Seminar on Cooperation between Parliaments and the United Nations

Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank you for the invitation to join you in Stockholm today. It is a pleasure and privilege to address this great chamber and share my thoughts alongside such a distinguished group of speakers.

I. Challenges

Our Secretary-General, António Guterres, put it bluntly, but truthfully: “Our world is a mess.”

We are facing a phalanx of mutually reinforcing challenges that threaten to upend every aspect of our life, anywhere, at any time.

Above all, climate change. No country, whether it’s large or small, rich or poor, is immune from the impacts of climate change. The impact is clear and tangible today: 16 of the hottest years ever measured have been since 2001; the hottest of all was last year and second highest the year before that.

When most of the world’s poor work in agriculture, the stark imbalances that we are working so hard to close between developed and developing countries will be even harder to close. The cost is borne by people in poor nations that are least equipped to handle it. In fact, some of the refugee flows into Europe not only arise from conflict, but also from places where there are food and water shortages, which will get far worse as climate change continues.

Now, if people struggle to have enough to eat today, you cannot ask them to worry about what will happen to the planet tomorrow. Worrying about climate change is a luxury you can only afford if your immediate needs are met. If we do not pay attention to increasing inequalities – and the fact that technology and globalization are accelerating – we risk a backlash. Today, eight men (because they are men, not women) hold the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity. Entire regions and countries fail to catch up to the waves of progress, left behind in the Rust Belts of our world.

But the general reveals itself in the particular and national trends mirror global trends. You can see it in Senegal and Samoa much as you can see it in Switzerland or Sweden.

Technology everywhere is straining societies’ cohesion as it shifts the distribution of income from labor to capital. Automation creates new opportunities, but threatens to make almost half of all existing jobs redundant. Mass unemployment – particularly among the young – is a dangerous seedbed for discontent, perhaps even radicalization. For the loss of work is not only a loss of income; it’s a loss of status, of dignity, of purpose in life.

There are many more aspects to this complex web of interconnected challenges that I have not unraveled here, but the general point I am trying to make is clear I hope: If the challenges we face are interconnected, so too must be our response.

II. Agenda 2030

Our response must be collaborative, coordinated, and concerted. It must span geographies, disciplines, sectors, and generations. It must connect the local with the regional, the regional with the national, and the national with the global.

But for a common response, we need a common plan, a common roadmap that tells everyone where the journey is going.

And here comes the good news: we have exactly that. For the first time in history, all 193 member states of the United Nations have adopted a blueprint for peace, prosperity and dignity for all on a healthy planet: the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development.

With 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs for short), all of us, have a roadmap for inclusive, sustainable and fair globalization.

The goals are unique because they call for action by all countries – poor, rich, and everything in between – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build sustainable economic growth. They cover the spectrum of social needs from education and health to social protection and job opportunities, while tackling climate change. They are integrated and indivisible. They balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, the social and the environmental. They do not leave anyone behind.

Achieving these goals would create a world that is comprehensively sustainable: socially fair; environmentally secure; economically prosperous; inclusive; and more predictable.

III. UN Reform

I just said that to achieve these goals, we need to be more integrated than ever before. And I am well aware that this needs to start with our Organization, the United Nations.

This is why our Secretary-General António Guterres has outlined a set of ambitious, mutually reinforcing reforms. Reforms to make the UN fit for the 21st century – focused more on people and less on process, more on delivery and less on bureaucracy.

We are already well underway in our efforts to achieve gender parity in the UN; protect whistle-blowers; and enhance counter-terrorism structures.

We are reforming our approach to peace and security – to ensure we are stronger in prevention, more agile in mediation, and more effective and cost-effective in peacekeeping operations.

We are reforming our development system to become much more field-focused, coordinated and accountable to better assist Member States as they implement the 2030 Agenda.

