In response, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings is committed to supporting international, U.S., and networked societal leadership for sustainable development and launched a dedicated Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) with an event on Wednesday, October 21. This included an address from Brookings President John R. Allen and keynote remarks from U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, followed by a panel with her and Dr. Raj Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation, moderated by CSD Director and Senior Fellow John McArthur.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #CSDlaunch.

       

If we’ve all learned one thing in 2020, it’s that the world was not on a sustainable path in 2019.  The great reveal began through a microscopic imbalance between humans and nature in a single community. The imbalance quickly turned to upheaval, permeating every society around the globe. On the starkest scorecard of life and death, the COVID-19 pandemic is still winning, having led to 1.1 million deaths and counting.

The pandemic’s broader consequences are equally telling. The virus has generated fresh appreciation for our collective dependence on the ecosystems of the natural world. It has prompted new recognition about how unequally life’s burdens are often shared—across families, communities, and countries. People with the least resources to confront a crisis have often been those most called upon to serve their society’s essential needs throughout the crisis.  And the pandemic has underscored the networked forms of societal cooperation that are essential in conquering a problem that will thrive anywhere, until it is defeated everywhere. COVID-19 didn’t cause the world’s interwoven economic, social, and environmental challenges of sustainable development, but it certainly brings their importance to new light.

In that context, despite the daily stresses that so many of us continue to experience amid the crisis, I’ve always been proud to be part of a group of Brookings scholars—eminent academics, former practitioners, and policymakers alike—who have been working for many years to tackle the underlying challenges of sustainable development, within and across all countries. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as agreed by all countries in 2015, are the world’s common policy framework for tackling these issues, articulated around a basic set of underpinning priorities. To leave no one behind. To end extreme poverty. To ensure the sustainability of the planet. To promote cooperation and prosperity for everyone.

It’s an even greater source of pride that Brookings has committed to elevate its long-term institutional commitment to these issues through the launch of a new Center for Sustainable Development. With special thanks for all their support to Brookings President John R. Allen and Brahima S. Coulibaly, the new vice president of the Global Economy and Development program, I’m honored to be the center’s first director. But if there ever were a case of servant leadership then this is it, since the center has such an extraordinary inaugural roster of scholars, each of whom is a distinguished leader in their own domain:

• Amar Bhattacharya is a global leader in promoting sustainable infrastructure and tackling climate change, building on his many years of distinguished service at the World Bank and as director of the Group of 24 developing country finance ministers and central bank governors.
• Marcela Escobari is pioneering new empirical approaches to advancing U.S. workforce opportunities, drawing from her extensive international experience, including as former assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and former executive director of Harvard’s Center for International Development.
• George Ingram is a highly seasoned voice in mobilizing bipartisan U.S. leadership for global development, having spent many years working across Congress, the executive branch, and the nonprofit sector. He is co-founder of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.
• Homi Kharas is one of the most prolific and impactful researchers on issues of extreme poverty, the global middle class, sustainable development finance, and international cooperation. Among Homi’s countless contributions to everything being taken on by the new center, he played a pivotal role as executive secretary of the U.N. secretary-general’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, which helped pave the way for what we now know as the SDGs.
• Anthony F. Pipa is leading new forms of international cooperation to advance sustainable development at the local levels, around the world, and within the U.S. itself. He builds on an extraordinary career spanning public and nonprofit sectors, including his work as the U.S. special envoy to the U.N. during the intergovernmental negotiations on the SDGs, and as former chief strategy officer at USAID.

This world-class team’s broad range of work is emblematic of the broad range of issues and geographies that add up to the global sustainable development agenda. I hope that we will only continue to broaden the team’s diversity of membership and research topics over the days ahead—a focus on gender equity being paramount on all fronts. Nonetheless, amid the potential vastness of the sustainable development landscape, and needing to build from our strengths, we have decided to prioritize five issue areas to start:

1. Defining the challenge: sustainable development economics and empirics;
2. Identifying mechanisms and instruments to advance SDG implementation across all countries, including within advanced economies;
3. Advancing sustainable development at local and other subnational levels;
4. Advancing effective financing for sustainable development; and
5. Advancing U.S. official and American societal leadership for global sustainable development.

