Nicholas Booth and Beniam Gebrezghi
Earlier this month, the world took a momentous step forward: the 193 member states of the UN reached an agreement on the new sustainable development agenda that will be adopted this September by world leaders at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York. Concluding a negotiating process that spanned more than two years, the agenda features 17 new sustainable development goals (SDGs) that aim to end poverty, promote prosperity and people’s wellbeing while protecting the environment by 2030.
That agenda is set out in the draft outcome document for the forthcoming General Assembly meeting, titled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” It makes repeated references to the need for a broad global partnership to ensure effective implementation of this ambitious new agenda. Throughout the document, the civil society is repeatedly and consistently mentioned as a core part of this partnership, including an explicit target in the new goals themselves to “encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships.”