Global Policy Forum Europe

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📢 We need to ensure that all governments actually deliver on the commitments made!⚖To ensure that governments honour the...
07/05/2025

📢 We need to ensure that all governments actually deliver on the commitments made!

⚖To ensure that governments honour their commitments, should be . ODA often suffers from cuts in times of because it is only a political commitment, not a legal obligation. Some donor countries have national legislation, which has had a positive impact on the level and stability of ODA payments.

🤝The conference should push for a legally binding multilateral agreement to enforce the 0.7% ODA target, using the EU budget contribution model as an example!

👉Further information & publications can be found at: www.globalpolicy.org/issues

We need to bridge the financial divide between North and South – fair financingconditions for all!There continues to be ...
15/04/2025

We need to bridge the financial divide between North and South – fair financing
conditions for all!
There continues to be a financial divide on the global financial markets, as the Interagency
Task Force on Financing for Development prominently noted in its 2022 report: while
countries in the Global North enjoy virtually unlimited access to capital on favourable terms,
some developing countries have no access at all or extremely costly options, due to high risk
premiums. This renders financing development projects unprofitable and quickly leads to
over-indebtedness.
The FfD4 conference should help bridge the financial divide between North & South and
promote fair financing conditions for all!
Further information & publications can be found at:
https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues


We need compliance of with and !Private investment is crucial for closing the €4 trillion annual financing gap, b...
07/04/2025

We need compliance of with and !
Private investment is crucial for closing the €4 trillion annual financing gap, but it remains controversial which sectors and areas are suitable for private investment. Many essential goods and services that need to be accessible to the poorest do not attract investments because they are not profitable enough for private investors. In discourse and policy, there has been a shift towards portfolio investments in the process. With the help of incentives and guarantees, large sums are to be transferred to developing countries.
In practice, private investors demand higher returns when they invest capital in the . The high cost of capital has a negative impact on growth and transformation, as fewer projects are profitable. The high repatriation of profits has led to a net outflow of money from private investments in developing countries in recent decades. This means that portfolio investments have decapitalized the Global South instead of making a positive contribution to financing for development.
For investments to the host country and its population, effective national and is needed.

The FfD4 conference should ensure
· promotion of technology transfer
· strengthening of local value creation
· provision of binding human rights
· environmental due diligence obligations
· safeguarding of workers’ rights!

Further information & publications can be found at: https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

We need better multilateral development banks!In recent years, multilateral development banks (MDBs), and in particular ...
31/03/2025

We need better multilateral development banks!
In recent years, multilateral development banks (MDBs), and in particular the World Bank,
have become the main source of external finance for many developing countries.
The FfD4 conference should support the following MDB reform measures:
· Governance changes that give more influence to borrower countries
· A shift away from the primacy of private sector development (private-finance-first
approach)
· A shift to a human rights-based approach to improve access to education and health
services for vulnerable populations.
· More lending in local currencies
· Contribution to debt relief for heavily indebted countries!
Further information & publications can be found at:
https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

Responsible lending and borrowing: The prevention of has so far only been regulated by voluntary principles, with no e...
24/03/2025

Responsible lending and borrowing: The prevention of has so far only been regulated by voluntary principles, with no effective mechanisms to ensure compliance by either creditors or debtors. The conference already decided to create a “global consensus” on the development of principles for responsible and .

The conference should renew this commitment, build on the existing United Nations Trade and Development ( ) Principles on Responsible Lending and Borrowing, ensure a higher level of compliance, and define both the next steps and a binding timeframe for this!

Further information & publications can be found at: https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

📢 UN treaty on business & human rights - surprising advances!From December 16 to 20, 2024, 74 states came together at th...
18/03/2025

📢 UN treaty on business & human rights - surprising advances!

From December 16 to 20, 2024, 74 states came together at the Council at United Nations Office at Geneva to negotiate an international legally binding instrument to regulate the activities of transnational and other enterprises (also known as a “UN Treaty”). Since the adoption of Resolution 26/9 by the UN Human Rights Council in 2014, the intergovernmental working group mandated to draft such a treaty has already met ten times. The meeting was postponed from mid-October to December due to organizational problems in the run-up.
However, the fear that the postponement would result in fewer states and civil society organizations participating in the negotiations has not been confirmed. Compared to the ninth round, very good progress was made in 2024. A total of eight articles were discussed.

In our new briefing paper jointly published with Brot für die Welt die Welt, Celia Sudhoff reports on the 10th session of the intergovernmental working group on transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights ( )

Read & download the full briefing paper: https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/publication/un-treaty-business-human-rights-surprising-advances

📢 We need immediate cancellation for heavily indebted countries!The debt situation in developing countries has worsene...
17/03/2025

📢 We need immediate cancellation for heavily indebted countries!

The debt situation in developing countries has worsened significantly since the conference, as many countries in the global South have been forced to rely on expensive from private creditors to finance regular development and to respond to multiple . According to the , more than half of low-income countries ( ) are now at high risk of debt distress or have already defaulted. These countries need substantial .
The outlook for 2025 is negative, partly because developing countries now have to catch up on debt service payments that were postponed during the crisis. This is a negative consequence of creditors' unwillingness at the time to undertake comprehensive restructuring and debt relief that could have led to a sustainable solution.
The international financial architecture also lacks effective mechanisms to prevent and manage , with debt restructuring coming too late or on too small a scale due to a lack of effective procedures. The 'Common Framework' agreed by the in 2020 was intended to remedy this, but has failed to speed up the process and involve private creditors and multilateral development banks in comprehensive solutions.
That’s why we need immediate debt cancellation for heavily indebted countries. The conference should reach an agreement on this issue!
Further information & publications can be found at: https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