Themes of networked leadership and “leave no one behind” will be core to the center’s work. For my own part, I will also continue to pay special attention to how both the U.N. system and Canada, my home country, are confronting the relevant challenges at hand—both as topics of deep personal interest and as bellwethers for international cooperation writ large.

Ultimately, despite our strengths, we are mindful that we are only a small starting team looking at huge global challenges, so we will use our scarce resources both to inform other stakeholders and to help convene them. The more we can serve as a helpful node supporting a global network of cooperation, the better we are doing our job. Our SDG-focused 17 Rooms partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation represents a flagship effort in this direction.

Finally, as with everything at Brookings, our work is only made possible by a remarkable team of research analysts, project coordinators, and project managers who drive the agenda forward every day, alongside an army of supporting business units spread around Brookings. We are fortunate to be part of a century-old institution that is so committed to independence and impact. Through the new Center for Sustainable Development, we strive to help the world chart a newly sustainable path over the course of 2021 and far beyond.

       

The year 2020 will forever be associated with crises. First came the COVID-19 pandemic, a joint public health and economic emergency that spread around the world with unprecedented speed and scope.  Next came a crisis of international cooperation, as countries struggled to coordinate their efforts in tackling a common viral foe. Then came a compounding social crisis—anchored in the United States but reverberating around the world—focused on issues of systemic racism and police brutality. Huge numbers of people have taken to the streets in calls for justice, despite the pandemic’s persistent risks.

We do not know what other crises might still arise during the rest of 2020, nor the consequences they might bring. If problems beget more problems, one staggers to think of how much worse things could get. As of early June, COVID-19 alone has generated extraordinary near-term costs. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people have been losing their jobs. More than a billion children have been shut out of schools. Trillions of dollars of economic activity have disappeared.

If we describe the current situation as a “moment of multidimensional crises,” then one of its toughest challenges lies in the uncertainty around how long the moment will last. But whatever further political tensions arise, the underpinning questions about COVID-19 remain fundamental. Will cascading waves of infection generate rolling shutdowns of schools, shops, and much of society? Will a vaccine be discovered and delivered to billions of people in short order, or might new treatment options provide imperfect solace in the meantime? Will today’s international institutions emerge renewed, worn down, or perhaps even broken from the cumulative strain?

Amid these heady concerns, there are reasons for hope too. Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements. Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies.

All of this has prompted fresh calls for a broad-minded approach to the integrated challenges of policymaking. For their part, many policymakers have long been accustomed to incremental processes and solutions that push gradually against the boundaries of popular and political will. Today, many of these same people find themselves scrambling to manage rapid and radical shifts toward uncharted territory, in terms of both what’s possible and what’s expected.

The world needs to make the most of the moment at hand. To chart a path through the complex uncertainty, we suggest three distinct forms of action—Response, Recovery, and Reset:

• Response in the near term: where the main objective is to protect lives and livelihoods, especially among people who are most vulnerable. Under this category, there is widespread alignment around the core goals, even if strategies are debated.
• Recovery over the medium term: where the main objective is to restart and rebuild economic and social activity in a manner that protects public health, promotes societal healing, and preserves the environment. Here there might naturally be more debates around desired outcomes and greater complexity to finding solutions.
• Reset systems for the long term: where the objective is to establish, wherever possible, a new equilibrium among political, economic, social, and environmental systems toward common goals. Ultimately, the only limit within this category is our collective imagination. As we emerge from a moment of great crisis, we can imagine a “great reset.”

In practice, these action horizons overlap. But the key point is to distinguish between the different functions and mindsets needed for the respective challenges at hand. It remains to be seen whether the next couple of years will unfold in a manner that makes it either easier or harder to achieve progress on the world’s economic, social, and environmental challenges. So rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.

