“Perspectives from Geneva: Bridging the humanitarian, development and security gap through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a pleasure to be at the OECD today – thank you for your kind invitation.

I appreciate the opportunity to address the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and to continue our fruitful exchange between Paris and Geneva. That exchange in itself is already an important part of the “bridging” referenced in the title of my remarks.

The full title – namely to share “perspectives from Geneva on bridging the humanitarian, development and security gap through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” – opens up a number of avenues which I look forward to explore with you.

But so as not to follow these avenues into all kinds of different directions at once, I would suggest a straightforward, three-part structure.

̶ First, looking at the past, that is at “what was”.
̶ Two, looking at the present, that is at “what is”.
̶ And three, looking into the future, that is at “what should be”.

I.

Not so long ago – and certainly recently enough for everyone in this room to remember – the international system operated on a number of assumptions.
Some were explicit, but others were more implicit, to the point that we may not even have been fully aware of their sway. They included:

̶ One, an almost unshakable trust in the stability and longevity of the multilateral order.
̶ Two, a deference to sectoral divides – meaning for example the assumption that wars are a matter for military experts while famines are crises best left to humanitarian actors.
̶ Three, and related to the previous point, a confidence in the possibility of selective, targeted action – meaning the assumption that conflicts or crises can be dealt with either sequentially or in isolation.

Every single one of these assumptions has been severely challenged in recent years.
Start with the first two about progress and the stability of our order.
Amidst an anti-globalist nationalist insurgency, faith in the value of the multilateral order is nearing all-time lows.

Economic threats – above all rampant inequality – have combined with rising nativist inclinations to amplify hostility toward power centres.

The causes of this turn differ from country to country, but a shared element is public distrust of institutions at local, national and international levels. The citizens feel abandoned, leading some to conclude that ‘banks may be too big to fail, but I am too small to matter’.

In place of shared approaches to societal problems – from trade disputes, to security, to climate change – narrow national interests have captured primacy.

The language of multilateral cooperation is often drowned out by angry appeals for tribal solidarity, tendencies that are in turn reinforced by economic anxieties.

And looking at the third assumption – namely that you can somehow surgically address crises in isolation – it has become painfully clear that that is no way to address the interconnected challenges of today.

If you look at the map, you see a complex web of interconnected conflicts, stretching from Mali, Libya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Somalia to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan.
These conflicts are seldom driven by traditional actors and military goals: After all, it is not difficult to draw a direct line between social grievance, economic despair, failing institutions, environmental degradation and the eruption of open conflicts.

If the drivers of conflicts are so diverse as to defy exclusively military solutions, so too has the geographic reach of challenges broadened dramatically. For every challenge can swiftly become crises faced by all – carbon emissions know no boundaries, distant conflicts lead to refugee flows and weak healthcare systems in a remote island state can lead to worldwide pandemics.

The erosion of the fundamental axioms of stability, progress and selectivity – and thus the disruption of the very way we used to think about the international system – is the backdrop to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It explains why the Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals is the game-changer it is becoming:

̶ It is a game-changer precisely because it does away with outdated assumptions and anachronistic divides.
̶ It grasps that today’s challenges cannot effectively be met by tinkering around the edges of economic, social and political governance, but require a fundamental shift in the dominant development model in all countries.
̶ It recognizes that you cannot deal with these challenges – whether inequality, climate change, or conflict – either sequentially or in isolation.
̶ This is why it integrates the three dimensions of sustainable development – the economic, the social, the environmental – into one coherent approach.
̶ It demands action from all – rich and poor countries, international and regional organizations, but also from the private sector and civil society. And it does not leave anyone behind.

The 2030 Agenda was agreed to by 193 Member States some two and half years ago. So while we may still have a large part of the journey ahead of us, we have by now reached cruising altitude.
How then has the Agenda changed the way we work? That question segues nicely into the second part of my remarks, looking not at the past, but the present.

II.

Thinking about how the SDGs have changed International Geneva, I am struck by the scale and depth of their impact. Today, there is not a single action we take that is not connected to one of the 17 goals.

Like never before, the 2030 Agenda has galvanized International Geneva to join up. This city has always been more than the sum of its parts – its more than 100 international organizations, 400 non-governmental organizations, representatives of 179 states, vibrant private sector and world-class academic institutions. But to truly leverage the diversity of its actors, it needed something: an organizing principle, a leitmotif – something which aligns perspectives, which galvanizes minds, which sharpens our focus. The SDGs have done precisely that.
Just take the business community. Not too long ago, it felt like the language of diplomacy, of the United Nations, was met by business with a certain degree of bewilderment. And the feeling was often enough mutual.

It may be that the stakes are simply too great now for the disconnect between the private and public sectors to continue. But I am more inclined to believe that the SDGs have built a linguistic bridge, a common reference point, for all of us to come together.

In an effort to leverage this spirit of collaboration and innovation, I set up an office dedicated to help implement the Sustainable Development Goals – the SDG Lab – last year.

The Lab creates space for interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral partnerships while consistently testing assumptions and asking difficult questions about what is needed to achieve the 2030 Agenda.