📢 first draft outcome document released!The flame keeps burning but there is still a long way to go on the Road to On...
13/03/2025

📢 first draft outcome document released!
The flame keeps burning but there is still a long way to go on the Road to

On 10 March 2025, the United Nations circulated the new version of the draft global financing framework that the international community is due to adopt at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla in early July. The new version reflects interventions by Member States and other stakeholders made at the third session of the Preparatory Committee ( ) at UN headquarters in February. It is the basis for the actual line-by-line text negotiations that are due to start at the end of March.
Compared to the zero draft (which we have analysed in detail in a previous blog, the first draft contains many amendments and remarkably few cuts, many watered down elements and – despite everyone’s desire to have a more actionable outcome of FfD4 – few concrete actions. Calls to ‘cut the fat’ were reflected in the sense that the co-facilitators reduced the number of paragraphs in the introductory narrative chapter from 27 to 20, and deleted most of the problem analysis in the following chapters on the action areas. More relevant are naturally the modifications in the chapters on actual Action Areas.
But what are the major changes in the new negotiation text?

Read more in the new edition of our Global Policy Forum Europe blog series by Bodo Ellmers:
www.globalpolicy.org/news

A rocky start for the PresidencyFinance Ministers and Public Development Banks convene in From 26 to 28 February 20...
10/03/2025

A rocky start for the Presidency
Finance Ministers and Public Development Banks convene in

From 26 to 28 February 2025, the first key events of the South African G20 presidency took place as Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors held their inaugural meeting in Cape Town, the country’s coastal metropolis. The fifth edition of the in Common Summit, the world’s major gathering of public development banks, took place at the same time, attracting around 2,000 delegates. South Africa is trying to pursue several important streams of financial architecture reforms during their Presidency, but the Finance Minister meeting failed to reach consensus on an outcome document.

This year is the first time that an African country has held the G20 Presidency, as South Africa is the only African nation state among the G20 members (the African Union was admitted only two years ago, during the Indian Presidency). South Africa has chosen the motto “ , and ” for their G20 term.

Expectations are high that topics of specific relevance for in particular and the in general will be high on the agenda, potentially promising concrete outcomes in terms of institutional innovations and .

The South African Presidency raised high expectations early on, for instance by announcing a new “G20 Cost of Capital Commission” tasked with finding solutions for the sky-high interest rates. These are proving to be a burden to developing countries and are much higher than those of their peers in the Global North, due to the high risk premiums that they have to pay to private investors.

The Presidency has to navigate an extremely challenging environment for multilateral decision-making.

Read the full blog article by Bodo Ellmers (Global Policy Forum Europe) at www.globalpolicy.org/news

We need more and better international public development finance!The 4th International Conference on Financing for Devel...
10/03/2025

We need more and better international public development finance!

The 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), taking place from 30 June – 3 July in , Spain, is a key opportunity to improve official development assistance (ODA) as well as South-South Cooperation (SSC) by setting standards for the quality and quantity of development cooperation. FfD4 can improve development cooperation in the following ways:
Stabilization through the legalization of development cooperation: The conference can agree on better incentives to reach the 0.7% target. A key problem is that ODA is only a political, not a legally binding, part of donor countries' national budgets. In times of austerity and budget cuts, ODA is one of the fastest and most disproportionately cut items. FfD4 can mandate the negotiation of a legally binding multilateral agreement on international development cooperation to ensure that the target is met.
Clarity in reportings: Donor countries should commit collectively to no longer include expenditures that do not constitute actual development finance into the ODA quota. Particularly, this includes the cost of accommodating refugees in their own countries. Some countries already do this voluntarily. This inconsistency leads to a lack of comparability of donor efforts. Climate finance must be added to traditional development finance, since the two cannot always be separated clearly. FfD4 should set a new target for the total amount of ODA and climate finance consisting of the 0.7% target + the target for climate finance. More accurate data is also needed for SSC.
Improve effectiveness: FfD4 should work towards a new multilateral consensus on the principles and practices of high quality and effective development cooperation.

Further information & publications can be found at: https://www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

– A new global financing framework must become a reality!The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Developm...
10/03/2025

– A new global financing framework must become a reality!
The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) will take place in , Spain from 30 June to 3 July 2025.
This is against the backdrop of massive delays in the implementation of the , not least due to deficits in development financing. The Sustainable Development Goal ( ) financing gap, which was estimated at US$ 2.5 trillion in 2015, has not been closed or reduced over the last decade. Instead, it has grown to over US$ 4 trillion annually. In addition, the decade since the adoption of the final declaration of the Third International Conference on Development – the Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA) – has been characterized by multiple crises: the , the growing crisis, a severe sovereign crisis and escalating .

There is no end in sight to the worsening . Expectations are high that the FfD4 conference will produce concrete results against this difficult backdrop.

Together with many civil society organizations from around the world, we will be making the case in Sevilla that a new global financing framework must become a reality.

In the weeks leading up to and throughout the conference we will post about the key issues and agreements we expect the conference to address and reach.
So stay tuned!

Further information & publications can be found at: www.globalpolicy.org/en/issues/development_finance_and_tax_justice

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Founded in 1993, GPF is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization, with consultative status at the UN. GPF's main office is located across the street from UN headquarters in New York. GPF also has a European affiliate, located in Bonn, Germany.

Global Policy Forum is an independent policy watchdog that monitors the work of the United Nations and scrutinizes global policy making. GPF works particularly on the UN Security Council, the food and hunger crisis, and the global economy. We promote accountability and citizen participation in decisions on peace and security, social justice and international law.

GPF gathers information and circulates it through a comprehensive and heavily-visited website, as well as through frequent media interviews. We play an active role in NGO networks and other advocacy arenas. We organize meetings and conferences and we publish original research and policy papers.