The SDGs—Still an integrating framework

Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 U.N. member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030. Guided by an underlying spirit of “no one left behind,” the goals have gained increasing traction since 2015 as a shared reference point of ambition. A widening array of governments, communities, universities, businesses, civil society organizations, and private philanthropies have all leveraged the lingua franca of the goals to pursue a common agenda for progress.

Despite the common vision, the ambition of the SDGs has not yet been paired with action to match. Many SDG advocates had planned for 2020 to be an opportunity to remind the world of its commitments for the coming decade. The novel coronavirus upended everyone’s calendar. Most governments and organizations are now struggling to make plans on a 10-month or even 10-week horizon, let alone 10 years.

The constraints need not define us. The incredible energy being mobilized, across all sectors, to address today’s concurrent crises creates the opportunity for bold solutions that help break from the past and open new possibilities. By thinking across multiple time horizons for action, it is possible to rebuild from the crises in a way that not only makes us more resilient to future shock waves, but also helps the global community reset toward better footing for future SDG success.

17 Rooms—From Rebuild to Reset

In that spirit, we and our colleagues at the Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation have decided to continue convening the “17 Rooms” initiative in 2020, with a focus on Rebuild and Reset. In 2018 and 2019, the 17 Rooms flagship meeting was held in person in New York City, as a new experiment in generating SDG action. This year, in 2020, we are organizing a series of virtual convenings (17 Zooms!) to deploy the key ingredients again—a focus on the 12-18 month horizon; an informal Chatham House Rule environment; and a cooperative mindset among respected actors leading within each of the 17 different SDG domains—to address the new context at hand.

Specifically, we are encouraging each Room (small working group) to consider the integrated challenges of Rebuild and Reset on a 2021 action horizon. In practical terms, we are asking each Room to answer the following:

In light of recent crises linked to COVID-19, systemic racism, and other urgent challenges, what are one to three actionable priorities over the coming 12-18 months (i.e., by the end of 2021) that address near-term needs while also making a decisive contribution to protecting or advancing your Goal’s 2030 results? What actions can members of your Room take to advance these priorities?

We are delighted that a remarkable cross section of leaders from civil society, academia, business, and philanthropy are helping to lead the effort amid these challenging times. Each Room will convene its own conversations over the coming months, culminating in a virtual conference in September. By October, we plan to publish a short document from each Room plus a brief overarching report focused on the integrated themes of Rebuild and Reset.

As the world eventually shifts its focus from the traumas of 2020 to the needed actions of 2021, we aim for these documents to help inform pathways back to SDG action. Emerging from this moment of crises, the final products will not amount to any kind of comprehensive roadmap. Instead, we simply hope to provide some helpful steps with which to start.

The Rockefeller Foundation provides support to the Brookings Institution. 

       

During this unusual time of flexible schedules and more time at home, many of us may have increased opportunities for long-form reading. Below, the scholars and staff from the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings offer their recommendations for books to read during this time.

Max Bouchet recommends

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World

The toughest problems we’re facing today—climate change, migration crises, income inequality, and obviously pandemics—know no national borders. Their effects concentrate in cities. Yet, cities and their leaders often lack the resources and support to solve these challenges. Rahm Emanuel, who was mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, gives his account of the growing role cities and their mayors play in global affairs. The book offers great insights on the international activities of cities and the job of being a mayor in the 21st century.

Brahima S. Coulibaly recommends

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

In “AI Superpowers,” author Kai-Fu Lee writes on everything you need to know about the genesis of artificial intelligence, its evolution, and its geopolitics.

Kemal Dervis recommends

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

It is a long (more than 500 pages) but very readable book by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, the authors of “Why Nations Fail,” with a huge amount of history from all over the world. Its length may be acceptable in these stay at home times. It reminds the reader that every generation has to win the battle for liberty and good governance again and again.

