Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 358 - December 27, 2019

Issue 358 - December 27, 2019
Social Watch reports
Spotlight report on the 2030 Agenda
 
   
 

Jordan: Good plans but no implementation

   
 

In Jordan the plans are good but just not implemented. The submission of the Voluntary National Review in 2017 was an opportunity “to further strengthen national ownership of the 2030 Agenda, build a proactive momentum around it, and accelerate its realization”. The preparation of the VNR “ensured the widest participation of all major groups and organizations” according to the report by the Phenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies. This report was “a remarkable step forward in creating an inclusive strategy to achieve the SDGs” but “the lack of concrete and effective implementation of this strategy, as well as the failure in implementing an effective monitoring system, dramatically affected its effectiveness as a tool for integrating the SDGs in the national agenda”. Read more

 

   
   
 

No time to lose: Meeting Canada’s SDGs

   
 

Approving good plans and failing to implement them is true in Canada. With the release of Opportunity for All in August 2018, followed by the introduction of the Poverty Reduction Act in November 2018, the federal government has for the first time set targets for reducing poverty in Canada, defined an official poverty line, and established a framework and a process for reporting publicly on progress – in keeping with its commitment to “end poverty in all of its forms everywhere” set out in the 2030 Agenda. The report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives praises this “significant policy win”, which provides “an architecture and different mechanisms for holding governments to account for creating a society where everyone’s basic needs are assured and their active participation in community life supported”. Read more

 

   
   
 

Ocean governance for sustainability

   
 

Global powers and Pacific Island nations are racing to divide up the ocean's resources using the narratives of Blue Economy and Blue Growth to justify their exploitation, argues Maureen Penjueli, of the Pacific Network on Globalization. Technology advances make once-unfeasible seafloor depths increasingly viable and will allow corporations to plunder oceanic resources in a bid to secure food security and alternative sources of minerals and energy for rapid growing populations.
The Blue Economy concept grew out of the broader green growth concept and a growing concern about the heavy damage wrought on our ocean ecosystems by overfishing, habitat destruction, marine pollution, ocean acidification and climate change. The science behind the health and resilience of the ocean to sustain human activities and life on the planet remains little discussed, a gap that SDG 14 and the 2030 Agenda attempt to address. Read more

 

   
 
Social Watch publishes country reports 2019

Social Watch coalitions around the world are contributing their assessments and reports to the global Social Watch report 2019 on the national implementation of the 2030 Agenda. While circumstances and capabilities are unique in each country, common threads emerge: Inequalities, often exacerbated by the international policy framework, are not being reduced, poverty is underestimated or hidden but not eradicated, sustainability is sacrificed to extractivism.

The Social Watch national platforms are independent coalitions of civil society organizations struggling for social and gender justice in their own countries. The Social Watch network has been publishing since 1996 yearly reports on how governments implement their international commitments to eradicate poverty and achieve equality between women and men.

   
   
 

Global Indicator Framework for SDGs: value added or time to start over?

   
 

Five years into the implementation of the SDGs, and after 10 bi-annual sessions of a grop of experts from UN agencies, the OECD and the World Bank, the Glonal Indicators Framework to measure progress is still unfinished. The slow pace of this process has raised concerns, report Barbara Adams and Karen Judd. Has the framework helped advance progress on achieving the SDGs, particularly at the national level? Has it been overtaken by other assessments, including by UN bodies and the Global Sustainable Development Report, which seek to examine the obstacles to progress not included in the global indicator framework, such as external and global constraints as well as trade-offs as progress towards one goal may mean regression on another? Read more

 

   
   
 

Snakes and ladders in sustainable development indexing

   
 

Are Finland and Norway a model to follow if you want to achieve sustainable development or an example of bad practices to avoid? It all depends who you ask.
The two Nordic countries are listed among the top ten in the Global SDG Index published last September by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (BS-SDGI). But they rank among the bottom 10 worst performers in the Sustainable Development Index (JH-SDI) published by anthropologist Jason Hickel in the January 2020 edition of the Ecological Economics Journal. Read more

 

   
   
 

Loss and damage from climate change: How much should rich countries pay?

   
 

“The wealthy countries must begin providing public climate finance at the scale necessary to support not only adaptation but loss and damage as well, and they must do so in accordance with their responsibility and capacity to act.” This is the main message of a technical report titled Can Climate Change-Fuelled Loss and Damage Ever Be Fair?, launched on the eve of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25). Read more

 

   

 

 
SOCIAL WATCH IS AN INTERNATIONAL NGO WATCHDOG NETWORK MONITORING POVERTY ERADICATION AND GENDER EQUALITY
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