Marking a Decade: The UN Sustainable Development Goals in Review

Panelists discuss the progress made toward achieving the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the prospects for advancing the global agenda on poverty reduction, climate action, health, and inclusive economic growth by 2030.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. We are here today to mark a decade of Sustainable Development Goals, to take stock honestly, and to ask what it will take to accelerate progress on the road to 2030 and beyond.

There are seventeen goals and 169 targets, but don’t worry, we’re not covering all 169 today. That would take us, probably, to 2030. But our arc today will move from taking progress—stock of the progress; of thinking about some of the gaps, governance questions, and legitimacy questions; thinking through financing the partnerships that accelerate the SDG vision; and looking ahead.

And I’m delighted to be here. I’m Sundaa Bridgett-Jones. I’m an advisor to the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. I helped to found that platform to accelerate renewable energy across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

And we’re joined by three distinguished panelists.

George Biddle, to my right, chairman of World Connect, a nonprofit organization investing in Global South local leaders. And he’s also held senior roles at the International Rescue Committee and the International Crisis Group.

Also, we have Ambassador Isobel Coleman here, former deputy administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She was also previously ambassador at the U.N. for management reform. And must be home for her coming back to the Council because she was a senior fellow here for more than a decade.

And virtually, we have our colleague Anthony Pipa down in D.C., who is senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. He led the U.S. delegation, actually, at the—at the U.N. to negotiate and to adopt SDGs as the special coordinator for the post-2015 agenda at the State Department.

Thank you all for being here and for this discussion.

Tony, I’ll start with you to get you in the room, to set the scene for us. And maybe tell us what you think about how are we—how are we doing? What progress has been made thus far with SDGs? What is your assessment of where we are with this framework?

PIPA: Well, thank you, Sundaa. And thank you to George and Isobel as well. Really glad to join this conversation. Sorry I’m not there in person, but I appreciate the opportunity to be able to engage in that.

And I think I would just start off by saying, you know, I think the SDGs as a political enterprise—a political multilateral enterprise—has had mixed success thus far. What do I mean by that? Well, the SDGs themselves were a(n) agreement—a voluntary agreement amongst the member states at the U.N. for countries themselves to make progress on development, to your point, on many different dimensions, with seventeen different goals. They were universal, so countries were meant to both achieve the goals—you know, work on achieving the goals inside their own country and then work in solidarity together so that all countries of the world would be able to achieve the goals as well.

We can look at specific goals and say, well, we’ve made—we’ve made some progress here or we’ve done a lot of backsliding there. I think—and maybe we can get into that conversation a little later on. But I guess I would say is that I think as a political—as a political commitment it’s been very inconsistent the extent to which countries have taken those commitments seriously to be able to achieve the goals internally and in solidarity.

And even in the United States, as a country we’ve never, for example, done a voluntary—a voluntary national review at the U.N. outlining what we think our progress has been as a country. And in the political environment that we’re in right now, especially geopolitically, we’ve seen a lot of movement coming out of COVID and just given the kinds of national or international politics that we’re experiencing a lot more focus on countries individually seeking to make sure that they’re OK. And that sort of breaks the bonds of solidarity to make sure everyone else is being supported as well in their own progress. We’ve seen the U.S.—example—pull great—pull back significantly even over the last six to nine months in its own global leadership and its own investments otherwise. So, as a project amongst the member states, I think there’s been really inconsistency around the commitment and around the solidarity commitment to be able to drive global development and sustainability forward.

Having said that, I think the SDGs have had a lot of—have had a lot of influence on nonstate actors and even at other levels of governance. We’ve seen a large movement of local governments—of cities, provincial governments, and others—that have even adapted the SDGs, which were set at the national and global level in terms of metrics and what the aspirations were—adapt them to their own reality and see them as a policy framework for their own progress. We’ve seen—we’ve seen, you know, fairly wide-scale adoption in the global corporate community as well. And those actors were not really at the table making the decision to commit to the SDGs, and yet they’ve seen the Sustainable Development Goals as a really important way to be thinking about what social, economic, and cultural progress can look like all together and the interdependencies amongst them.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Thanks, Tony, for that.

I note your point on mixed reviews as a political enterprise. The U.N. report for 2025 for SDGs has, I think, 35 percent of the SDGs making progress or et cetera, and I think that’s a questionable statistic for us. And I wanted to get Isobel to come in to offer some views on where do you think we are if you outline your thoughts on the SDGs as a—as a credible development framework for us in the world.

COLEMAN: Well, thank you, Sundaa. And it’s great to be here with Tony and with George, and to be back at the Council.

You know, I agree very much with Tony that the SDGs were a very valuable framework for getting a variety of different actors onboard and bringing new actors in to push in concerted action against a set of goals. And it’s a useful framework in that it really covers, you know, all the bases, pretty much, of what it will take to reduce inequality and create a better life for people in the world. It’s got the basics in there, you know: zero hunger, and education, and health care, and rights; I mean, a whole set of goals and subpoints beneath.

