution provides some answers to these questions, drawing on findings from our broader study on earmarking in the multilateral development system. Towards the end of the piece, we reflect on how to take the recently adopted UN Funding Compact forward.

In a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study, the head of the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department and his colleagues show that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require a large increase in public and private investments. Low-income developing countries with average per capita incomes below US$ 2,700 per year cannot finance these investments out of domestic resources or debt financing alone – even though domestic resource mobilisation can and needs to be expanded substantially in many countries. Neither will the private sector come to the rescue, as many SDG investments cannot generate commercial returns. The IMF concludes that Official Development Assistance (ODA) and other forms of concessional finance must increase if the SDGs are to be achieved, a point also echoed in a 2018 report by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The reform agenda for the UN development system (UNDS) has been dominated for some 30 years by analyses and initiatives relating to coherence. The most significant reform proposal during this period – the Delivering as One initiative – was contained in a report dubbed the Coherence Report. Reform has been clearly associated with organisational and structural reform: how can an overly complex system comprising more than thirty entities that differ in size, mandate and governance be consolidated or, at minimum, better coordinated?

The parallel resolutions on Peacebuilding and Sustaining peace, adopted in April 2016 by the UN Security Council (S/RES/2282) and the General Assembly (A/RES/70/262), emphasise ‘the need for predictable and sustained financing to United Nations peacebuilding activities, including through increased contributions, and strengthened partnerships with key stakeholders, while also noting the significance that non-monetary contributions can play in peacebuilding efforts’. The Secretary-General’s 2018 report on implementation of the resolutions pointed to discouraging trends in donor funding that result in insufficient resources dedicated to addressing conflict risks and to supporting countries going through fragile transitions. The report made several recommendations for advancing the application of the Sustaining Peace framework and to address existing gaps, including on financing.

The Secretary-General’s report on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace from January 2018 makes several recommendations on financing of United Nations peacebuilding activities. Among them is a call to explore innovative finance options. With slow progress in areas of voluntary and assessed contributions, the lens is often turned towards innovative finance to bring solutions. This presents a window of opportunity for the peacebuilding community to build on the motivation of actors willing to bring investment and resources. However, we need to act with caution. Innovative finance is unlikely to be a panacea that brings the ‘quantum leap’ for the Peacebuilding Fund that the Secretary-General called for in his report or to raise the needed resources for financing peacebuilding more broadly; donor contributions will remain at the heart of financing, certainly in the near term.

The Secretary-General’s report on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace highlights that nearly half of all people living in extreme poverty reside in fragile and conflict-affected states. Unless concerted action is taken by 2030, that figure is expected to rise to 80% by 2035. At the same time, peacebuilding and conflict prevention remains a cost-effective way to safeguard development gains – with US$ 1 invested in prevention, resulting in US$ 16 saved by one estimate. By another estimate – the United Nations-World Bank study on Pathways for Peace: Inclusive Approaches to Preventing Violent Conflict – costs of conflict far outweigh the costs of prevention by anywhere between US$ 5-70 billion. Increasing donor spending on peacebuilding in conflict-affected countries remains an important lever by which the international community can focus on prevention and contain rising human and economic costs of violent conflicts. The present section lays out the current trends in Official Development Assistance (ODA) to conflict-affected countries as well as to peacebuilding ODA in conflict-affected countries updating the findings of a 2017 report on ‘Stocktaking of Peacebuilding Expenditures: 2002–2013’ by the Institute of Economics and Peace and the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO).

Violence and conflict are the most important obstacles to sustainable development. Nearly half of all people living in extreme poverty reside in countries affected by conflict. Fifty percent of the lowest ranking countries in the 2018 Human Development Index Report are affected by violent conflict. Peace and development mutually reinforce each other; violence and conflict can reverse development gains, by causing death, disease, deprivation, displacement, destruction, damage as well as leading to a decline in public services and limited access to resources, which in turn can provoke grievances resulting in mistrust and conflict. On the other hand, peace can sustain development gains. Because of this interdependence, the UN system is working closely together to ensure progress on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.