Last week (April 5) marked 1,000 days before the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are replaced -- as the consensus macro-framework for measurable developmental poverty-reduction progress -- with the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).
One of the 10 principles, agreed at last year's Rio+20 summit, around formulating the SDGs is that the process include the active involvement of 'all stakeholders ... as appropriate'.
This includes the private sector (by which I mean business and its umbrella groups -- one can debate where private foundations / philanthropy fit here).
There are quite a few interesting insights and arguments on business' role in the SDGs (a good one of these from the ODI can be found here).
One thing that has arguably changed, and which is both implicit and often unexplored in many of these debates, is that it is now seldom questioned in policy-making circles that it is 'appropriate' that business be a relevant stakeholder both in the process of agreeing on the SDGs, and efforts to realise these.
Indeed, for my part if I were again a student and looking for a doctoral topic now, I'd want to look at either (a) how the role (and public sector's expectations) of the private sector in meeting development goals changed during the MDGs' lifetime (or perhaps changed as between the process of deciding the MDGs pre-2000, and their pursuit after promulgation) or (b) how business has been / is involved -- or not -- in the process of refining and deciding the SDGs (and perhaps how this has changed from the MDGs experience).
We are not at the 'end of history' but in an age of both austerity (of public funding for development) and greater consensus (about the role that business can or even should play in meeting public goals, and about how developing a vibrant private sector is a key aspect of development programming), it is easy of forget how the UN system has long had a very ambivalent view of the private sector's place at tables that talk about public (governmental and civic) issues.
Across the continent I follow, there is not necessarily ideological consensus about the role that business should play in meeting local, national and regional development aspirations. Sometimes private commercial activity dictates development policy; sometimes the voice of business is muted or not sought.
Yet what is probably true is that especially in African countries experiencing rapid headline growth rates, there is a new pragmatism from all sides -- governments, business, and civil society -- about finding ways to bring business along in the process of translating economic achievements into sustainable and developmental transformation. This is surely to be welcomed as an opportunity -- and as something 'appropriate'.
Jo
Ps -- for one of a number of earlier posts on this blog on this topic see here ('after the MDGs -- the private sector and development') and here.
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