Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) addressed the opening plenary of the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) at UN head quarter in New York on Monday, 30 June 2014. Dr Bhattacharya is also the Chair of the Southern Voice on Post-MDGs – a network of 48 think tanks from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The theme of the HLPF meeting was “Achieving the Millennium Development Goals and charting the way for an ambitious post-2015 development agenda, including the Sustainable Development Goals”. The High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development was created at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012, to provide political leadership, technical guidance and policy recommendations towards adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a apart of the post-2015 international development agenda.
Dr Bhattacharya in his speech emphasised the need to mobilise additional public finance, particularly domestic revenue resources and concessional foreign assistance to endow the ambitious goals of post-2015 international development agenda. For this, he pointed out that the global development community has to look beyond financial resources and generate efficiency gains by concluding international negotiations in a number of areas. These areas include multilateral trade, climate change, technology transfer, international tax agenda and financial architecture.
He urged for strengthened and effective global development cooperation for improving the global governance and institutions so that low income countries can accelerate their national efforts to reduce poverty, inequality and discrimination in their respective countries.
The other panelists of the session were H.E. Mr. Csaba Kőrösi, Ambassador of Hungary and Co-Chair of the UN Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals, H.E. Mr. Antonio de Aguliar Patriota, Ambassador of Brazil, and H.E. Ms. Bénédicte Frankinet, Ambassador of Belgium. The President of UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Ambassador Martin Sajdik of Austria chaired the session, which was moderated by Dr. Manish Bapna, Executive Vice President of the World Resource Institute.
