Treaties and Agreements

Coauthored with Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program. The Final Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) convened by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is being presented as a last-ditch attempt to negotiate standards for the international trade in conventional arms. After a twelve-year process involving panels of experts, regional dialogues, and a lengthy planning program, it is showtime for the international community.  Given the well-documented hurdles to achieving consensus among 193 UN member states on international issues, however, the treaty is unlikely to be the “final”  word on the issue. The previous round of negotiations on the ATT concluded in failure just eight months ago, in July 2012, in part because the Obama administration did not want to hand Republicans a red meat issue in the run-up to the November elections. This time around the White House seems to be on board, buoying prospects for the treaty’s signature. For the first time, the world is on the verge of new rules to govern trafficking in conventional weaponry, including small arms and light weapons. On the surface, governments  have accepted the compelling humanitarian need to curb the trade in instruments of violence too often exploited by war criminals, despots, and human rights abusers All is not rosy, however. As often occurs in complex multilateral negotiations, the language in the draft ATT has been diluted to reflect the discrete interests of major players. The United States, for example, has previously rejected proposals to regulate the trade in ammunition—of which the United States has half of the $4.3 billion annual trade. China, too, has added reservations to allow the “gifting” of weapons to favored strategic partners, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Russia, similarly, has requested an addendum to allow it to loan weapons to its own allies.  Clearly, these initiatives violate the spirit of the proposed agreement. There remains broad disagreement, moreover, concerning the scope of any treaty—and considerable hypocrisy among the great powers. For instance, while the Permanent Five members (P5) of the UN Security Council (China, Russia, United States, Great Britain, and France) signed a statement supporting “the highest common standards” for regulating the international trade in conventional weapons, all except Great Britain reject a joint statement of 120 countries (drafted by Mexico and backed by Germany) calling for a “strong” treaty. Given the reluctance of the P5 (excepting perhaps the UK) to create binding and international mechanisms of enforcement, the impact of the ATT will depend on the vigor of its implementation by domestic  authorities. The draft treaty [PDF]  proposes that each state party rely on its own national control system, with limited oversight from a modest international secretariat. In conjunction with Conference President Peter Woolcott’s decision to strike language broadening the treaty’s application to weapons not explicitly specified in the convention, states will enjoy broad license to define their own efforts to regulate the arms trade. In the absence of a more powerful secretariat empowered to define concepts like “war criminals,” “terrorists,” “illicit markets,” and the like, the long-anticipated ATT may make little difference in the real world. Beyond a weak secretariat, the effective implementation of the ATT will face three additional obstacles. The first relates to capacity. Poor states like Mali have already made clear that though they are likely to ratify the treaty, they will require financial and technical assistance to implement its complex provisions.  It remains unclear that the international donor community will offer such aid, particularly in an era of fiscal austerity. The second obstacle is less about capacity than about will—specifically, the lack of commitment among some “outlier” states to conform to the treaty, regardless of whether they ratify it. The draft ATT is different from other arms control treaties, such as those concerning the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons (as well as initiatives to ban landmines and cluster bombs), in that it would regulate a market in legitimate arms, rather than a prohibition against those broadly considered normatively out of bounds. For the ATT to be effective, states must be willing to distinguish between licit and illicit forms of trade in the same class of weapons. Unfortunately, outlier states like Iran, North Korea, and others have proven all to willing to disguise the final destination and purposes of trafficked weapons, including by using shell companies and false end-user certificates. Even if the ATT goes into force, non-ratifying (and even some ratifying) states may occupy a position similar to that of tax havens, continuing to facilitate the illicit and increasingly opaque transfer of weapons. Some fear that an imperfect treaty might actually exacerbate the illicit trade in weapons—and that no treaty might be better a fatally flawed ATT. The third challenge is legislative. Signing a treaty is one thing, ratifying it quite another. This is most obvious, and problematic, in the case of the United States, which has signed numerous multilateral treaties, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), only to see them languish in the Senate. Prospects for ratification of the ATT have been complicated by conservative resistance, backed by the influential lobbying activities of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has introduced an amendment to a U.S. budget bill that would prevent the United States from becoming party to the ATT, on the grounds that the treaty would impinge upon citizens’ Second Amendment rights. This claim is entirely without merit, since the ATT regulates international trade in weapons, does not interfere with domestic commerce, and places implementation entirely in the hands of the state, rather than any international body. As Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pointed out in his own amendment, the United States cannot be party to treaties that violate the U.S. Constitution in any case (making Senator Inhofe’s amendment moot). Nevertheless, it is quite possible, even likely, that opponents will be able to generate opposition from more than one-third of the Senate to block ratification. As of today, a final draft treaty has been produced and released by Conference President Peter Woolcott with no further scope for amendment. It remains unclear whether states will, in fact, sign onto the treaty . The ATT negotiations reflect the obstacles to achieving grand bargains in the twenty-first century, particularly ones requiring difficult negotiations at both the multilateral and domestic levels. If nothing else, we can  be confident that this “final”  treaty will not be the last word.