But I think it’s clear that the political will that came together with member states at the U.N. to actually agree to that set of goals has deeply frayed. And you know, I can’t even imagine now in 2030 bringing the world back together again to do something like that. It was hard when it happened. Tony’s great leadership from the U.S. helped get us over the finish line, but—although we didn’t quite fully get over the finish line, did we? (Laughs.) I think we’re one of three countries who never actually submitted a national commitment plan, alongside Haiti and Myanmar. So this is—you know, this is complicated politics that go back a long time.

But when you look at it, it is a useful framework but underneath it, you know, you see when you—when you—when we evaluated the MDGs—the Millennial Development Goals that ran from 2020—2000 to 2015—you know, it was a mixed picture of how helpful those goals were in the progress that had been made. And when you pulled out China from the picture, you know, it was even more muddled. And China during that period, 2000 to 2015, lifted 600 million people out of poverty. And today, in this period—this decade we’ve had—India has driven a lot of the global gains; 250 million people brought out of poverty. But when you look at countries that have done well against—you know, making progress against the SDGs, the top performers have overwhelmingly been in Asia and they’re really just delivering on the basics for their people. So are they doing it because of the SDGs, or are they doing it because they’re just trying to deliver basic goods and services for their people—education, health care, food security, these things?

And you know, I think that when you look beyond that at the countries that are lagging and the ones that are at the bottom, it’s no surprise that these are for the most part counties with very poor, weak governance, and they’re conflict-affected. In fact, 80 percent of USAID’s funding went to conflict-affected countries.

So you’re seeing this framework. It is a useful guiding principle and set of goals, and it is bringing in new actors. And countries that are functioning pretty well are moving forward in uneven ways but against these, and there’s a whole lot of countries that are actually falling backwards and doing even worse than anyone had really expected at this stage against that set of goals.

And then, frankly, even inside rich countries, you know, we’ve had—we’ve had wars and we’ve had COVID, and that has dramatically set back even wealthy countries and certainly middle-income countries in terms of some key metrics like education. And the learning poverty—you know, the percent of kids who can’t read and write at a basic level at the age of ten—prior to COVID was 57 percent in low- and middle-income countries. It’s a staggering figure. But today it’s over 70 percent. So, you know, we’ve really seen backsliding in some very important areas.

BRIDGETT-JONES: And indeed, George, I want to bring you in here because you have worked across the humanitarian sector for quite some time and I’m wondering what you’re seeing. How does this play out in those kinds of contexts that Isobel just talked about, not only the pandemic but also the conflicts that we have been plagued with for quite some time, the voices in those countries that are not showing up in the data on SDGs?

BIDDLE: Sure.

BRIDGETT-JONES: If you could share, how do you assess where we are?

BIDDLE: Well, I’ll speak from the practitioner approach and I’ll build off a little bit what Isobel said. When you look at the combination of the MDGs and the SDGs as a motivating force, we saw about a 50 percent drop in global poverty over the last thirty years. But it is very uneven depending upon where you look; and China and India, of course, count for a lot.

But I want to first put on a development hat and then a humanitarian hat. I think one of the things—and I want to shout out to Isobel and her colleague and former boss Samantha Power at USAID for being prescient in trying to move USAID towards a more locally-driven donor agency approach, one of the few in the world that did it. I think there is a consensus in the development community that when you go to local solutions you drive sustainable change. And I think the challenge that has happened is that you don’t see the donor community willing to take the risks that are necessary to make those changes.

We did a study at World Connect, the organization I chair in conjunction with Duke University and Lilongwe University of Agriculture, in rural marginalized communities in Malawi to ask local residents, community members, how they felt about owning and driving their own development. They said: We want it. We know we can do it. We have the capacity to do it. We don’t want to be pushed off by the North. We want partnership, but we don’t want to be told how to do it. We don’t want to be told how to design it, implement it, or necessarily even evaluate it, but we want partnership in that process. And that is what I believe the future is for development.

The challenge with that is, is that I think those that have driven large tranches of money through the system—ODA, official development assistance—across the world see that as risky. They don’t believe the capacity exists. Our philosophy is that capacity exists everywhere; you just have to identify it and support it. You don’t always have to build it. And if that philosophical change happens, when people own even at a grassroots micro level the projects that they’re running, it develops a mindset change, a sense of confidence, and the ability to drive change in quite marginalized areas of the world, which will lift poverty overall.

From the standpoint of a humanitarian—and I worked at the IRC, and I see my colleague Gillian Sorensen and Lucile Herbert in the audience—the fact is, is that when you look at that change of 50 percent of people coming out of poverty across the world there’s an 83 percent decline in the most fragile and conflict-affected countries around the world during that same period. So when you look at the impact on the SDGs of countries like Nigeria, Sudan, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo it drives the ability to address those SDGs effectively way down. And there is still—and this has been an ongoing issue that goes back to the Brookings process in the ’90s when Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner, and Jim Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank, tried to bring development and humanitarian actors together to look at conflict situations more holistically, because the dividing line between humanitarian and development issues are really not as great as they may seem. And we can’t look at just citizens of countries. We have to look at who’s in a country, and how to help them, and how to survive.

