Locations
The region is undergoing fragile economic and political situations. Photo; UNDP Mexico
The Latin America and the Caribbean region is at a fork in the road—a time to rethink its development paths and institutional arrangements to promote progress in the social, economic and environmental fields, while reducing inequalities. That is why the 2030 Agenda, approved by the member countries of the United Nations in 2015, becomes so relevant. It is an invitation to see the interconnected nature of the challenges we face. The principle of addressing this agenda in an integrated manner and not leaving anyone behind are the key to its success. At the UN headquarters in New York, we saw the serious commitment of the governments of the region and their willingness to reverse their situations during the High Level Political Forum on sustainable development between July 9th and 18th.
The region is undergoing fragile economic and political situations. The International Monetary Fund has just cut its growth forecasts for 2018 (from 2.0 to 1.6 percent) just above the rate of population growth. The electoral cycle is at a peak, with six presidential elections this year and five next year. To top it off, the impact of hurricanes and other natural disasters continue to take a toll on these countries, and the cyclone season is already beginning in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Despite the challenges, this is a moment of opportunities as well. We must rethink the institutional models for sustainable development in the region. For this reason, we emphasize the shift from development approaches focused on government actions (from the whole government) to development approaches based on the whole society, making visible and empowering social, cultural, academic and private actors in pursuit of integrated and sustainable development.
This was the key to our event at the UN headquarters, with the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB) and the missions of Jamaica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico to the UN. We saw, for example, how Jamaica has to work on the issue of resilience with the whole society in order to achieve sustainable development. In the State of Mexico, municipalities were invited to establish specific councils for the 2030 Agenda; and in Colombia, the end of a long-lasting conflict allowed new financial mechanisms to boost trade in the most affected areas. In the Dominican Republic, civil society has forged spaces to work with governments at the local and national levels, and together they are discussing strategies for sustainable development.
This strategy of working towards the 2030 Agenda is essential to face the pending challenges of the region, despite the tremendous progress made in recent decades. The progress includes reducing poverty, accessing services and social protection, and addressing societal exclusions based on gender, ethnicity and/or race - and basic challenges - to move towards clean energy economies, build sustainable cities and conserve the environment. The challenges are associated mainly with the economic slowdown, where the emphasis on recovering growth and boosting the labour market tends to overshadow the public agenda for any other objective.
We learned some valuable lessons from the first three years of implementation of the 2030 Agenda. First, that the challenges of addressing structural transformations of the economy, society and the environment compete with the ongoing day-to-day agendas in the region. This does not mean that you cannot give simultaneous answers to short and long problems. The Dominican Republic proposes an agenda for the construction of systemic resilience for middle-income countries while seeking to protect the social achievements of the last decade. Colombia is coupling its historic peace process with the unfinished tasks of integral rural development in areas of pacification. Costa Rica deepens its environmental achievements by consolidating renewable energy sources and drawing energy sustainability for its future.
Second, the financial challenges of the agenda generate their own innovative dynamism. The promise of moving from billions to trillions in financing for development begins with impact investments, impact bonds, insurance, public-private credits and new initiatives for pension systems, institutional investors and development banks. In the Caribbean, Granada is moving towards the structuring of blue economy life conservation bonds. Argentina places social impact bonds to improve the quality of social services. Jamaica seeks to articulate new sectors of tourism based on environmental conservation.
Finally, the institutional challenges of implementing a universal and ambitious agenda still remain. In all of the countries of the region, mechanisms to bring the 2030 Agenda to the local level are emerging, including use of mobile data, digital administrative records and service platforms that build the institutional framework of the future emerge. For many decades, the chicken-and-egg debate about how to build institutions in areas where they are weak is giving way to new forms of institutional presence generated by necessity: Honduras today maintains administrative records in real time for more than four million people; the Dominican Republic implements early warning systems for natural disasters based on household-by-household records.
Almost three years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, there are reasons to build a new narrative on development in the region based on efforts to protect social achievements and build ecologically sustainable economies, but above all, to create a narrative defined by a region in perpetual motion.
This piece was original published by El País - Planeta Futuro