Not long ago, concerns about environmental degradation were marginal in U.S. national security deliberations. What a difference climate change has made. Foreign policy officials and experts are starting to recognize profound linkages between planetary health, economic prosperity, and international security. These connections were on full view Wednesday, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) teamed up with Conservation International (CI) to convene a symposim,“Global Resources, the U.S. Economy, and National Security.” The livestreamed event (available here) assembled intelligence officials, development economists, defense experts, conservation biologists, and corporate executives to discuss the rapid degradation of the earth’s natural endowments and its dire implications for long term prosperity and stability. The provocative conversation ranged far beyond global warming to assess the implications of deforestation and desertification, collapsing fisheries, habitat destruction, and water scarcity.  That these topics were broached at CFR—an august institution traditionally concerned with issues like Middle East peace, nuclear proliferation, or China’s rise—shows how central the subject of sustainability has become for foreign policy professionals. The reasons are clear. For the first time in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, the most powerful force shaping the planet is human activity. Some geologists have coined a new label for this era: The “Anthropocene.”  This epoch may turn out to be short-lived, however, given the disastrous pace at which our species is degrading the earth’s natural capital endowments—from rainforests to oceans to aquifers. Globally, governments have failed to account for—and private markets to put a price on—the many  “ecosystem services” that nature provides, ranging from arable land to clean air to fresh drinking water.  Unless humanity reverses course, warns the Stockholm Resilience Center, the world could be in for “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” Powerful demographic and economic forces are driving these trends.  The world will need to make room for two billion more people in coming decades, before the global population stabilizes at nine billion. Consumer demand will accelerate even faster, as humanity becomes richer. Between now and 2030, the global middle class is slated to double­­.  These newly affluent populations will place extraordinary strain on the earth’s limited supplies of arable land, fresh water, fisheries, and forests, with knock-on consequences for political instability and international security. Fresh Water. According to the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Global Water Security [PDF] report, the world’s annual water requirements will exceed current supplies by forty percent in 2030, thanks to demographic pressures, agricultural demands, and watershed degradation. Nations  will need to negotiate new arrangements to manage the world’s 263 shared water basins (among these the Mekong, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates) negotiate equitable access to stressed aquifiers The alternative, the NIC warns, could be growing instability and conflict, particularly in contexts of “poverty, social tensions, and weak political institutions.” Arable land. Meanwhile, the global demand for food will surge [PDF] more than thirty-five percent by 2030, as populations swell and dietary preferences (particularly for meat) evolve. Already, food consumption has outpaced production in seven of the last eight years—and current global food reserves amount to only two months of world production. Such scarcity virtually ensures a future of price volatility and disastrous shortages, of the sort that led to food riots in dozens of countries—and the toppling of the Haitian government—in 2008. Historically, degradation and scarcity of arable land has fuel violence, whether in Central America in the 1970s or Darfur in this century. Fisheries. The degradation and emptying of the world’s oceans were among the most alarming trends discussed at the conference. As Kerri-Ann Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science, told the gathering that the vast majority of the world’s commercial fish species are over-exploited [PDF], fished to capacity, or barely recovering, thanks in large part to rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.  