And, by the way, the last point I would add is there’s a self-interest in that that people don’t talk about, which is if you care about stemming global migration or extremism or curtailing potential pandemics, by doing the right thing you’re also doing yourself and the global community good. So those are some of the—some of the points that I wanted to add, from the sort of a practitioner’s perspective.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Thank you for that. I mean, these are—this is really—it suggests that we’re in a global development emergency at this time. And Adam Tooze’s Foreign Policy article—I hope we can speak to that here at the Council—he notes that the age of political neutral, universally endorsed development agenda is over. He also posits that it’s the end of development. And I’m wondering if I can come back to you, Tony, and share with us where you believe we could have optimism in perhaps rebuilding the trust to be able to scale potential solutions moving forward. If you could speak to whether you indeed believe that this is the end of development, and how we can begin to make a pivot. Particularly in these last five years before we hit 2030.

PIPA: Yeah. I don’t know whether it’s the end of—countries are going to develop and communities are going to develop, right? That’s part of—just part of the DNA, I think, of social groupings and social societies. It may be the end of what we’ve known as foreign assistance trying to support development, or a way of doing that. I think, to George’s point, one of the places I see actually a lot of optimism is in the recognition of the capabilities and of directing investments to be locally owned, locally driven, and locally led. And I do think, even in the midst of what we’re talking about as a global enterprise, the SDGs are seeing big success. I do think one of the bright spots is at the local level, seeing that development take place, seeing that leadership look for investments.

And they actually are, in some respects, using the SDGs to align against, or even measure progress. Not seeing it as a top-down, you know, sort of multilaterally agreed something that they ought to do. But, to Isobel’s point, as they start to look at the things that are really important for their communities—whether it be from health, and education, and job creation, seeing those all reflected in that particular framework and finding it useful to think about the interdependencies amongst them, and how to measure progress on them. So that is one place I see some optimism.

And I also see optimism in the types of initiatives that, Sundaa, you yourself are working with, where you actually do have coalitions of the willing come together at global scale—they may be governments in partnership with private sector, private investors, private organizations, businesses, and philanthropy, and NGOs—towards a particular set of objectives that they feel like they all have interests in advancing, and can work together to align their own work and, as a group, be stronger than just a set of individual parts. And I think the SDGs have also provided a platform for that in many different areas as well.

So while those investments might need—might want to look different, and we might be changing the way in which we think impact happens through those kinds of investments, and indeed, maybe some of the traditional ways in which we’ve actually made our foreign assistance available, I would hope that we would actually continue to see value in societies outside of our own developing. It will be good for us in terms of trade. It will be good for us in terms of economy. It’ll be good for us in terms of security. And that will continue to actually work together with countries or with communities, even beyond—you know, lower than the level of the country, to be able to achieve that.

And I do think the SDG still has some purchase around that. I mean, sort of aligning against a set of objectives and also agreeing on what the measurement looks like, to understand whether we’re making progress or not. And to be—continue to be evidence-based. I think there’s still some appetite for that, especially amongst coalitions of the willing. I think where it gets dicey is then to include everybody in that, and see that as a commitment we’re all holding each other, as member states, and a whole other set of actors accountable to making progress on. That, I think—to Isobel’s point—I think the way she called it, “deeply frayed,” was exactly right. Like, I think that’s a good way to characterize that.

BRIDGETT-JONES: And, Isobel, I’m wondering, in this coalition of the willing, when one of the largest partners decides to categorically reject a framework like this, where does that leave everyone else? If you can speak to that. Tony talked a lot about philanthropy and others. I think there are many who are looking to philanthropy that fill the gaps. We are hearing from philanthropy that they aren’t able to do that. I don’t think any, you know, high net worth individuals or others will be able to fill that gap. So where does that leave us, in terms of being supportive of what you were just saying, the very vision of, you know, people not being left behind, having basic health care, those kinds of things?

COLEMAN: It leads us—it leaves us in a very difficult place. Because, you’re absolutely right, there’s no secret pot of money out there that’s going to fill the gaps. The U.S. was by far the largest bilateral donor. And it’s a great big sucking sound that has happened in the sector. And you’re seeing really such a massive contraction that is still at the relatively early stages. You know, there are going to be waves of this contraction. And you’re losing human resources out of the sector, and losing expertise that will be—even if money comes back in, it would be very difficult to recreate the infrastructure.

But I think it leaves us in a place where you just have to do more with less. And Tony and George have both mentioned localization. I mean, the theory of localization is that it should remove that middleman that was very costly. And I don’t think anyone is really going to mourn, over the long-term, the lack of the—loss of the, you know, industrial development complex. But there’s a lot of resources that went to perpetuating that, and in not the most efficient way. So being able to target local organizations with—directly with resources. I mean, you know, I used to be a leader at GiveDirectly. And the results are really astounding when you can give the ultra-poor direct cash grants, and what they can do with that. And the efficiency of that.

And at USAID—you know, the irony of shutting down USAID at this particular moment is it occurred at a point in time when finally USAID had the tools to really look at cost effectiveness. I’m looking at my colleague, Dean Karlan, who I had the honor of bringing on board at USAID to really help drive cost effectiveness, from an economic perspective, a rigor perspective, using randomized control trials. And not enough to say, OK, we’re going to put money into education or into health but knowing exactly what types of interventions will deliver the biggest bang for the buck, the biggest return. And I think combining localization with that type of cost-effective rigor is a way that we can really make some dents in closing the gaps. We have to.