Pascaline Dupas recommends

A Man of Good Hope

This 2014 book by Jonny Steinberg tells the unimaginable but true life story of Asad, a Somalian refugee whom Steinberg meets in South Africa while preparing a book on xenophobia. Narrative nonfiction at its best, the book is a powerful introduction to the challenges and complexities faced by displaced populations and the many ways in which the international community fails to support them. A book that never leaves your mind after you’ve read it.

Helena Hlavaty recommends

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is a two-part graphic memoir about the author’s experience coming of age in the time (and aftermath) of the Iranian Revolution. Satrapi’s vivid illustrations bring her experiences to life, effortlessly weaving together countless elements of the human experience across public and private spheres. A remarkably human perspective on a marked moment in history, no brief description can capture the full extent of Satrapi’s work!

George Ingram recommends

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure Future — Lessons from the World’s Limits

“Extreme Economies” by Richard Davies is an economic and sociological study of nine microeconomies: three economies that bounded back from disaster, three that collapsed, and three that provide a window into the future. Not a special focus of the book, but striking from a development perspective is the theme of the role of informal networks in cases of success, and their absence in collapse.

Addisu Lashitew recommends

Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good

Professor Colin Mayer’s “Prosperity” answers the timely question of what should be the purpose of business. It is an ambitious, rigorous work that canvases a broad set of topics on the purpose and governance of business. It is strongly anchored on history and yet decidedly forward-looking, tackling key questions on how the corporation should be renewed in order to meet the present needs of our societies.

Payce Madden recommends

Wizard of the Crow

Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s sprawling, comic, incisive novel—translated by the author to English from his native language, Gĩkũyũ—tells the story of a battle for control of a fictional African nation in the postcolonial era. In the process, the novel dissects the 20th-century experience of Kenya, and of Africa more broadly. Ngũgĩ uses magical realism and satire to great effect, providing as nuanced (and entertaining) an account of Africa’s history and possibility as any offered by a historian or analyst.

John McArthur recommends

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves

Adam Hochschild provides a masterful account of how the leaders of the British abolitionist movement toiled for decades to bring about an end to slavery across the empire in 1834. Through so many highs and lows, the activists persisted in growing their coalition for justice into an unstoppable force. Whenever the world’s problems start to feel extra hard and intractable, this book can offer a deep reservoir of inspiration.

Sebastian Strauss recommends

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region

“How Asia Works” is the closest thing you’ll find to a step-by-step recipe for economic development, with clear and falsifiable prescriptions for poor and rich nations alike. Studwell argues that efficiency considerations—important for developed economies—shouldn’t determine policy in poor countries, which must invest in learning before they can worry about efficiency. Their governments must proactively foster capital accumulation and technological learning. At the same time, rich countries must grant them the policy space they themselves once had, as developing nations cannot be expected to succeed without infant industry protection or state control of financial resources and international capital flows.

       

Brookings experts are looking ahead to the issues they expect will shape the world this year and the solutions to address them. Below, explore what our experts have identified as the biggest policy issues in their field for 2020, the ideas or proposals they encourage policymakers to consider, and the overlooked stories that deserve greater attention.

       

The ambitious 15-year agenda known as the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 by all members of the United Nations, contains a pledge that “no one will be left behind.” This book aims to translate that bold global commitment into an action-oriented mindset, focused on supporting specific people in specific places who are facing specific problems.

In this volume, experts from Japan, the United States, Canada, and other countries address a range of challenges faced by people across the globe, including women and girls, smallholder farmers, migrants, and those living in extreme poverty. These are many of the people whose lives are at the heart of the aspirations embedded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They are the people most in need of such essentials as health care, quality education, decent work, affordable energy, and a clean environment.

This book is the result of a collaboration between the Japan International Cooperation Research Institute and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. It offers practical ideas for transforming “leave no one behind” from a slogan into effective actions which, if implemented, will make it possible to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. In addition to policymakers in the field of sustainable development, this book will be of interest to academics, activists, and leaders of international organizations and civil society groups who work every day to promote inclusive economic and social progress.

