Political will and political power and sustainable policies at national level as well as national policy space and fair international trade, money and finance systems are essential to tackle poverty and inequality, according to experts at an eminent panel discussion at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) last week.

The experts on the panel were discussing best policy practices for tackling poverty and inequality on the road to achieving sustainable development.

The discussion took place in a round-table session on 19 June, during UNCTAD's two-day Public Symposium (18-19 June), which this year coincided with UNCTAD's own fiftieth anniversary celebrations.

When the United Nations began negotiating a Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations (TNCs) back in the 1970s, the proposal never got off the ground because of vigourous opposition both from the powerful business community and its Western allies.

“The need of a multilateral dept dispute resolution mechanism was highlighted by the financial crisis of 2008 and the debt crises that it unleashed in several European countries. It is dramatically emphasized in these days by the tragic fact that a country like Argentina that is fighting hard to lift its people out of poverty, reconstruct the national economy destroyed by two decades of neoliberalism and recover the trust of the international financial markets is being attacked by unethical “vulture funds” and might be even forced into default by a resolution over its sovereign debt taken by the justice system of another country. This does not only threatens to submerge millions of Argentinians back into poverty but might even put into risk the whole international financial system” said Roberto Bissio, on behalf of Social Watch, during the Special Session of Trade and Development Board organized by UNCTAD Geneva, 17 June 2014.

A new GPF working paper, jointly published with Brot für die Welt and MISEREOR, gives an overview of the debate around how to create an international legally binding instrument to hold transnational corporations accountable for human rights abuses. The scope reaches early efforts to formulate the UN Code of Conduct to the current initiative for a binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights. The paper particularly focuses on the responses by TNCs and their leading interest groups to the various UN initiatives, specifies the key actors and their objectives. In this context it also highlights features of the interplay between business demands and the evolution of regulatory debates at the UN. This provides an indication of the degree of influence that corporate actors exert and their ability – in cooperation with some powerful UN member states – to prevent international binding rules for TNCs at the UN.

There is almost no dispute that the worst performance of all Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was registered on MDG 8, the Global Partnership for Development. The impending deliberations to shape the post-2015 development agenda offers a high level political opportunity to correct that imbalance.

For that, it is important to avoid treading the same path of the MDG approach. The initial blueprint for the MDGs entirely neglected mention of the means of implementation necessary in the form of international support. Since it was clear that developing countries would never get on board with an agenda that would harshly judge their progress in improving certain quantifiable indicators without correlative commitments of financial support to help achieve them, one more goal was added, and this was Goal 8 on the Global Partnership. Accepting this approach condoned the methodological nonsense of putting means of implementation as a category equivalent to the goals they should serve. It condemned finance for development to the constraints of a format that required simplified, succinct, one-size-fits-all statements that could never capture the breadth, complexity and diversity needed for development finance to work.