19 July 2023, 08:00 - 09:30 EDT- Conference Room A, UN HQ, New York

With just seven years to go, and already halfway through the 2030 Agenda, the world is far from achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progress has slowed, with governments still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic as well as navigating other acute crises such as the attendant effects of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine on the global economy, energy market, and food security. The increasingly complex economic, environmental, social, and geopolitical conditions of today’s world have had serious implications on countries’ progress towards achieving the SDGs by 2030. This calls for stepping up efforts to enhance policy coherence for sustainable development as an SDG accelerator.

It is well known that the SDGs being reviewed at this year’s HLPF – SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), 7 (affordable and clean energy), 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure) and 11 (sustainable cities and communities) – are extensively interlinked. Policies in these areas can have impacts that cross national borders and negative spillover effects on the environment, society and economy that affect progress on the SDGs. For example, government expenditure on measures supporting the production and consumption of fossil fuels almost doubled in 2021, partly due to COVID-19 support. This undermines international efforts to combat climate change. At the same time, countries must confront the necessary trade-offs to effectively decarbonise their cities and towns. The decarbonisation of industrial processes and infrastructure will require disruptive innovations, with possible implications for the labour market and the wider society. Coastal cities will also rely on a sustainable blue economy for strengthened resilience to future shocks.

Governments are well aware that the nature of these issues calls for policy coherence capabilities to address transboundary impacts and balance policy trade-offs, but achieving it in practice requires reinforcing mechanisms, competencies and tools for enhancing coherence in policy-making. Challenges remain in delivering policy coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) as called for by SDG Target 17.14. Among countries with data available, the vast majority are presented with significant challenges to assess transboundary impacts, ranging from limited data at appropriate stages of the policymaking process; high demands in terms of resources and capacities, difficulty in establishing clear causal links between policies in one country and effects in another country where often externalities are not linear; and ensuring that the assessment of transboundary impacts is a systematic process.

The OECD Council Recommendation on Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development provides an actionable framework to help equip policymakers with the necessary institutional mechanisms and policy tools that help them in addressing transboundary impacts and managing cross-sectoral interlinkages to ultimately accelerate progress on the SDGs at all levels of government. The specific approaches of PCSD include identifying trade-offs and maximising benefits across economic, social, and environmental policy areas,making sure domestic policy objectives are compatible with internationally agreed commitments, and managing the spillover effects of policies on longer-term development prospects.

Under the backdrop of the UN Secretary-General’s global call to “rescue the Sustainable Development Goals,” this side event presents an important opportunity for countries to identify best practices and persisting challenges towards using PCSD as a means of implementation for the SDGs and as a framework for increasing capacities for accelerating progress on SDGs and advancing sustainable development for 2030 and beyond.

OBJECTIVES

This side event aims to:

· Foster peer-learning dialogue on the practical application of PCSD as well as challenges for setting coherent policies with SDGs, with a focus on sharing country practices for addressing interlinkages across policy areas covered by SDGs 6, 7, 9 and 11

· Provide an opportunity for participants to take stock of their institutional and public service capacities to deliver PCSD, highlighting the main persisting barriers and challenges and sharing potential solutions

· Launch the new OECD report on PCSD, which highlights some of the results of the OECD survey conducted to assess the implementation of the OECD Council Recommendation on PCSD

· Share lessons learned from the event on the OECD Knowledge Platform on PCSD, launched at the HLPF side event in 2022