In its structure, the Lab embodies the guiding principles of the Goals
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̶ First, multi-stakeholder collaboration. The Lab is staffed by individuals seconded from international organizations, national governments and non-governmental organizations, who hail from every region of the world and bring in a wealth of experience and perspectives.
̶ Second, a spirit of experimentation and transformation. The 2030 Agenda requires new approaches to some of the world’s most entrenched issues. The SDG Lab is creating a space for co-creating solutions and embracing the risk that is inherent in doing something completely new.
̶ Third, an integrated, systems-based approach to sustainable development. It is no longer enough to work in our silos, we need new methods of working and we need to embrace technologies that allow us to do just that. The SDG Lab has, for example, helped to connect the Millennium Institute with governmental and other key actors across Africa to present a tool that shows governments the impact of their actions across any one of the 169 indicators or 17 Goals.

The Lab amplified this tool, which is now used in several African countries. For the successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda it is obviously crucial to understand the interdependence of the Goals and indicators, which will be the basis for effective development policies and programs on the ground.

This is just one of many examples how the Lab has – in just a year of existence – demonstrated how collaboration can deliver better outcomes.

Importantly, the drive towards collaboration can also be felt internally, within the UN system.
My favourite example to illustrate this is the following: senior staff from over 30 UN organizations across Geneva are meeting outside of their working hours, and without instructions from the top, to sit down together and think about how they can reinforce, assist, and complement each other in implementing the SDGs. Throughout my almost 40 years in the UN, I don’t recall ever seeing anything like this.

All of which is to say that there is today a change in mindset, a new spirit of partnership that simply wasn’t there in the pre-2030 Agenda era.
But none of which is to say, however, that there aren’t tremendous challenges that we are still struggling with.
Which brings me to my last part – that is, looking ahead at what needs to be done.

III.

For one, we need to act with a greater sense of urgency – or, to put it in our metaphor of the SDGs as a journey, we may be walking, but we need to pick up the pace and start running.
Progress so far is too uneven across regions, between the sexes, and across generations. And too often, the level of our ambition does not match the scale of our challenges.

As long as we cling to an economic and social model that drives exclusion and environmental destruction, people die, opportunities are missed, the seeds of division and future conflicts are sown and the full force of climate change becomes ever more likely.

Differently put, as long as we cling to the old assumptions of how things should be done, the measure of our actions will always fall short of the magnitude demanded by the SDGs.

To actually deliver the 2030 Agenda, we need to pursue above all two things:

̶ One, a relentless commitment towards integration to cooperate horizontally across organizations, locally, regionally and globally.

̶ Two, a stronger focus on prevention.

The imperative of integration applies at every level, to every actor:

̶ At the UN, we are pursuing a set of ambitious and interdependent reforms to truly deliver as one. The success of this effort hinges on Member State support and will take time until it is embedded as much as it should be, but the direction of travel so far is encouraging.

̶ The imperative of integration also applies to our cooperation with regional organisations, including of course the OECD. Your work has a direct impact on our work and vice versa. Integration must therefore mean finding ways to closely align and mutually reinforce each other; to diminish the risk of duplication or even contradiction. Dialogue across duty stations, like our discussion today, are helpful steps in this regard.

̶ Last but certainly not least, the imperative of integration applies at the Member State level. Whatever the international forum, the nameplate of a country always reads the same; the voices speaking behind it, however, are not always pitched in unison. Dissonance within Member States reverberates on the global stage. If, for example, the mandates we are given are not matched by sufficient financing to actually deliver them, organisations like ours cannot effectively do their job
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It is in this context that the UN Secretary-General has proposed a Funding Compact as part of his development system reform. Its aim is to give the system the resources and the flexibility that it needs to deliver, in exchange for more transparency and accountability for results.

Enhancing the predictability of funding streams is one part of the equation. The other part links back to both my point around the interconnectedness of today’s crises and the prescriptions of the 2030 Agenda. It is about where we invest the funds we have.

In the past ten years, the international community spent $233 billion on humanitarian response, peacekeeping and hosting refugees
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And if this kind of financial cost is unsustainable, the human cost is unbearable.
We must do more to address the imbalance between spending on conflict, and spending on peace. Instead of responding to crises, we need to invest far more in prevention.
Prevention works, saves lives, and is cost-effective. A recent study by the UN and World Bank estimates that better funded, more focused preventive action would save the international community between $5 billion (in the most pessimistic scenario) and $70 billion (in the most optimistic scenario) per year.

This brings us back in a way to where we started, namely to the flawed assumptions of yesteryear. The 2030 Agenda has corrected these – in theory. But it is only when each of us – the UN, regional organisations, Member States, together with our partners in civil society – really begin to conceive of ourselves as part of a single, indivisible peace continuum, stretching from short-term firefighting to long-term development, that we will finally have shed these flawed assumptions in practice.

That is what bridging the humanitarian, development and security pillars is all about. That is why it is so much more than an exercise in bureaucratic efficiency. The stakes are much higher. It is about being able to deliver on the most fundamental goals of our work – to alleviate suffering, reduce risk and lessen vulnerability; to make our world a better, more prosperous, more peaceful place – and to really leave no one behind!

Thank you.