The Steering Committee and Joint Support Team.
The 5th edition of the Busan Global Partnership Forum (4-5 December), and the 18th Meeting of the Steering Committee (5-6 December) were hosted by the Republic of Korea in Seoul, rounding out a year in which they also marked their return to the Steering Committee.
Busan Global Partnership Forum
The Forum was opened by the Vice-Minister from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, HE Mr Taeho Lee, with remarks from Global Partnership Co-Chairs, HE Mrs Elysée Munembwe Tamukumwe, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Planning, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and HE Mr Mustafa Kamal, Minister of Finance, Bangladesh. Dr Deb Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) provided the keynote address, calling for new learning to ‘push the needle’ on the effectiveness narrative, and make sure it was responding to evolving development realities.
The Forum brought together nearly 200 participants from national governments, academia, civil society, and other stakeholders, to review key trends in development cooperation and development effectiveness. The basic framing of the effectiveness conversation was the 2030 Agenda, with sessions variously looking at constituent elements, including the FfD process, and the SDGs.
Rich discussions picked up on the momentum following the Global Partnership’s Senior-Level Meeting held in New York in the margins of the UN High-Level Political Forum in July 2019, and on how we might re-orient the discourse toward sustainability, with each of the effectiveness principles – country ownership, inclusiveness, focusing on results, and mutual accountability – a good metric for sustainable interventions.
18th Steering Committee Meeting
The Steering Committee Meeting focused on the Co-Chairs’ proposal for the new work programme , creating space for partners to align and contribute their own efforts on development effectiveness. Deliberations were structured around each of the three proposed strategic priorities – advancing development effectiveness efforts for the 2030 Agenda, building better partnerships, and leveraging monitoring for action.
The Committee broadly agreed on the overall vision for the Global Partnership, calling on the need for more collective actions, and for more effective interventions, going into the ‘decade of action’. The meeting also discussed the importance how to strengthen the Partnership’s flagship monitoring exercise, while making it lighter and more amenable to translation into policy action. Given the need for reflection, it was recognized that the monitoring would not happen in 2020 in the same way as previous years. Other issues discussed included firmly anchoring the work of the Partnership at the country level, strengthening engagement of partners across constituencies, generating and sharing evidence, and knowledge; and reinvigorating political momentum and outreach.
In moving into the second work programme of the Partnership, a number of Steering Committee members have already come forward to lead on a number of proposed ‘action areas’. Steering Committee members, GPIs and other actors are invited to express their interest in participating in and co-/leading them, and work on substantive proposals for contributions.
The European Commission announced its intention to host a workshop (now confirmed for 18-19 March 2020), for technical experts engaged in work programme preparations to accelerate the finalization of the work programme.
In addition to the new Co-Chairs, from DR Congo and Switzerland, warm welcomes were extended to the Republic of Korea, replacing Japan; Ivory Coast, representing recipients and Francophone African countries; Colombia, replacing Mexico; IADB, represented by ADB, for the MDB Group, replacing the World Bank; and WINGS, who have replaced the Aga Khan Foundation.
A summary of the Steering Committee Meeting can be found here , and relevant background material here .