Simultaneously, growing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are acidifying the oceans, portending “an unprecedented loss of species,” including the disappearance of biodiverse-rich coral reefs by the end of the century. Such an environmental catastrophe would have devastating implications for global food security, given that one-fifth of humanity depends on fish for their primary protein source. Deforestation. Finally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that global deforestation and forest degradation continue, albeit at a slower pace. Already, twenty-seven percent of the world’s tropical forests are cleared, and each year, the world loses additional forest cover twice the size of New Jersey. Rampant logging—much of it illegal—deprives the world of valuable biodiversity, degrades watersheds, destroys habitats, and leaves countries vulnerable to environmental disaster. Uncontrolled and illegal logging has been linked to repression and violence in many countries, from Cambodia to Haiti, Burma to Liberia. As the conference sessions made clear, recent multilateral efforts to advance conservation and environmental sustainability have been woefully inadequate. Several problems stand out. First, the world is clearly fatigued with large, UN-sponsored mega-conferences (like the UNFCCC Conferences of Parties or the Rio Plus 20 meeting), which promise comprehensive solutions but deliver little but rhetorical pablum. Second, the existing set of “regimes” governing the global environment is fragmented, with significant overlap and redundancy among competing, but underpowered and underrersourced institutions. In the absence of a single “World Environmental Organization,” one answer may be to ramp up the UN Environmental Program into a fully-fledged specialized agency, on a par with the UN Development Program (UNDP), to help provide coherence to UN efforts. Third, international negotiations on the environment suffer from a crippling bureaucratic weakness. They are typically conducted under the purview of the ministers of the environment—whose political clout pales in comparison to their foreign or finance ministry counterparts.  Finally, global environmental cooperation is hamstrung by a lack of global leadership—not least from the United States fails—which remains outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Given the perceived failures of top-down, intergovernmental efforts, what can be done? Conference participants offered several suggestions. One was to look more closely at narrower “minilateral” efforts. Rather than insisting on the presence of all countries, why not begin with coalitions of the willing, relevant, and capable? A second was to encourage parallel national processes when a formal treaty or agreement was impossible. In place of a binding agreement, ask countries to adopt a “pledge and review” approach in which countries promise to take certain actions—such as phasing out harmful subsidies, embracing “green procurement,” or increasing foreign aid for natural resource management—and set up a system to monitor commitments. Another was to expand the use of multi-stakeholder partnerships, including by enlisting the private sector in certification schemes to ensure that their complex global supply chains do not inadvertently contribute to illegal logging, overfishing, or trafficking in endangered species. Advances in information technology, including geospatial mapping and remote sensing, can play an important role in identifying problems (from deforestation to poaching to illegal fishing) and empowering governments and law enforcement. Participants also noted the potential of multi-level approaches that could enlist municipalities and local communities and even individuals as partners in the campaign for sustainability. Among the few major accomplishments at the 2012 Rio+20 conference was the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—a coalition of fifty mega-cities whose mayors (including Michael Bloomberg of New York) agreed to collaborate on new approaches to urban waste management. These are all laudable initiatives, but we can’t afford to ignore the multilateral track entirely. Three priorities come to mind. The first is to ensure that the post-2015 successor framework for the Millennium Development Goals includes new sustainability priorities beyond the provision of “clean water and sanitation” and attempt to price the ecological costs of economic activity. In parallel with this effort, national governments should endorse the proposal by the UN Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel to create a Global Sustainability Index [PDF], which would measure “development” beyond mere calculations of gross domestic product. Second, the international community must deepen its commitment to fight corruption and increase transparency among UN member states, recognizing that organized crime is frequently at the core of rapacious behavior toward the environment. A good place to start would be to develop an analog to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which could establish minimum environmental standards, identify non-complying or underperforming jurisdictions, and eventually permit the naming and shaming of countries, corporations, or organizations that embark on environmental crime. In closing the conference, CFR President Richard Haass joined with CI’s Chairman Peter Seligman and Vice Chair Harrison Ford in underscoring the “direct connection” between global resources, the U.S. economy, and U.S. national security. Ford’s message was a plainspoken reminder that “nature doesn’t need us. We need nature.” Richard Haass, for his part, explained that the world, unlike universities, isn’t divided into separate departments. In the twenty-first century, major security challenges will span borders, both geographic and disciplinary.  

