|
||
|
TWN
Info Service on UN Sustainable Development (Nov22/04) We are pleased to share with you a new Global Policy Watch Brief on LDCs and Their “Graduation” produced by Social Watch and Global Policy Forum. Below is an extract and the full briefing is available at: https://www.globalpolicywatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/GPW39_2022_1115_LDCs_and_Their_Graduation.pdf. With best wishes, Third World Network LDCs and Their “Graduation” By Alexa Sabatini, Julie Kim, Barbara Adams and Karen Judd “Leave no one behind – these four words are the promise at the heart of the 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development. This is the principle this UN body committed to… Today, not only do smaller Nations and younger democracies like Malawi still feel left behind but feel much farther behind than before.” – Lazarus Chakwera, President of Malawi at the 77th UNGA General Debate The UN established the category of least developed countries (LDCs) in 1971, as many developing countries were navigating a path to development in the post-colonial period. The classification identified specific development challenges faced by these countries. As the UN ECOSOC Committee for Development Planning (renamed in 1998 Committee for Development Policy – CDP) acknowledged in 1971: “[w]hile developing countries as a group face more or less the same general problems of underdevelopment, the difference between the poorest and the relatively more advanced among them is quite substantial…. The least developed among them cannot always be expected to benefit fully or automatically from such general measures adopted in favour of all developing countries. Some special supplementary measures are therefore called for to remove the handicaps which limit the ability of the least developed countries to derive significant advantages from the Second United Nations Development Decade.” Criteria for the LDC classification and to “graduate” out of that classification have evolved over the last 50 years, as has the number of countries so designated. The path to graduation has become, implicitly and explicitly, a measure of successful development. There have been different iterations of graduation criteria, with multivariate indices to better capture the complexity of development progress in LDCs. The evolution continues as the CDP – primarily responsible for determining these criteria – adopted a work plan to evaluate the process at its 2022 annual meeting. The CDP is a 24-member subsidiary body of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) set up to provide independent advice to the Council on development policy issues. Concomitantly, UN Member States adopted the fifth decade-long blueprint for LDC development in March 2022: the Doha Programme of Action (DPoA). To address the graduation challenges, the DPoA established targets that “i. enable 15 additional LDCs to meet the criteria for graduation by 2031. ii. Improve the scope, where necessary, and use of smooth transition measures and incentives for all graduating LDCs. iii. Provide specific support measures to recently graduated countries for making the graduation sustainable and irreversible” (para 312). It also welcomed the establishment of a Sustainable Graduation Support Facility “as a concrete country-led solution of dedicated capacity development support” (para 319). To date, there have been four UN conferences to support LDC development. The fifth LDC Conference (LDC5) scheduled to take place in Doha, Qatar in January 2022 was split into two parts due to the impact of COVID-19: 17 March 2022 for the formal adoption of the DPoA and 5-9 March 2023 for the five-day conference in Doha. The rescheduled fifth LDC Conference in 2023 provides a timely occasion to plan a quality review of the implementation of the DPoA that extends beyond ticking off a mid-term checklist as well as evaluating the relevance and quality of the metrics used, and support required on the path to graduation. This briefing is a backgrounder on the dynamics of the graduation process from the LDC category. It addresses the developments, challenges and possible next steps of a process that provides either a path or a roadblock for sustainable development in LDCs.
|
||