And then, you know, sadly, I think there are going to be countries that will get left behind even more so, because of their own structural problems. You know, the lack of good governance that we’re talking about. And, you know, it’s really difficult. And I can say this, having spent years at USAID trying to stabilize or turn around some of these countries. It’s really, really difficult to do it when there are no institutions, there’s no accountability, no transparency, you know, real just rampant corruption. It’s really, really hard to do it, let alone—at all, let alone in a cost-effective way. And so hard choices will be made.

And I think you’ll see countries getting their act together, abiding by a framework that really looks like the SDGs, or whatever. You know, this—even if nothing comes after that, the set of goals are, I think, long lived. And working in a concerted way to deliver for their people. And there are going to be other countries that get further and further behind.

BRIDGETT-JONES: You know, Elinor Ostrom, I think, who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, if I’m not mistaken, on economics, was someone I always, you know, admired, because she very much focused on this point around localization, and community development, and investment in people. And I’m wondering if—George, if you can share more, offer us a bit of optimism of where you’re seeing this done well, perhaps, in the work that you’re doing. And give us a sense of what does that mean, in terms of scaling, to be able to actually have a tipping point across the progress?

BIDDLE: Well, two points. I wanted to just piggyback on one thing Isobel said. In addition to the evisceration of USAID and its foreign—expanded foreign budget of $70 billion, the European allies of the United States have been cutting back dramatically as well. Partially due to the new expenditures on defense spending and partly due to the lack of leadership by the U.S. So you’re not just seeing the U.S. pull back. You’re seeing other major donors at the same time.

So the impact of this, especially in humanitarian settings, is profound. What is happening in Sudan, by the way, is the worst humanitarian crisis on record, since they’ve been keeping records practically. The numbers of displaced, the numbers of humanitarian—in humanitarian needs are in the tens of millions. It’s just insane. The genocide is occurring in Darfur again. It is a—it is a tragedy of just immense proportions. So just on the funding side, that is a little—the dark side.

The more positive side, and as both Isobel and Tony said, is that there are great studies that not only—you know it commonsensically—but by giving locally, it’s a higher return on investment, greater value for money. Very interesting study done by Refugees International and Share Trust on what would happen if you gave money traditionally, the way it’s been done more historically in the development context, or directly to local partners. It was mainly focused on Ukraine and Nigeria. It saw an absolute savings of close to 20 percent, but probably closer to 30 when you extrapolate out more evidence. So that’s just from an actual detailed study on that.

What we see from what we do is we give quite small—I’m just going to give a small anecdote, but we see this across our work. That when you give small amounts of money to local actors in a community that are supported by that community, the change that can occur is much greater than the amount of money invested. And part of that is because the community gets behind it and the outcomes, therefore, are not just immediate but they are reverberating. We call it the virtuous cycle of development, in that you see confidence grow in a community. And they don’t just stop with one project, but they continue on.

I give one little vignette of a gentleman in Zambia. He was an AIDS orphan. Both his parents had died of AIDS. He ended up getting a degree at the agronomy school in Lusaka. He returned to his hamlet of around 400 people right on the border with Malawi. He’d been requesting $750 from a variety of different agencies. No one ever gave him money. Somehow he found World Connect. We gave him $750 so that he could plant a different banana variety in his village, the Williams banana, which he knew could be cultivated in half the time and sold at twice the price. He got most of the families in his hamlet to agree to plant those with him.

And I visited that community two and a half years after that. That was in 2018. And they had—the income in that community alone had gone up three times. They were selling the bananas down at the safari parks nearby, a couple hundred miles down the road. But also, it creates a momentum. His name was Paul Phiri. He was recognized in that community. He started to advise other local farmers. And he ended up being elected president of 180,000-farmer cooperative across that stretch of Malawi. And he’s now lending that kind of innovation and skill base. And he was a local leader who was not necessarily someone that would normally be found.

So I think we have to trust in the fact that small investments can have big outcomes, and not always thinking of one solution fits all, and that one model is scalable globally. There was a book written in the ’70s by Schumacher called Small is Beautiful. And I think we have to go back to that philosophy a little bit. It doesn’t mean that large-scale electrification or industrialization programs aren’t vital to address development, but if you’re really going to reach the most marginalized you have to get down and think at a smaller level. And the blossoming effect of that can be quite profound, and quite scalable.

COLEMAN: Can I just—

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yes, please.

COLEMAN: Can I just add a point? George, you used the word “trust.” And another feature, I think, of foreign assistance that will not be mourned is the excessive, highly expensive over-accountability that was imposed on every single dollar. And it led to just an incredibly expensive system—a system of monitoring, system of tracking, system of just over-reporting in every single way, that precluded local organizations from even participating in it because it was so onerous and so burdensome. One of the ways that we tried to direct more money to local organizations was by streamlining and scaling back on some of that. But there’s just a level of, you know, that really excessive accountability that—there’s an element ultimately—you’re going to say, well, we’re spending 20 percent of every dollar on this accountability. What if we trust? Trust that we’re not—(laughs)—we’re not going to lose more than 20 percent? You know, and in a way—

BIDDLE: Hear, hear.