John Kerry’s first major address as secretary of state, delivered Wednesday at the University of Virginia, was light on specifics and priorities. But it offered a useful glimpse into his mindset as the country’s newest chief diplomat. Two themes permeated the speech: the eroding boundary between what is “foreign” and “domestic” in our global era and the risks to U.S. national security of shortchanging investments in diplomacy and development assistance. Kerry’s first observation—on which I’ll focus here—was that foreign and domestic policy are increasingly one and the same. This is most obvious when it comes to climate change. Given the obstacles to negotiating a comprehensive, binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol—or even instituting a global cap-and-trade system—major progress on mitigating global emissions will depend on parallel national actions among the world’s major economies. Thus the most dramatic U.S. government contribution to reducing global emissions has been the Obama administration’s negotiation with the automobile industry to mandate higher fuel efficiency standards. (Of even greater immediate importance to lowering emissions, of course, has been another domestic development led by the private sector: the revolution in unconventional oil and natural gas, reducing U.S. reliance on coal.) The disappearing distinction between domestic and international is apparent across multiple issue areas. Take transnational terrorism, which finds al-Qaeda cells operating not only in Mali but in Minneapolis. Or global financial crises, which may originate in unsustainable debts in Athens, Greece, or real estate bubbles in Naples, Florida. Or the epidemiology of infectious diseases, which can spread to and from the United States among the 150,000 visitors who enter (or leave) the country daily. The blurring border between the national and international has put traditionally “domestic” agencies on the front lines of U.S. foreign policy. Consider the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Given its limited staff, the FDA already struggles to supervise approximately 200,000 domestic facilities involved in the manufacture, distribution and sale of food, prescription drugs, medical supplies, cosmetics, and the like. Now reflect on this: the United States imports nearly half of its fresh fruit and produce—placing the safety of the U.S. food supply in the hands of foreign regulators. The food scares of recent years—from  tainted Chinese infant formula to salmonella-laden Mexican peppers—point to the potential risks of (essentially) subcontracting regulatory functions to other nations. The risk is even greater when it comes to prescription drugs. Fifteen years ago, the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals were produced primarily in the United States. Today, eighty percent of such ingredients are manufactured abroad, particularly in China and India, and these drugs are often re-compounded in several countries before reaching the United States. As my colleague Laurie Garrett has noted, the emergence of complex international global supply chains presents a regulatory nightmare, particularly as unscrupulous suppliers and illicit networks have flooded international markets with counterfeit, substandard, or entirely fraudulent pharmaceuticals. To be sure, the FDA now places its own inspectors in a number of foreign countries, but the inspection of even a single plant may take a week. The only way out of this conundrum, says FDA Administrator Dr. Margaret Hamburg, is to create a “global alliance of regulators,” committed to establishing common (or at least harmonized) national standards—and to expand information sharing and enforcement efforts. The idea of a “global alliance of regulators” is one that has legs far beyond just food and drugs.  