For 45 years, the UK has debated achieving the ODA target of 0.7% of GDP/GNI set out in UN General Assembly Resolution 2626 in 1970. In 2013, with cross-party agreement at last, the UK became the first of the G8 states to achieve that 0.7% target. And on Friday 12 September 2014 164 MP’s across the House of Commons voted in support of the International Development (ODA Target) Bill. Following adoption by MP’s the final hurdle for this Bill is the House of Lords, where I hope it will pass the first stage of scrutiny today.
Let us just think how different the world could be now if this target had been implemented by 1975. Forty years of quality investment and forty years of effective aid programmes. Forty years of building schools and roads and infrastructure, of tackling gender inequalities and gender-based violence. Forty years of saving lives with vaccinations and clean water, and forty years of building democracies, institutions and government capacity to tax, to spend wisely and to trade. How much more peaceful, prosperous and sustainable our world would be today.
The time has come for the debate to move beyond a contest over quantity and begin conversations on quality: quality of programmes, quality of impact, quality and accuracy of data collection and quality of accountability.
We missed the mark in the 1970’s. The Cold War, the vacuum of the 90’s, and the slow progress of the Millennium Development Goals mean four decades have passed and substantial long term investment has been too slow. Some argue that setting a target would cause problems for quality – people would be pressed to meet goals, fill quotas and spend for the sake of it. I disagree. Enshrining the 0.7% target in law allows the discussion to be taken forward. A consistent target, embedding that continuity, enshrining a fair and agreed percentage is the next step in the road to greater impact. A crucial step, as from it we can have a real debate on governance, on trade, on tax, and on programmes that are truly transformational. We can move from quantity to quality.
In 2015, the UK is in a prime and privileged position to be a global leader on a commitment to development investment. We are one of the few donor governments to have reached the 0.7% target. Our membership of the UN Security Council, the IMF, the G8, the G20, the Commonwealth and the EU means the UK is uniquely placed to influence and lead this debate. And there will be no better opportunity than 2015.
From the UK General Election in May, to the Financing for Development Summit in Addis Ababa in July and the Sustainable Development Goals agreement in New York in September, rounded off by the World Climate Summit in Paris in December – 2015 is a year for change and transformation. To miss this opportunity would be unacceptable. But to start this year with a bold statement of justice, of partnership and of belief in a better future, would be a credit to our nation and a signal to the world. Let’s do it. Let us pass this Bill.
Throughout Britain, and around the world, obstacles are turning into barriers, not just to Peoples and Governances but to Earthlife-Survival itself, Lord McConnell.
The Lords of the Blog, whilst being partly successful in opening a ‘direct democratic channel’ with The People, has always had a big deeply entrenched obstacle in the directively-imposed constitutional rule # 11 “Stay on topic”,
which too often, and too summarily and suppressively is applied to submissors’ attempts to have underlying and overarching influences, even outright but heavily smokescreened or constitutionally-buried causes – [I called them ‘underlurking’ and ‘overshadowing’ in a previous submission or two].
An instance is the evident suppression, by the head-term “Sustainability”, of longest-term-essential “Sustainworthiness”.
Flashback: In Australia 1990 at a “Sustainability” public meeting, I raised the need to include a detailed “Sustainworthiness” essential; and whilst only one person acknowledged this, he was a serious, sober and only slightly-left conservationist male submissor leading a small group, and came to me in the interval to say
“Yes, we absolutely agree about the need for Sustainworthiness to be factored-in”;
yet the dominant powers did not include it,
nor have they since – anywhere around the globe including the United Nations.
Nor do ‘our’ best thinkers help:
even ‘though the Dr Joads are paid hugely multiple human livings, in universities for instance, to pause us, and even effectively scupper democratic public meetings, with the simple injunction
“It all depends what you mean by [“sustainworthy and sustainability”],
overarching Governance and Establishment Management does not plan and implement sufficiently long public discussion, scrutiny, and ‘No-Lose’ Needs & Hows Identification timeframes, for such meanings and senses to be gathered and agreed.
Thus both Establishments and Governance bodies have us blindly wheeling along in narrow-visioned and short-term one-track consumerist-minded Uroboric circles.
A further increasing barrier is the UK having no Lifeplace-Sustainworthy leaders: who are already living, and leading exemplarily and emulably effectively off just one-human-living each.
Our central need is surfely for Round-Table New-Foundational Individual Human Development Movements nurturing, networking, and nonpolitically-enabling people to set about “sustainworthying”
first theirselves, individually at home and mutually in Lifeplace local and neighbourhood meetings,
and then progressively outwards through all Civilisations’ collective institutions and constitutions.