COLEMAN: It can work out for the better.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yeah, Tony, I see you might want to jump in, and please do before we offer our colleagues an opportunity to ask questions.

PIPA: Yeah. Yeah, and I’m glad Isobel brought that up, because I think related to that excessive accountability was actually a great deal of conditionality. And so I think this is another opportunity of where—you know, where the traditional norms of development and how we’ve done foreign assistance have been broken offers an opportunity. I think one of the really important dimensions that we haven’t sort of referred to, of the localization agenda that Isobel and Ambassador Power were leading at USAID, was not just getting more money directly to those local actors but was also ensuring that they were determinant of what the priorities were for that money.

And this offers us an opportunity actually for there to be less, this is what we want from you, to, what is it that you want and what can we provide for what you feel like you need to develop? For a certain set of countries, I think that’s going to be far more palatable and more of a partnership. Now, it’s very difficult, I think, to the set of countries that we were talking about from a humanitarian perspective and that are sort of in fragile states and their governance is weak. But for a set of countries, I think we have a real opportunity, as we remake what development might look like going forward, to put those countries more in the driver’s seat than us just putting a lot of conditionality onto what it is we’re asking of them. Because I think that’s part of where that excessive accountability comes from as well.

BRIDGETT-JONES: We are certainly in a moment of going back to the whiteboard on what a new global development agenda might look like. This is a great time for our colleagues here to ask questions that you might have. Please state your name and affiliation when you do so. And I wanted to remind you that we are on the record as well. I see my good friend Earl.

Q: Earl Carr, representing CJPA Global Advisors. Great to see you, Sundaa. And thanks for moderating such a fascinating event.

So my mother worked at the U.N. for her entire professional career. My dad represented Jamaica at the U.N. Security Council as a rotating member. So this is a very dear topic to me. Working in the private sector, how do we—when you talk about SDG number seventeen, public-private partnerships—how do we redefine how public-private partnerships can work more effectively in the U.N.? You talked about the donor fatigue and how donors can and should step up more, but you also talked about trust. How can institutions, companies trust local partners on the ground when they don’t know those partners on the ground?

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yeah. Who would like to take that? Isobel?

COLEMAN: I’m happy. Thanks, Earl. And nice to see you. Thanks for the question.

I think the way that it has worked best is there’s a level of coordination that can happen. And I think American companies perhaps more so than in other countries, they really don’t even know how to begin to navigate the U.S. government. They don’t know where to go and how to access it. I mean, I’ve been advising some companies recently. And it’s a little shocking to me when they’ve hit a wall in a country and they don’t know how to break through. And I say, well, what have you done? And when they tell me what they’ve done, they’ve done—you know, they haven’t picked up the phone and, like, called the embassy, and talked to the—you know, gotten through to anybody in the U.S. government to help them. And we, diplomats—you know, we have a whole commercial section in our embassies and consular, you know, help—are there, in no small part, to help American companies.

And finding those—that’s on the commercial side. But on the—you know, on a more philanthropic side, likewise, working together with our diplomats and, you know, frankly, even back when USAID existed, you know, we were part of that diplomatic community. But there’s still diplomats on the ground to help connect with local leaders who are, in some ways, trusted, vetted. You know, it really gives a way forward in terms of partnership. And, you know, having agreements where you could just create a framework for how you would work together, I think, is really important, so that you have shared objectives and shared outcomes that can be measurable. And we’ve seen public-private partnerships be very successful following a model like that. I think where it goes wrong is when there’s a lack of clarity and a lack of shared understanding about what you’re trying to accomplish.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Also, an expectation of public capital being used to reduce risk.

COLEMAN: Yeah.

BRIDGETT-JONES: And I think that’s been a real—I’m not—that’s a mixed—that’s a mixed bag as well, just thinking about blended finance mechanisms or other things that have come up where there have been expectations on the part of private sector, et cetera, that philanthropy or others would come in to reduce risk.

COLEMAN: It’s been a mixed bag, but we’ve also seen a lot of successes too with blended finance, and using public money—I mean, USAID was using some public money to help buy down risk and really leverage whatever types of investments were being made with private money. And I think there are cases of, you know, enormous success on that front.

BRIDGETT-JONES: George.

BIDDLE: I was just going to say you made me think of the Development Finance Corporation, previously OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, that did enormous good in ensuring, primarily, obviously American businesses investing in the developing world against everything from currency devaluation, political risk, and those kinds of things. Hugely effective for a long period of time. I don’t know where it stands right now in the current political context, but that’s a great U.S. government mechanism.

I was just going to say, at the micro level the way, as a small co-investor with grassroots projects, World Connect works, we require a 20 percent co-investment by the community with us. So if you just expand that out, that creates accountability. It creates ownership. We have almost no malfeasance or theft in any of our projects because the communities are in it. So if you just ratchet that up to a higher level where you’ve got governments and private sector working together, in theory that can work.

Now, you know, Isobel has pointed that governments are much more complex beings than local communities. But in theory, that philosophical framework of being partners, and not one superior to the other, and coming in on an equal basis, not from a top-down, creates a partnership that allows for greater accountability and a more positive mutual outcome. But that’s just from a philosophical standpoint that works at that grassroots level.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Great. Terrific. I have a question here in the front.