As the world becomes increasingly interdependent, effective global governance will rely less on existing international organizations and laboriously negotiated treaties and more on transnational networks of officials who hail not just from foreign ministries but from domestic agencies that possess specialized technical expertise and regulatory authority in fields ranging from health to transportation, energy, education, justice, labor, the environment, and virtually any other “domestic” sphere imaginable. This isn’t a new idea, of course—Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University has been propounding it for a decade. But the full implications haven’t really sunk in among decision-makers in Washington, to say nothing of the wider public. At the close of the nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the disappearance of the American frontier an epochal event U.S. history. More than a hundred years later, the dissolving frontier between the domestic and the foreign will have its own transformative impact on U.S. diplomacy. This is something that John Kerry seems to understand instinctively.  “There is no longer anything foreign about foreign policy,” the secretary of state declared in Charlottesville. In a “shrinking world,” he explained, advances in national security, economic prosperity, and social welfare are increasingly linked with progress on those same objectives abroad.  Kerry used this linkage to urge Congress to invest heavily in the civilian components of its global engagement—namely, the U.S. State Department and USAID.  But to be a truly great secretary of state, Kerry must think beyond the institutional confines of is bureaucratic position. He should welcome and encourage the increased global involvement of America’s traditional domestic departments and agencies, using his position as the country’s chief diplomat to ensure the overall coherence of U.S. foreign policy. That Kerry chose to offer his first major address at “Mr. Jefferson’s University”  lent an elegant historic symmetry to his speech. Jefferson, America’s first secretary of state (1790-1793), had assumed his position “in a nation that was just getting used to its independence.” As the 68th occupant of the same office, Kerry noted, he did so “in a world that’s still getting used to our interdependence.”  

Surprising to many Americans is the importance of the United States’ trade with Mexico. While Asia captures the headlines, U.S. exports to Mexico are double those to China, and second only to Canada. And while many of these goods come from border states—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California—Mexico matters for much more of the union. Seventeen states send more than 10 percent of their exports to Mexico, and it is the number one or two destination for U.S. goods for nearly half the country. The graph below shows those states most economically dependent on our southern neighbor–notice that South Dakota and Nebraska outpace New Mexico and California. These flows are only accelerating. During the first ten months of 2012 exports heading south grew by $17 billion dollars (or 10 percent) compared to 2011, reaching a total of $181 billion. They include petroleum products (some $17 billion worth) and intermediate goods such as vehicle parts, electrical apparatuses, industrial supplies, metals, and chemicals (over $40 billion combined). Spurred on by deep supply chains, these pieces and parts move fluidly back and forth across the border (often quite a few times) before ending up as finished goods on store shelves in both countries. The uptick should be seen as a good thing. According to economic studies, these exports support some six million American jobs (directly and indirectly). But to continue this dynamism, the United States and Mexico need to improve border infrastructure and facilitate flows. This means expanding border crossings and highways, and harmonizing regulations and customs to make the process easier and faster. Prioritizing and investing in bilateral trade will provide greater opportunity and security--for U.S. companies and workers alike.

