The world’s leaders meet early next week at the United Nations (U.N.) headquarters in New York to adopt the Pact for the Future at the Summit of the Future, Sept. 22-23, 2024. The draft Pact, developed under the joint leadership of Namibia and Germany, comes at a pivotal moment. U.N. Secretary-General Guterres announced the Summit of the Future in 2021 as he issued Our Common Agenda, a vision for the future of international cooperation. One of the central objectives of this vision was to reduce the obstacles blocking the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted by all the world’s governments in 2015 but that now languish, far from being met by 2030 as was promised. The Pact for the Future makes practical recommendations to fill gaps in global governance, in the hopes that better institutional processes for the how of sustainable development would make it easier to realize the what set out in the SDGs.
These governance gaps are glaring. The world is facing unprecedented ecological catastrophes with global implications, as well as wars, genocides, and rising numbers of people living with food insecurity. The challenges demand coordinated global action, in conjunction with just and green transitions at the national level to reduce inequality, mitigate climate change and protect biodiversity. If adopted, the Pact for the Future will commit nation states to a wide range of actions. The areas of action include: Sustainable Development; International Peace and Security; Science, Technology and Innovation and Digital Cooperation; Youth and Future Generations; and Transforming Global Governance. In addition, a Global Digital Compact is annexed to the Pact. A full third of these actions deal with transforming global governance and the need to renew trust in global institutions.
On the "Summit of the Future Global Call" livestream hosted by the U.N. last week, on behalf of the President of the Republic of the Republic of Namibia Nagolo Mbumba and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Olaf Scholz, leaders got an opportunity to express their hopes and aspirations before the Pact is presented for adoption at next week’s summit. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's comments were notable and echoed in one way or another by many other Global South governments. He acknowledged the “fruits” of multilateralism since 1945, but noted, “the clothes we wore in 1945 no longer fit us.” Lula insisted that the U.N. remains the best and pre-eminent forum for global governance, as it is the most inclusive forum. He and others also emphasized the need for a new global governance architecture to make the U.N. more inclusive and accountable, and to ensure that same standards are applied to all nations when established international laws and norms are violated.
The Pact’s recommendations for sustainable development concerning food, agriculture and trade are somewhat contradictory. The Pact identifies the multilateral trading system as an engine for sustainable development and suggests export-led growth in developing countries through, inter alia, preferential trade access for least developed countries (LDCs), as a sustainable development strategy (under Action 5.a.). Yet this is one of those situations where the policies proposed are like the “clothes that no longer fit.” For many developing countries, especially LDCs, export-oriented economic strategies have reinforced a dependence on primary commodity exports that started in colonial times and discouraged critically important value-added industry. Exploitation of primary commodities has come at great cost to local environments and rural communities. Meanwhile, most LDCs are dependent on imports to meet demand for staple foods and therefore vulnerable to international price spikes and volatility.
Instead, LDCs could pursue a food sovereignty strategy centered on agroecology. At the civil society forum of the fifth U.N. LDC conference in 2023, IATP joined with partners from LDCs to call on the conference to adopt just such a strategy. This approach would recognize the rich biocultural heritage of LDCs and invest in domestic agroecological food production and distribution as a vital pillar of food sovereignty.
To succeed, this transformation of domestic food systems needs the support of a transformed global governance architecture. That architecture must protect and promote corporate accountability.
This is because underregulated corporate operations have been causing environmental destruction and human rights abuses – antithetical to the goals of SDG 2030. Ample evidence shows that increased corporate influence plagues the multilateral system as well. While the corporate abuse happens even without multilateralism (as in the cases where national corporations engage in abusive practices), transnational corporations, especially the larger ones, leverage multilateral spaces to shape the agenda, enabling their access to enter countries of interest.
Northern-based corporations still account for the majority of corporate profits and abuse. Indeed, this is the huge elephant in the room: the north-south disparity that protects northern interests including that of northern corporations through international finance, trade and investment agreements and unilateral sanctions.
But the meteoric rise of southern transnational corporations over the last two decades too has come with high global environmental costs, often devastating local communities and their environment as well, whether operating nationally or transnationally, as for instance, in the case of an Indian multinational operating in Australia or India.
In this context, an important first step toward a reformed global governance architecture would be to recognize and name the issue of conflicts of interest between profit centered corporations and public interest. Most importantly, governments should add strong measures to limit conflicts of interest and to stop corporate abuse of farming and Indigenous communities.
Unfortunately, there is currently just one reference to large corporations in the Pact under Action 55, on accelerating the reform of the international financial architecture so that it can meet the challenge of climate change. And that is about committing states to “Encourage that the private sector, especially large corporations, contributes to sustainability and protecting our planet, including through partnership-based approaches, to scale up support to developing countries and enable climate action,” and there is no reference to holding corporations accountable for their actions.
Corporations are indeed important actors with huge impact, and it is important to hear from them. But without better accountability mechanisms their participation can lead to increasing influence in shaping the global governance agenda. This would ultimately worsen the already damaging consequences of prioritizing return on investment over people and planet. Given the increasing influence of corporations in global governance space, it is imperative that there is a clear recognition of conflicts of interest. The reformed architecture must also address the lack of legal and regulatory instruments to address transnational entities, the need for progress on fair taxation of global profits, and other measures to hold corporations and investors accountable for transborder actions that violate human rights norms and devastate the environment, in addition to addressing the real concerns around north-south parity. Only then can the trust in multilateralism be rebuilt and the 2030 SDGs be met in a way that is accountable to local communities across the world.