Q: Hi. Thanks for the question. My name is Alexis Husby. I’m with Lazard.

So I wanted to go back to something Tony said at the beginning about corporates also starting to use the Sustainable Development Goals, despite them not being in the room when they were originally created. So I work on the public investment side analyzing stocks. So a lot of the stocks that I analyze have adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of their reporting framework, my sense is probably because we do lack some sort of global, agreed-upon norms that they can measure themselves against. Obviously, they were not created with the intent of being used for investment purposes. So I have seen some attempts to dedicate capital towards the Sustainable Development Goals in the public markets with, we’ll say, mixed success, probably similar to the goals themselves. So my question for you is, where have you seen elements of success and failure when it comes to public companies and investors? And if you were to redesign, or maybe not even redesign just go forward for the next five years to 2030, what would you adjust about the process of incorporating those goals? Thanks.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Tony. (Laughter.) You were at the table and you’ve been working a lot at the city, local level with companies, amongst others.

PIPA: Yeah. So I think—I think the question is exactly a right question. And I do think that the reason why companies and others started to look to the SDGs is at least it was globally agreed. Like we—all of a sudden we’ve got a globally agreed framework. we should be pulling from that. But it is a little bit of a, you know, square peg in a round hole, right? Those aren’t necessarily easily transferable, right, to corporations. And there’s been both some very complicated endeavors to try to take all the different indicators, the 269 indicators that you talked about, Sundaa, and try to create, you know, sort of a toolkit by which companies could report on those, and then use them to align investments.

I know, for example, like CalPERS, the California pension company, was actually, you know, measuring against the SDGs, rather than, I think, trying to drive investment by using the indicators of the SDGs. But I think what I would—what I would change, actually, going forward—and if we were to do a process in 2030—I don’t know that it—you know, it would be very complicated within the U.N. structure to have all of those other constituencies at the table—at the decision-making table. But could we actually think through, like, how they are applied to different audiences or useful to different audiences, and actually have some really focused conversation amongst those constituencies?

That would be quite helpful, right, because it’s sort of different parts of the investment community, or the different parts of the global corporate community, trying to think about, well, these are globally agreed. How do we apply them to us specifically as a company, how do we apply them to our investments? Rather than continuing to, you know, sort of have the—an ongoing global conversation. And there are different, you know, common conversations around that. But I think it does make it difficult. And, you know, maybe that is a place where, for example, artificial intelligence can help us sort of do that translation. It would be interesting to actually start to try to apply some of the tools that we have to see how they line up in terms of the substantive reporting that corporations have to do, and also what it might mean for de-risking their investments.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yes.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much. I actually have a follow-on question on this topic. My name is Amina Tirana. I’m currently a professor at New York University.

Measurement has—I’ve worked on measurement my whole life, from MDGs, to setting corporate impact goals for visa, and now teaching measurement. And the question is, going forward, even though it’s 2025, 2030 is just around the corner. What comes next? Should anything come next? Thank you.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Let’s start with you, George, and then—(laughter).

BIDDLE: Well, I mean, I think we’ve talked about the political challenges that face the SDGs, especially in the current global context. You can look at that as just saying that the process of bringing countries and local actors, everyone together is maybe not as feasible as it once was. I think you have to look at who’s in the room to make those targets and set those goals. And I think if we can get to a place where a larger set of voices are in the room, rather than just national governments and their representatives, but in fact indigenous, women leaders, a cross section of the populations that are affected by the willingness of the global community writ large. And, by the way, it’s incumbent on each country. It’s not just the Sustainable Development Goals for the Global North to support the Global South. It is a collective effort.

So as an example, you know, we at World Connect recognize there’s poverty here in New York City. We have a grants program, co-investment program in New York City, in the most underserved communities here. We recognize you have to have voices from across the spectrum in any given situation. So what I would advocate for is if you’re going to come to 2030, see what progress was or wasn’t achieved, and try and extend it, that you look at it from a fresh perspective and make sure that the individuals that are going to be most affected globally by whether those goals are met are leading the efforts to set what the next targets would be, and maybe how it is undertaken as well. Meaning, the processes that might change as well.

BRIDGETT-JONES: I mean, just to continue with Amina’s question, I’m wondering, Isobel, if you think that even having such a framework like that is still relevant for moving forward?

COLEMAN: Yeah, I think it’s still relevant. I mean, you know, there are going to be countries and actors that ignore it, but there’s going to be others that are motivated by it. And I think if we lived in a world where 2015 had rolled around and we said, OK, well, we can’t agree on anything so let’s just keep the MDGs, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world but it would have been a huge lost opportunity too because the MDGs were not as robust as the SDGs. I mean, it didn’t include the focus on gender, for example. Tt was seen as, like, a bridge too far in 2000 to try to get some of those points included.

But I think you have a very robust framework in place. And if 2030 rolls around and, you know, we can agree on a new set of goals and/or metrics, I think continuing to look at what we have with the SDGs and push against those and continue to iterate on how we’re measuring. You know, the—really, the quality of looking at the gains, I think, is very important to disaggregate, you know, within countries, across countries. And to be very clear-eyed on where we are making progress, and where we’re not. Just as a forcing mechanism, a focusing mechanism too for all the different actors in the field, to be able to say, wow, I’m trying to decide where to put some resources. And, you know, I think this is better over here than that, because of that.