And to underpin all of these measures we are implementing sweeping management reforms – to simplify procedures and decentralize decisions, with greater transparency, efficiency and accountability. We are working to bring decision-making closer to the people we serve; trust and empower managers; reform burdensome and costly budgetary and administrative procedures; reduce fragmentation; and eliminate duplicative structures.

But the UN cannot do it alone, and certainly not without support from our Member States.

IV. Role of Parliaments

And we cannot have Member State support without the strong support from Parliaments.

In everything we do, Parliaments are vital:
̶ You are the bridge between the local, national, and international.
̶ You have your finger on the pulse of people’s concerns and the ear of decision-makers in government.
̶ You domesticate global priorities. And vice versa, you aggregate local interests into national policies and global priorities.
̶ You break down silos that often exist between national ministries.
̶ You authorize the resources and pass the legislation that translate global commitments into local action.
̶ And you hold governments accountable, which by extension means you hold international organisations accountable.

Much as we at the UN therefore need Parliaments, it is not of course a one-way street.

As challenges globalize, parliaments need to broaden their horizons – and the UN is the means to achieve that. The UN is where the world agrees global agendas, which parliaments are expected to implement. We have seen through the excellent work of the Inter-Parliamentary Union just how significant the benefits are if we at the UN incorporate the perspective of Parliaments from the outset, rather than as a detached two-step process between global proposal and national implementation.

We have seen the benefits of closer cooperation between Parliaments and the UN across the spectrum of our activities: whether it’s in implementing the Agenda 2030, safeguarding peace and security, promoting human rights and gender equality, or strengthening governance.

V. Towards Closer Cooperation

This is not to say that there are no challenges that we must manage together. Let me name three:

Firstly, the fiscal gap: in a world of constrained budgets, we need to leverage our funds to have the greatest possible impact. This means that we should not “just” direct flows to the latest headline-capturing emergency, but towards underlying causes such as poverty or gender inequality. The smart money is on prevention.

Secondly, the perception gap: Good stories rarely make the headlines. Ask your voters what comes to mind when they hear “United Nations” and chances are they will think of power deadlock in the Security Council. What they likely won’t think of is how we secured peace, cleared landmines, banned toxic chemicals, eradicated smallpox, and many other successes. Parliamentarians, given how close they are to their people, can be key spokespersons for the United Nations. But to do so, they need to believe it. And given the natural turnover following elections, we need more robust structures to achieve even closer regular engagement between the UN and Parliamentarians.

Thirdly, the gender gap: If we continue along current rates of change, we will have closed the gender gap in 217 years. This is an embarrassment, but it is also dangerous. Gender equality is a prerequisite for the success of every single goal in the Agenda 2030.
̶ Economic prosperity depends on it: just consider that achieving gender parity alone could add at least USD 12 trillion to global growth by 2025.
̶ Peace and security depend on it: just consider that whenever women participate in peace processes, the chance of sustainable peace increases by 35% over 15 years. And that is true in Northern Ireland as much as in Guatemala or Liberia.
This is why I commend Foreign Minister Wallström and the Swedish Government for enshrining the imperative of gender equality into its foreign policy. This really is an example I can only encourage every country in the world to emulate. All of us, including the UN and Parliaments, need to do more to promote the necessary changes – in structure, culture, and attitude. We can start with ourselves. After all, only 23% of all national parliamentarians are female.

So where and how could we strengthen our cooperation to address these challenges?

As you head into your discussion, let me just outline three straightforward proposals:

̶ First, Member States could more systematically include legislators as members of national delegations to major UN meetings.
̶ Second, UN country teams could develop a more structured and integrated manner of working with national parliaments, for example by involving them in consultations on national development strategies and through regular exchanges on the ground between resident coordinators and national parliaments.
̶ Third, we could further build on the breadth and depth of interaction between the UN system and IPU – which was reaffirmed in last year’s new cooperation agreement – through regular exchanges between the senior leadership of the two organizations. It would also be important to ensure the parliamentary component to major UN processes more systematically.

There are of course many more proposals to consider and I look very much forward to examining them further in our discussion.

Thank you.