Need to think about self sufficiency - Dr Shamshad Akhtar, Executive Secretary, UNESCAP

Dr Shamshad Akhtar was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and as the tenth Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. She is also rendering her services as the United Nations Sherpa for the G20. Prior to this, Dr Akhtar had served as the senior advisor on economics and finance to the Secretary General and as the Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Ms Akhtar has also served as the 14th Governor of State Bank of Pakistan and enjoyed the privilege of being the first woman to steer State Bank's leadership.
Last month, BR Research was invited to attend the 71st Commission Session of Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok. The visit provided us with an opportunity to meet and interview this very influential woman. Below is the edited transcript of the conversation:
BR Research: Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) faced this criticism of not being environmentally friendly. Will Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) be able to overcome this criticism? Shamshad Akhtar: MDGs also had an environmental goal but it's just that the progress was very slow and it depends on what your definition of environment is. We take an integrated view on development. So, one is the issue surrounding green house gas emissions, which has to be brought down and this can have a lot of positive impact on temperature which is currently rising.
Second, is that there are other factors which cause environmental degradation. For instance, sanitation is one of the biggest things and clearly water supply and sanitation were part of the MDGs. Poverty breeds environmental degradation. As I see, there is a direct correlation between poverty and environmental degradation; when your living conditions are not good, then your environment deteriorates. There has been a lot of cutting down of forests, a lot of mismanagement of ecological resources and biodiversity.
SDGs have very broad scope. The one unique feature is that out of 17 goals, 16 try to look at all dimensions of poverty and all dimensions of environment but how these two things are interrelated has also been captured in this. You really have to look at the goals and then the targets to see this interrelationship. There is a climate specific goal, there are environment specific as well and if you move from goals to targets you will find many more.
BRR: Can you please dwell a little more on this interrelatedness?
SA: SDGs have a very holistic approach for development; there is a lot of thought in how to get this architecture right because you are worrying about economic growth, decent lives, good quality, reduction in deprivation and all its forms. At the same time you are reinforcing the goals with multiple targets, which are also trying to bring connectivity.
For instance, if you go deeper into the goal on promoting healthy lives, it talks about environment. So there is adequate attention in the goals for environment, and for social and economic pillars. But at the same time, the integration has been achieved by juxtaposition of the goals with the targets. And this is the first time the architecture development has evolved this way.
Another important thing that is critical for sustainable development is "effective institutional co-ordination". The policymakers within the country have to sit in one room and discuss sustainable development because there are trade-offs. If you pay excessive attention to short-term economic growth consideration, then you likely are not going to be able to achieve long term consequences of short term growth.
BRR: So you mean every aspect needs to be given due consideration if sustainable development goals are to be achieved?
SA: The way the legal part of it is that Rio+20 talked about development and sustainable development goals. Then Rio+20 added a qualifier that every region and every country can adopt these goals in line with their regional and national realities, circumstances and situations. So every government is going to look at what is being negotiated and agreed upon at the sustainable development event in September 2015. And then from there, every country will decide their national strategy for sustainable development based on their binding constraints.
BRR: With so many items on the wish list, will these goals in anyway distort national policies or national priorities?
SA: National plans and policies should be aligned to the overall direction of sustainable development. That's how we perceive it because it is a holistic agenda.
Some countries have already adopted the sustainable development path. China, for instance, has now corrected its core and said that it's not just the economic growth that they are looking at but a sustainable growth path. They may not be as rigidly adopting the goals but basically the broader direction is there which is "sustainable development".
For example, if you provide good quality drinking water and make sure that there are no animals walking in the drinking water that is all sustainable development. And if you provide clean drinking water, you can cut your health budget. If you reduce air pollution, you will cut your expenses by billions because right now air pollution is forcing people to spend a lot of money; the governments are also spending a great deal of money on health, so that what it means is interdependence.
The issue is that the pace of progress requires better targeting and that is one of the most important lessons that we have learnt from millennium development goals. If we target it better and give a global push to the agenda and sequence the development process better, then you get better results and this is what one has to take forward. Once you have come up with the path based on your national priorities, then proper institutional mechanism is required to follow up and review the progress.
BRR: After the agreement on MDGs, we saw a lot of money flew into the developing countries. Is that trend likely to continue with the SDGs?
SA: This is now being negotiated in terms of what we call the outcome document of financing for development; we have yet to see that. I think the broad highlights is quite similar to the chair summary but the big message is that we have to use alternate sources of funding and go beyond official development assistance to really mobilize domestic resources and encourage private sector to invest in sustainable development through effective credit enhancement and risk mitigation strategies.
And then on official development assistance (ODA), there is a big push by the developing countries that the share of ODA going to less developed countries should be raised. ODA partners had a goal to mobilize ODAs equivalent to about 1.7 percent of GNI whereas the outcome is that it is around 0.3 percent of GNI. So we are even less than what the original commitment of official development assistance was!
So, there are two types of commitments that we are trying to mobilize. One is to look at all alternate sources of financing and make sure that countries are mobilising international and domestic flows in a way that can help the financing for development. The second is the ODA debate: countries that are ODA partners should increase their assistance equivalent to 0.7 percent of GNI.
BRR: The success of SDGs and the Paris Climate Moot that is happening this year hugely depends on global leadership and global governance. How can this be brought about?
SA: The UN has a mandate of global governance; the quality of global governance mechanism is in the hands of member states but I think in terms of institutional mechanism the various agreements, treaties that UN has been able to foster over several decades they run into multiple numbers. It has played its role as a standard-setter in a number of areas, an important role in MDGs, the millennium declaration that member states adopted and then they decided and negotiated MDGs. After 15 years plus, we have come back and examined and done some stock-taking of millennium development goals, what progress has been made and the UN system is doing it. And at the same time, we have laid the foundation of futuristic global development agenda.
I think there are two to three major tensions that impact the progress. One is of countries being at different levels of development with different resource capacities, so that's a reality that needs to be kept in mind.
Second, is some of the issues happening globally like green house emissions that is because of a very fast track development in certain countries and its mostly the developed world, they are the largest emitters of green house gas emission. The debate is who should pay for investing in carbon neutral technologies and once that is worked out, then obviously that debate results in a different delivery of funding to the developing countries.
Also, MDGs cannot be implemented by the UN; they can only be implemented with strong political leadership, country ownership and country resource mobilisations. Nobody will give money to a country if the country doesn't try to raise its own money. So that mindset changes has to occur from moving from entitlement to thinking about self sufficiency.