BRIDGETT-JONES: George, then Tony wants to come in.

BIDDLE: Yeah, just one—yeah, one group I just forgot to leave out in my comments were the globally displaced. There are 123 million people forcefully displaced around the world. That’s one in every sixty-seven people on the planet. You have to have those folks in the room too, because they also are part of the major reason that the Sustainable Development Goals are so lopsided in terms of the countries where they are having the most positive benefit—most positive outcomes versus the least. Sorry. I just wanted to throw that in.

COLEMAN: And I would just toss it to Tony and ask, you know, when the SDGs were being negotiated was there something left on the table that you wish had been included, as we think about what comes next?

PIPA: So I would say, exactly to George’s point, I feel like we really—we kind of avoided immigration and migration, and the movement of peoples. We treated it very lightly, and because politically it was just already starting to be very difficult. And I think we didn’t—we didn’t sort of meet those politics head-on at the time. I would also say that technology—you know, artificial intelligence and what that might mean, both in terms of opportunity as well as potential negative impacts, would be something that you’d want to take a look at.

And I would actually, you know, interestingly, and in the intervening 10 years as I’ve been both in local communities as well as in different countries, I think culture, in some respects, plays a really—I mean, the way in which George was even talking about how it works at the local level for communities and societies to sort of self-determine their own development, culture is a part of that. And to the extent to which the SDGs could have said something about that and how important it was, and the respect for that, I think would have been important.

To the question, though, you know, what comes after 2030, look, we—the SDGs, as a political enterprise, may have not been the political catalyst or even the bulwark that we would have hoped against, you know, all these geopolitical shifts and things that we’ve been experiencing. But the honest truth is, like, everything that they represent is still—it actually reflects everything that we still need to make progress on, right? So, if not having it exactly as the SDGs, we’re going to want to do something to say these are the things that we still need to work on, both individually as countries and together as a set of countries across the globe.

And I really agree with George in that, you know, I used to say, look—and my colleague John McArthur, we used to be fond of saying, look, you know, the SDGs are not what the U.N. told countries to do. It’s what, sort of, the peoples of the world and their constituencies told us not to forget. And I really think that with any intervening process that goes forward we do want the local voice to be more a part of the process. We want the people who ought to be the ones affected and benefiting from what progress looks like on the SDGs to be a bigger part of that conversation in some shape or form.

And I think even the SDGs lay out such a large, comprehensive framework, but it’s really a whole-of-society approach, not just a national government approach. And somehow, we need those voices to be part of any kind of process that might come after as well. Now I’m just upping—you know, these are all pie in the sky. And I’m just upping the level of difficulty for what it might look like. But I think the bottom line is, look, these issues aren’t going away. They’re only getting more complex and more complicated. And so we’re going to have to still grapple with them as a global community in some way. Whether they’re called the SDGs at 2030, post-2030 or not, we’re going to need to keep working together on them.

BRIDGETT-JONES: And also how we pay for them, because we know now that there’s this $4 trillion financing gap. We know that OECD has told us that ODA is decreasing. We’re not seeing those kinds of development budgets coming. Things are going to national security. So I think part of that question is, well, who is going to help to fill that gap? And how do we think about that in the next framework? But there are a few other questions. Yes.

Q: Thank you. Joshua Walker from Japan Society.

You’ll not be surprised that I’ll ask you a question related to Japan. But the point here, just on a light note, is the badge for SDGs have become so ubiquitous in Japan that many people think that it represents the Japanese business community because every business leader wears them. And thinking about the contrast between here and New York, on such a day like today where it’s easy to be pessimistic. A week from now we host the U.N. No one knows what that’s going to look like. India and Brazil are in big fights with our administration. You talked about the importance of, kind of, moving forward with development. What gives you optimism?

You talked about Asia being a place where you see a lot of hope there. If America is not going to be the traditional leader—I mean, I had a delegation from Japan a couple weeks ago and they point blank asked the State Department, how did you—why did you eliminate USAID? And you can imagine what our colleagues were saying, kind of the politicals and the others. So as America goes through what we’re going through, what’s the room for optimism there? And then how can we, as Americans who believe in some form of development for the future and not just navel gazing and internal side, how can we be optimistic?

COLEMAN: Mmm hmm. Well, you know, it’s interesting. There’s so many people around the world who think so fondly of USAID, probably more so than in this country. JICA, which is the Japanese Development Agency, was in part helped set up by USAID. And we worked very closely with JICA. And JICA and USAID were working hand in hand on a number of very, very strategic initiatives of really trying to counter some of the more predatory practices of China, particularly in Africa and in Asia. And, you know, I’m sure that countries around the world are thinking, wow, we’re on our own now, in some ways. That they felt that they were in partnership with a big brother and now they’re on their own. So I think my hope, anyway, is that you’ll see more coordination among the willing, who remain.

