OVERVIEW
Held in the margins of the 2018 World Bank Group Spring Meetings at the Inter-American Development Bank, the 15th meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation’s Steering Committee underscored the political necessity of revitalising development effectiveness as an instrumental anchor of efforts to realise the SDGs by 2030. Midway between the Nairobi High-Level Meeting and the 2019 Senior-Level Meeting (SLM), the Steering Committee agreed to lend its full support to the effectiveness agenda in all relevant policy arenas, at global, regional and national levels.
The Steering Committee highlighted the importance of the 2018 Monitoring Round as an instrument to demonstrate progress. The Steering Committee will also continue to actively engage on four strategic priorities – country level implementation, monitoring, knowledge sharing and private sector engagement – to carry forward successful implementation of the 2017-18 Work Programme.
KEY CONCLUSIONS
In support of this vision, the Steering Committee took a range of decisions at its 15th meeting and endorsed the contours of ongoing work to promote effective development co-operation, including:
1. Country-Level Implementation:
The Steering Committee agreed to support the development of a Global Compendium of
Good Practices on effective development co-operation, with concrete solutions to implement effectiveness principles at country level, informed by ongoing work in ten pilot countries and complementary evidence from Global Partnership stakeholders.
2. Monitoring:
The Steering Committee endorsed:
• The guidelines to address feedback on the current monitoring framework and the next steps to finalise indicator revisions by May, and to launch the third monitoring round by June 2018, in order to provide fresh data on effective development co-operation and feed evidence into the SDG and FfD follow-up and review processes.
• Contours for adapting the monitoring framework to challenges of the 2030 Agenda, beginning with a focus on fragility and conflict-affected situations. An open working group will guide this work and report back with initial recommendations and a roadmap at the next Steering Committee meeting.
3. Global Action Plan
The Steering Committee endorsed the broad contours of a Global Action Plan to address the unfinished business of development effectiveness, i.e. those commitments from Paris and Busan that have not yet been met.
4. Knowledge-Sharing:
The Steering Committee agreed to establish a virtual Knowledge-Sharing Platform to share lessons learned on effective development co-operation and connect policy-makers and practitioners to evidence-based solutions on how to make development co-operation more effective for all Global Partnership stakeholders.
5. Global Partnership Initiatives:
The Steering Committee endorsed a proposal to strengthen engagement with Global Partnership Initiatives in order to capitalise on their store of on-the-ground implementation knowledge and strengthen of the Global Partnership’s mutual learning loop.
6. Private Sector Engagement:
The Steering Committee expressed their support for the proposed way forward for developing guidelines for private sector engagement leveraged through development co-operation based on ongoing analytical work, in close collaboration with other partners. They also endorsed the establishment and proposed composition of a 12-member Business Leaders Caucus to engage the private sector.
7. Learning from different modalities:
To move the cross-cutting work on learning from different modalities forward, the Steering Committee agreed on the usefulness of convening an informal “group of friends”, and to explore a topic of common interest to emerging economies, for a specialised policy dialogue.
8. Political Momentum:
The Steering Committee will operationalise the Global Advocacy and Outreach Strategy by
leading on events and engagement efforts in the run up to the 2019 Global Partnership Senior Level Meeting, to be held in the margins of the 2019 HLPF. To align with the Global Partnership meeting cycle and to ensure the production of high quality deliverables, it also agreed to extend the current work programme until the 2019 SLM. The Committee also highlighted the need to kick-start preparations for this milestone event, including discussions with the UN System, facilitation of successor arrangements for the role of Co-Chairs and some Steering Committee members, and preparations for a subsequent work programme.
