Interview: Countries have different priorities for sustainable development goals

Different countries will have different priorities within the sustainable development goals (SDGs), Amina Mohammed, special adviser to the UN secretary- general on post-2015 development, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"You have different sets of priorities," Mohammed said. "It's a universal agenda, so what Belgium would do would be different to what Chile would do or what Nigeria, my country would do."

The 193 UN member states agreed last Sunday to the final draft of the post-2015 development agenda -- which includes the 17 sustainable development goals, a set of priorities intended to guide global anti-poverty efforts from 2016 to 2030.

Unlike their predecessors the Millennium Development Goals ( MDGs), a set of eight anti-poverty targets to be reached the end of this year, the SDGs apply to both developed and developing countries. The goals also cover new issues, such as peace, oceans and climate change.

"Every country sees themselves in those 17 goals as a whole -- not separate siloed issues, but as a whole -- because all three, the social, the environment and the economic agendas, are together, " Mohammed said.

Mohammed said that governments were already beginning to consider seriously how the sustainable development goals would affect their future plans, while taking into consideration their own development priorities.

For example, Colombia, a country that has experienced internal conflict for five decades, will prioritize peace, education and inequality as it implements the goals, said Mohammed.

"Colombia is taking on the SDGs in a way that now their policy framework is informed by them," she said. "They have their priorities which are inequalities, peace and education -- incredibly important for them -- but they are going to use the SDG framework to try to achieve that."

She said that China was not just looking to implement the goals at home but also thinking about their impact internationally.

"What I have seen in China since the time we've engaged with them over the SDGs is the real concrete efforts to look at development beyond trade and to see that formulated in ways that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs actually looks at the skill sets and the kind of expertise that they need," said Mohammed, who had recently been to a round-table meeting in China where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chinese think tanks and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) were examining what the SDGs would mean for China's five-year plan.

"Clearly they're putting a lot of effort on trying to figure out what would apply to them -- but also ask the same questions about how this resonates with the rest of the world," she said. " It is a universal agenda and you know what it means for different parts of the world was something that they were quite keen to explore."

In order to fund the ambitious new agenda, governments are being encouraged to find new sources of funding including partnerships with businesses and borrowing money from other countries and multilateral banks.

However, Mohammed encouraged those involved to strengthen their partnerships to ensure that governments had the resources they need while being aware of the potential consequences of unsustainable debts.

"So I think that when we talk about borrowing, we know the downside of having governments that have not managed that well and have to pay for that now with extensive burdens on their population," she said. "Hopefully this is something that we'll mitigate against and we have been speaking to the multilateral system and certainly the finance system to say what sort of instruments can we have to help us do that."

Governments should also seek to improve their partnerships with lenders, including other governments and the private sector.

"Often when we find that some of these partnerships are weak because we go into these public private partnerships without knowing what the full implications are in having the best capacity and information available for it," said Mohammed, warning overall, the transition needed isn't necessarily going to happen overnight on Jan. 1, 2016.

"January (1, 20)16 is the day that we begin the new goals (but) there will be a transition," she said. "It will be difficult to embrace a new way of doing development." Endite