Director-General's remarks at the Beyond Lab's What's Next workshop at Building Bridges Summit 2024

Beyond Lab’s What’s Next workshop at Building Bridges Summit 2024
“Rethinking our Economic and Financing Systems for Long-term Sustainability”

Tuesday, 10 December at 11.30 a.m.
CICG, Varembé Conference Centre

Dear colleagues,
Dear friends,

A warm welcome to this What’s Next workshop and dialogue on Rethinking Economic and Financing Systems for Long-term Sustainability at Building Bridges, convened in partnership with Kenya and Canada, and the Beyond Lab in my office. I would also like to thank Switzerland, and Germany, for its support and trust in the Lab. 

As a founding partner of Building Bridges, we are proud to see how much the movement has grown over the years, and how Building Bridges has become a key platform for multi-stakeholder exchange and innovation, aligning finance with impact for sustainability. 

However, despite the growing attention given to making finance work for the SDGs, on-going efforts do not match the level for systemic change we need to secure a liveable future for current and future generations. The complexity of the inter-linked development challenges in front and ahead of us – rising emission due to increasing energy needs, loss of biodiversity, inequality, political instability, push back against gender equality – just to name a few, require holistic, bold and systemic solutions and approaches. 

For that, we must go beyond the current status quo and not only adapt, but profoundly re-think and design our economic and financial systems. To measure what creates real value for people and the planet, our economic and financial systems must be re-arranged around human and planetary needs, and not the other way around. Equally, we must make it visible and consider the long-term spillover effects and impacts of our actions today on generations to come to uphold our commitment to our children, and their children. I know that the Beyond Lab is working on some promising solutions for doing that, such as the Future Balance. 

The recent adoption of the Pact for the Future in New York offers a historic opportunity to finally walk the talk on this commitment and make the leap we need to move beyond: The Pact gives us a clear mandate to develop a framework on measures of progress on sustainable development to complement or go beyond GDP (action 53). It also incentives us to reform the global financial architecture and system to make it fit for the complex and uncertain world we now live in. We cannot fail on this. 

As an economist by training, I know firsthand of the transformative power of defining the right metrics to measure progress that goes beyond economic financial capital, and also considers the human, social, environmental and other pillars of sustainable development. GDPs solely focus on the monetary value of goods and services produced in an extractive way without accounting for the human, social and environmental impacts and costs, and it is no longer sustainable nor is it acceptable.

I am very pleased to welcome Anue Peltola from UN Trade & Development. We are partnering with Anu, alongside the student movement Rethinking Economics International, on the “Youth Moving Beyond GDP” initiative. A warm welcome also to Gustav and Julius, two young change makers and winners of the joint essay competition on measuring what we value, which kicked off the initiative. Thank you, Gustav and Julius, for joining us all the way from Zurich!

As a hub for forward-looking multilateralism, Geneva offers the unique enabling environment needed to push the boundaries of conventional paradigms and approaches to development, by allowing new ideas and approaches to emerge that focus on systemic rather than incremental change. 

It is in this spirit that the Beyond Lab at UN Geneva, in collaboration with Kenya and Canada, have embarked on this initiative anchored in the What’s Next. In fact, it was during last year’s Building Bridges where the first dialogue on Values Based Financing For People and the Planet took place, creating a space for an honest and open inter-generational, multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary dialogue on financing what we value. This dialogue has now evolved in connecting with the rethinking economics conversation, which is the other side of the coin. 

A key goal of the initiative is to create and offer an inclusive and collaborative space to explore and promote new concepts and solutions that can shape the way how we redefine the “rules of the game” when it comes to measuring and financing well-being, that is comprehensive and inter-generationally equitable. The initiative aims to “build bridges” between the Pact for the Future and the Financing for Development Conference next year, outlining a pathway from New York to Sevilla via Geneva. 

Please be reminded that this is a workshop that will require your active participation and co-creation. I hope you will take the ideas and perspectives you will exchange and deliberate over the next hour or so into the broader Building Bridges Week, back to your respective organizations and communities, into multilateral processes, importantly next year’s Financing for Development Conference, in Sevilla. 

We are at a unique moment, and we need more champions like you to be part of our mission. You are all uniquely positioned to drive these urgently needed changes to our economic and financial systems.

Thank you.