-- Moscow Having recently assumed the rotating chair of the Group of Twenty (G20), the Russian government is now soliciting input on the agenda for its September 2013 meeting in St. Petersburg. Yesterday I contributed to these deliberations as a member of the “Think20”network—a consortium of independent experts from around the world. My own advice to the Russian sherpa, Ksenia Yudaeva, was that Russia should transform the G20’s nascent development agenda to address the pressing challenge of fragile states. Development has been on the G20 agenda since the Seoul summit of November 2010. Under the South Korean chair, the group endorsed the Seoul Development Consensus, a set of principles for advancing growth in the developing world. This initiative promises unprecedented cooperation between the world’s established donors and dynamic emerging economies. What this approach ignores, however, is the changing landscape of global poverty, which is increasingly concentrated in the world’s fragile states. The Organization for Economic and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) and World Bank currently classify forty-seven countries (out of 193 UN member states) as “fragile.” These countries, which have a collective population of 1.5 billion, are a diverse bunch, ranging from Pakistan to Nigeria, Haiti to Yemen. But they all have critical deficits in institutional capacity and political legitimacy, leaving them susceptible to political instability and violent conflict. They struggle to provide their citizens with physical security, the rule of law, stable markets, and social welfare. Historically, fragile and conflict-affected states have been treated as a sideshow when it comes to advancing global development. This approach is no longer tenable. By 2015, the OECD-DAC predicts, fully half of the world’s poorest people, subsisting on less than $1.25 per day, will live in fragile states. As former World Bank President Robert Zoellick has noted, fragile states have become the hard core of the global development challenge. As a cohort, these countries are furthest from achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among other shortcomings, today’s fragile states contain more than three-quarters (77%) of all children not in primary school and account for seventy percent of global infant mortality. They contain 66% of the world’s population without access to safe water, as well as 60% of the world’s undernourished. A G20 focus on state fragility is compelling not only on development but also on humanitarian and security grounds. Fragile states are frequent settings for the world’s worst atrocities, including gross abuses that may merit invocation of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. They are also capable of undermining regional stability and generating dangerous spillovers, from terrorism to transnational crime, as I outline in my book Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security. Compared to “normal” developing countries, fragile states remain highly dependent on official development assistance (ODA), their leading source of financial flows (followed by remittances, and thirdly by foreign direct investment, or FDI). At the same time, foreign aid remains highly concentrated: in 2010, half of the $50 billion in ODA to fragile states went to just seven recipients (Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Pakistan, West Bank and Gaza, and Iraq). Such selectivity contributes to the dual phenomena of "donor darlings" and "aid orphans." Aid to fragile states is also volatile, and a large percentage is simply palliative humanitarian aid. Like aid, remittances and FDI are also highly concentrated in particular fragile states.  Some 80% of fragile state remittances go to just five countries (Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal). Likewise, three-quarters of all fragile state FDI goes to seven resource-rich countries, among them Nigeria, DRC, and Sudan. Finally, the vast majority of fragile states are marginalized from the global trading system, particularly since the onset of the global economic crisis. Traditionally, the challenge of states addressing fragility has been the purview of Western countries, in collaboration with UN agencies and the World Bank. But this needs to change, because development cooperation with fragile states is no longer a monopoly of the OECD-DAC. Not only are cash-strapped Western donors cutting back their aid budgets, but a new set of donors—including G20 members like China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey—is emerging. (Among these countries, China is in a class by itself: its aid budget grew 30% annually between 2004 and 2009). Beyond foreign assistance, emerging donors are increasingly sources of FDI and trading partners for fragile states. These trends underscore the G20’s value as a forum for harmonizing approaches to poverty alleviation in fragile states. Over the past decade, the OECD-DAC and World Bank have refined a set of Principles for Good Donor Engagement in Fragile States and Situations. Their successful implementation will depend on buy-in from new donor countries. The G20 can play a critical role in two policy realms. The first is in putting substance, political muscle, and resources behind the so-called “New Deal for Fragile States.” Agreed at the Fourth High-level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, in November 2011, this initiative recognizes that development cooperation in fragile states differs fundamentally from engagement with “normal” developing countries. Success requires that aid donors and recipients alike “do things differently”—by designing aid interventions that