Social Watch E-Newsletter - Issue 359 - February 3, 2020

In Finland, the civil society report of Fingo, the association of Finnish development NGOs, concludes that “conflicts of interest between actors lead to decisions where a short-term economic advantage eclipses long-term sustainability.”
Finland claims to be “among the first to draft a national implementation plan, to initiate sustainable development budgeting, to establish an inclusive monitoring system and a citizens’ panel, and commission an external evaluation of the world's first national 2030 Agenda policy, the PATH2030 report published in March 2019”. Yet, the alternative report shows that Finland is not consistently committed to the human rights-based approach of the 2030 Agenda, to ensure that “no one is left behind”. Further, “the 2030 Agenda is widely known about in Finland, but there is no consistent understanding of its interpretation and political significance”.Read more

Rising inequality in India not only causes poverty of income or assets but also leads to unequal access to basic needs - food, livelihood, water and sanitation, health and education. These disparities disproportionately affect historically marginalized groups such as Dalits, tribals and Muslims, with women in each group worse off. Read more

“The Data Revolution” has been promoted as a vital tool to help to achieve the SDGs or, at least, to better measure progress. Having access to massive amounts of data is seen as helpful for countries to plan, design and implement development and public policies in general. Cecilia Alemany (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era - DAWN) and Anita Gurumurthy (IT for Change (ITfC) highlight concerns about this revolution and suggests how to rethink global governance for the digital era.
The redefinition of the principles, norms and policies (software) and the structures and institutions (hardware) of sustainable development governance is closely related to our capacity to adopt new rules and adapt international structures to govern data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and their impact on our lives and rights. Read more

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.

The numbers provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about the assistance contributed by its members to developing countries are “inflated”, include “fictional figures”, suffer from “fundamental flaws of overcounting, incoherence and premature implementation of an unfinished system” and have therefore “become incoherent as a statistical quantity”, argues Simon Scott, former head of the statistical division of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in an article recently published by the Brookings Institution. Read more

The WORLD Policy Analysis Center and University of California Press are thrilled to announce a new, freely downloadable book, Advancing Equality: How Constitutional Rights Can Make a Difference Worldwide. This resource pairs a quantitative analysis of the constitutions of all 193 U.N. member states with case law from more than forty countries. By systematically examining protections against discrimination on the basis of sex/gender, race/ethnicity, religion, migration status, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity, alongside guarantees of the rights to health and education, Advancing Equality offers insights into the range and implications of different constitutional and judicial approaches to ensuring equal opportunities. Read more