And they’re also—you know, I mean, I spent a couple hours this morning virtually with colleagues at the EU. I mean, everybody’s—despite their own constrained budgets, they’re all asking the same question: How do we do more with less? The team that we set up at USAID on cost effectiveness—I mean, Dean is here, but there’s—there were a number of economists working with him. And other governments have sort of taken that work and are really trying to drive it forward and distill the learnings of that, and take it to the next level still. Because, as I said earlier, I think the only way forward is to do more with less.

And there are ways to do that. You know, we’ve talked about local initiatives that can be more streamlined, but also, you know, really looking at the data of what works. And I hope one of the things that comes in the next iteration, whatever that looks like, is, you know, the goals are the goals. But now it’s really focusing in on the how. How are we going to do this? And we do have more rigorous evidence of what works, what works to deliver better health outcomes, what works to deliver better governance in ways, and what works to deliver food security, nutrition, educational outcomes. All of these things, we’re—my predecessors at USAID were a little bit shooting in the dark. They really didn’t know, because they didn’t have randomized controlled trials to say, well, you know, this money actually delivered this much good versus that amount of money.

And I think you’ll see JICA and other organizations around the world, I hope, take on, you know, some more innovation and leadership. But the worry I have, of course, is that the amount of time that I spent doing diplomacy to get our coalition of the willing to step up, and continue to step up, was significant. That is gone. So this is going to have to be truly self-motivated out of self-interest on these—on the part of these other countries. And the Japanese have self-interest.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yeah. Tony, I see a couple of other hands. I’d like to just get their questions in, if we could. Our gentleman with the red tie right in front of you. Yes, right in front of you. Yes. Right in front of—

Q: (Off mic.)

Q: Has a blue tie, oh. (Laughter.) He has the red tie.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yes.

Q: I have a blue one.

Hi. I’m Jeff Laurenti, now with New Jersey’s Capital City Redevelopment Corporation.

Tony a moment ago had referred to pie in the sky. And I wonder if we might get, in our concluding minutes, some very concrete examples of where the pie in the sky SDGs that are yapped about in New York have actually entered into the consciousness of government ministries in particularly developing countries, but also the development aid agencies of donor countries, rather than being, as we assume they have to be, for the U.N. agencies, a box you have to check? Has anybody’s actual pattern of allocation of resources changed notably because these goals have been forefront in people’s consciousness? Or Are there no countries where, at the national and sub-national level—in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, South Asia—where they have actually affected people’s debates and the way in which money is used, to the extent they have it?

BRIDGETT-JONES: Tony, do you want to start on that? To Jeff’s question? And hi, Jeff. It’s been a long time. Got my eyes checked the other day, but that wasn’t good enough because I didn’t recognize you at first. But I also wanted to just say in the energy access space, in particular, over the past few years is where there’s been, I think, some progress. And there’s been a considerable amount of financing being placed in that area, not only from many governments, because of the climate crisis, but also from philanthropy and others. I mean, that’s what led to the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, just as one example. But, Tony, do you have others in mind?

PIPA: Yeah. So I would—a few examples. I’ll stay primarily on the donor side. I’ll let—you know, maybe George has—or Isobel want to talk about examples on the developing-country side. But I will actually say, so I had a global community of practice of cities from across the world, about a third from the U.S., a third Global North, third Global South. All of whom were actually using the SDGs as their policy framework for their particular plans for job creation, inequality reduction, resilience, all of that at the local level. So from the mayor through the, you know, city governments, on down.

Everything, you know, from—you look at a at a city like Bogota, for example. They did a whole city strategy that was basically on the SDGs, and then even did reporting against the SDGs on what their progress looked like. New York City has actually done a couple of voluntary local reviews to show what their city plans look like and what progress they’ve made against the SDGs. And you can pull those out from local governments across the world, actually.

When you look at donor agencies, actually, my colleague George Ingram at Brookings a couple of years ago actually looked at the policy frameworks and donor strategies for a lot of the OECD DAC donors. Except for the U.S., almost every OECD DAC donor was using the SDGs and SDG metrics actually as their framework for both how they were trying to drive what their return on investment was and how they were measuring their progress. And you could see it, you know, at different levels amongst different donor countries, but it’s certainly something that had a great deal of uptake at the time in which they were doing their policy frameworks.

I also want to go back to the question about Japan and what gives you hope. I’m actually—

BRIDGETT-JONES: Yeah, please. let’s have you have the last word on this, as we are closing out, to offer hope.

PIPA: Oh, sorry.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Go ahead.

PIPA: Japan gives me hope, because there is about 95 percent uptake of the SDGs, and sustainability, and understanding and knowledge actually even amongst the population in Japan. And it is actually the Japanese people who are then asking it of their corporate leaders, of their government leaders, about what is happening around the SDGs. And so I think I would go much further than what Isobel said about having JICA, you know, take some more leadership, but I think Japan can actually be quite a leader on the global stage around these particular issues given what they’ve done as a country over the last ten years.

BRIDGETT-JONES: Thank you, Tony, Isobel, and George for such a great exchange. And I hope you all would agree with that. We need more than just hope. There’s certainly a good deal of action that needs to take place, not just to get us to 2030, but beyond that. But this was a great conversation to allow us to consider what we need to do differently. Thank you all for joining us. (Applause.)

BIDDLE: Thank you, Sundaa.

COLEMAN: Thank you, Sundaa.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.