reflect the unique context of fragility in each state—and also “do different things”— by structuring interventions around five agreed “Peacebuilding and Statebuilding goals.” (These include fostering inclusive politics, strengthening human security, bolstering justice systems, generating employment, and ensuring transparent revenue management). Significantly, the driving force behind the New Deal for Fragile States has been a group of nineteen fragile and conflict-affected states—including Liberia, Burundi, and Timor-Leste. This is an important breakthrough. Too often, Western donors have paid lip service to the principles of “country leadership and ownership” that are critical to successful development interventions. The New Deal for Fragile States also puts fragile state governments on the hook to solicit inputs from civil society actors, in designing “one national vision and one plan out of fragility.” Some wonder whether fragile state governments can rise to the occasion. The New Deal for Fragile States assumes that the average fragile state government is weak but well intentioned. In reality, such regimes are often dominated by predatory elites indifferent to their citizens, skeptical of participatory politics, and resistant to transparent revenue management. By raising the normative bar, however, the New Deal for Fragile States may gradually change expectations about appropriate behavior by fragile states and their eligibility for ODA. For such implied conditionality to have an impact, however, all major donors—not merely traditional OECD-DAC partners—must be on the same page. The second area where the G20 can play a useful role is in identifying and ameliorating systemic forces that exacerbate institutional weaknesses within fragile stages. To date, most analysis of state fragility has focused on internal shortcomings. This overlooks that state fragility is often a function of sins of omission or commission by foreign governments, corporations, and individuals. For example, outside actors can exacerbate fragility when they: insist on abrupt economic liberalization that exacerbates social inequality; encourage a precipitous turn to electoral politics in volatile political circumstances; maintain prohibitive tariffs and other barriers that discourage imports from fragile states; cast aside concerns for good governance in resource-rich countries; sustain demand for narcotics or other illicit commodities, undermining the rule of law and licit economic sectors; provide financial safe havens where kleptocrats can stash their ill-gotten gains abroad; and engage in a lucrative trade in arms that subsequently circulate in the world’s conflict zones. Some of these dysfunctional dynamics are outlined in a useful new OECD-DAC report: Think Global, Act Global: Confronting Global Factors that Influence Conflict and Fragility. If the G20 is serious about development, it should launch a new working group to illuminate the global taproots of state fragility—and to explore potential policy responses to mitigate them. Among other items, the G20’s fragile states agenda should consider how to: coordinate strategies with UN Office on Drugs and Crime to fight transnational organized crime, which imposes staggering costs on human welfare in fragile states; bolster multilateral efforts to crack down on money laundering in (and from) fragile states, including through an expanded Financial Action Task Force (FATF); bolster the World Bank/UN Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) Initiative, which aims to track down the wealth that corrupt autocrats stash abroad; gain wider buy-in, including from emerging powers, for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), as well as the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention; grant duty-free access to a wider range of imports from fragile states; expand risk insurance and other instruments to allow commodity-dependent fragile states to hedge against fluctuating prices; assume leadership from the Group of Eight (G8) for the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), which trains peacekeepers to deploy in conflict-affected states; and, more controversially, revisit counterproductive source-control approaches to counternarcotics policies.

For more than a decade, the global conversation about development has been dominated by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established at the United Nations’ Millennium Summit of 2000, these eight objectives focused on what the international community could do to meet basic human needs in the developing world. Over the past dozen years the MDGs have been attacked on numerous grounds—for setting impossible goals (such as 100% primary school attendance), for neglecting critical requirements like good governance and strong institutions, and for placing unrealistic expectations on what foreign aid can actually accomplish. But whatever their shortcomings, the MDGs mobilized unprecedented global attention and financial resources for poverty alleviation, driving policy and budgetary decisions throughout the world’s aid agencies. Several of the MDGs have already been achieved (such as halving of absolute poverty) or are on track to be met by 2015. The global development community is now debating what should replace the MDGs when they expire in 2015. What is crystal clear is that the inherited MDG model is increasingly irrelevant to today’s development landscape: - First, the MDG approach focuses overwhelmingly on what Western donors can do to deliver development through foreign aid. This ignores growing evidence that aid often pales in comparison to foreign investment, trade liberalization, private sector