Delegates meeting at the UN headquarters last week remained divided on how best to follow-up and review a planned post-2015 development agenda, including a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs).

While consensus reportedly emerged around the importance of a functioning review framework, differences remained between countries over the terminology, degree of centralisation, and the relationship between the monitoring of the post-2015 agenda as a whole and the outcome from parallel UN talks on development financing.

The co-facilitators of the post-2015 talks – David Donoghue, Permanent Representative of Ireland and Macharia Kamau, Permanent Representative of Kenya – had released a discussion paper earlier in May outlining key elements on follow-up and review that have emerged in post-2015 talks to date.

The new development agenda is due to be adopted by world leaders at a summit scheduled to be held in New York in September.

Securing a good review

According to Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), some delegates disagreed on whether to label the process a monitoring, accountability, or review exercise. Furthermore, while a number of delegates supported the use of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) as a key platform for review at the global level, some differences emerged around its outputs and relationship with other institutions.

The HLPF, born out of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2012 and placed under the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), replaces the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in following the implementation of sustainable development.

During last week’s post-2015 session, negotiating groups such as the G77/China said that other mechanisms and conventions should report to the HLPF, with a view to follow up. Other nations cautioned against a centralised structure, calling instead for a system where the HLPF was supported by a network of existing review mechanisms, including other agencies with expertise relevant to elements of a list of proposed SDGs put forward by a dedicated UN working group last July.

Delegates also did not reach convergence on how to structure the HLPF’s outputs in this area, with the co-facilitators of the talks noting that the body only meets annually for eight days, which may not give it enough time to take on all the tasks eventually mandated.

The relationship with the outcome document of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3) remained unresolved by the end of the week, with many delegates agreeing that the question of whether to have one overarching or two separate monitoring frameworks for both processes would need to be resolved after there is more clarity on the financing talks’ content.

Trade-related targets have been put forward in both the proposed SDGs and the revised FfD3 draft outcome document.

SDG targets

Ahead of last week’s talks the co-facilitators had also released a revised proposal on selected targets for the proposed SDGs.

Some of these revisions address areas in the UN working group’s proposal where “x%s” instead of numbers were left for some of the targets. In other instances the co-facilitators have proposed revisions to bring the SDGs into line with other international agreements.

One such case applies to a trade-related target under the proposed health goal, which mentions flexibilities affirmed by the WTO’s Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, with TRIPS referring to Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), in relation to providing access to affordable essential medicines. Revisions to this target had already been proposed by the co-facilitators ahead of a post-2015 session in March to make it more consistent with current WTO documents.

The latest revisions document acknowledges that while the target’s language is inconsistent with certain aspects of the WTO declaration, making substantive linguistic revisions could backtrack on earlier negotiations, and therefore it suggests keeping the original proposed SDG text.

Other proposed revisions at the recent session, as in March, met with mixed reactions from post-2015 delegates who continued to express concern that this exercise would re-open the UN working group’s SDG negotiations. Others reportedly welcomed the effort to ensure alignment with international agreements.

Next steps

The post-2015 talks will now head into a final negotiating phase in the coming two months in a bid to secure an outcome document to be adopted in September. Talks since January have focused on the four substantive elements due to be included in the new framework: a declaration, the SDGs, the means of implementation (MoI) for these, and follow-up and review modalities.

The co-facilitators announced at the end of the week that a “zero draft” of the outcome would be provided on or around 1 June. The next post-2015 negotiating session is scheduled for 22-25 June, followed shortly after by the Third HLPF. According to the processes’ current agenda, delegates should wrap up the post-2015 outcome talks by the end of July.  

Meanwhile informal talks are currently ongoing this week in New York on the FfD3 outcome document. That conference is due to be held 13-16 July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

Post-2015 delegates last week also received a briefing update from John Pullinger, this year’s chair of the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC), on its work on developing a global indicator framework for the SDGs, which is due to be adopted at the body’s annual session next March. Further progress reports will be delivered at the June and July post-2015 negotiating sessions.