promotion, and technology transfer in laying the foundations for sustained economic growth. It also overlooks the growing role being played by non-traditional aid donors, including China, India, Brazil, and the Gulf countries, and pays insufficient attention to aligning global goals and targets to the national development priorities of the poorest countries themselves. - Second, the world’s poor are not where they were when the UN establish targets for the MDGS. In 1990—the baseline date used for MDG targets—fully eighty percent of the world’s poor lived in stable, low income countries. Today, only 10 percent do, whereas nearly two-thirds (66 percent) live in middle-income countries and another quarter (24 percent) inhabit fragile or conflict-affected low-income countries. The implication? Making a dent in global poverty will require unprecedented collaboration with governments in middle-income nations, on the one hand, and new strategies to engage the world’s most conflict-ridden and dysfunctional countries, on the other. - Third, any successor to the MDGs must take a more comprehensive approach to development. As the UN team spearheading global consultations has concluded, follow-on goals must target not only inclusive economic and social development but also environmental sustainability (given short shrift in the MDGs) as well as peace and security (completely ignored by the MDGs, despite being a fundamental precondition for development). So what should replace the current MDGs? The best practical answer to date comes from the Korean Development Institute (KDI) and the Canada-based Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), which recently released a glossy report, titled Post-2015 Development Agenda: Goals, Targets and Indicators. Don’t let the soporific title fool you. This short document is an engaging, incisive and timely contribution to debates on the future development agenda. The authors’ eleven goals include: Inclusive growth for dignified livelihoods and adequate standards of living: The KDI-CIGI initiative wisely focuses on broadly shared economic growth as the sine qua non of development. Sufficient food and water for active living: This goal responds to growing concerns about water scarcity and food price volatility, as well as the need for adequate nutrition, not simply caloric intake. Appropriate education and skills for full participation in society: Whereas the MDGs focused on grade school enrollment and childhood literacy, this replacement goal encompasses secondary and tertiary education. Good health for the best possible physical, mental, and social well-being: The KDI-CIGI report wisely integrates all global health targets under one single goal. It also addresses not only infectious disease but the growing burden posed by non-communicable diseases. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of health system strengthening—as opposed to stove-piped, single disease interventions. Security for ensuring freedom from violence: Among the MDGs’ biggest lacunae was inattention to human insecurity (including war, crime, and domestic violence) as a limiting factor to development. Closing this gap is critical, particularly in engaging fragile states. Gender equality enabling men and women in society to participate and benefit equally in society: Reflecting the importance of women in the development process, the report calls for steps to advance the physical, economic, and decision making autonomy of women across societies. Resilient communities and nations through disaster risk reduction: Growing global vulnerability to natural disasters–ranging from drought to hurricanes—underlines the need for all societies to invest in preparedness and recovery systems. Quality infrastructure for universal access to energy, transportation and communication: In an age of globalization, development depends on connectivity. The authors thus include targets for increased access to energy, transportation networks, and communications technology. Empowering people to realize their civil and political rights: This proposed goal is both the most controversial and the most important. While authoritarian regimes may bluster, long-term development requires that people participate in the political process, possess civil rights, have access to rule of law, and can hold their governments accountable. Sustainable management of the biosphere, enabling people and the planet to thrive together: Building on the Rio+20 conference, the authors propose steps to break from “business as usual”, including putting a price on the ecological costs of economic activity. Global governance and equitable rules for realizing human potential: Finally, the report proposes sweeping reform of international institutions to advance development globally. This potential agenda is so massive and complex that the authors might wish to limit themselves to an even ten goals or focus on specific shortcomings in the global economy that represent enormous barriers to development. One of the report’s most distinctive—and perhaps controversial—recommendations is that progress toward these goals be measured in all countries, including advanced market democracies. While one can imagine outcries from some sovereignty-minded conservatives about being “judged” by the international community, there is no reason the United States should not voluntarily embrace, domestically, a set of universal, non-binding goals for human betterment broadly consistent with its own political and economic ideals—as well as the development agenda it has long pursued abroad. After all, as philosopher Amartya Sen has written, the most compelling definition for development is “freedom.”