Chapters and Contributors

1. Getting Specific to Leave No One Behind on Sustainable Development
   Homi Kharas, John W. McArthur, and Izumi Ohno
   
   Part I: People
2. Women on the Move: Can We Achieve Gender Equality by 2030?
   Hilary Mathews and Michelle Nunn
3. Breaking Out of the Poverty Trap
   Lindsay Coates and Scott Macmillan
4. No Smallholder Farmer Left Behind
   Jane Nelson
5. No Refugees and Migrants Left Behind
   Dany Bahar and Meagan Dooley
   
   Part II: Problems
6. Leapfrogging to Ensure No Child Is Left Without Access to a Twenty-First Century Education
   Rebecca Winthrop and Lauren Ziegler
7. Vulnerable Populations and Universal Health Coverage
   Krishna D. Rao, Saeda Makimoto, Michael Peters, Gabriel M. Leung, Gerald Bloom and Yasushi Katsuma
8. No Women Left Excluded from Financial Services
   Eiji Yamada, Erica Paula Sioson, Enerelt Murakami, and Akira Murata
9. Leaving No One Behind: Can Tax-Funded Transfer Programs Provide Income Floors in Sub-Saharan Africa?
   Nora Lustig, Jon Jellema, and Valentina Martinez Pabon
   
   Part III: Places
10. Spatial Targeting of Poverty Hotspots
    Jennifer L. Cohen, Raj M. Desai, and Homi Kharas
11. Leaving No Fragile State and No One Behind in a Prosperous World: A New Approach
    Landry Signé
12. The Importance of City Leadership in Leaving No One Behind
    Tony Pipa and Caroline Conroy
    
    On Politics
13. Left Behind or Pushed Back? Redistributing Power Over the Sustainable Development Goals
    Paul O’Brien

       

Pouring several colors of paint into a single bucket produces a gray pool of muck, not a shiny rainbow. Similarly, when it comes to discussions of financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), jumbling too many issues into the same debate leads to policy muddiness rather than practical breakthroughs. For example, the common “billions to trillions” refrain on SDG financing falls into this trap. While originally a useful device for calling attention to the need for a paradigm shift in financing, including from private sources, the meme’s emphasis on mega-aggregates is now a distraction from operational considerations.

The purpose of SDG financing is to ensure the right mix of resources are available in the right places at the right time to solve specific real-world problems. These include challenges like deprivation of basic human needs, obesity-induced non-communicable disease, species loss from land and oceans, and greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. The SDGs will only be properly financed and achieved when there is clarity on each of the underlying problems to be solved, on the respective mechanisms needed to address them, and on the appropriate mix and volume of resources needed for implementation. In this paper, we stress the need to think beyond financing aggregates to a more granular description of specific types of resource gaps in specific countries. We “zoom out” on the big picture issues in order to encourage “zooming in” on the practical ones.

Our starting point is to ask what it will take to build a new global economy that is consistent with the SDGs, including the imperative to address climate change. We think of an “SDG economy” as one where the aspirations of two foundational agreements on sustainable development are met. One is embedded in the third paragraph of the 2015 United Nations resolution (70/1) that gave us the SDGs, entitled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.” It offers a concise description of the overall ambition:

We resolve, between now and 2030, to end poverty and hunger everywhere; to combat inequalities within and among countries; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources. We resolve also to create conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all, taking into account different levels of national development and capacities.

The second foundational agreement is embedded in paragraph 12 of the U.N.’s 2015 Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development. It makes a commitment for a new “social compact,” one that delivers social protection and essential public services for all:

To end poverty in all its forms everywhere and finish the unfinished business of the Millennium Development Goals, we commit to a new social compact. In this effort, we will provide fiscally sustainable and nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, with a focus on those furthest below the poverty line and the vulnerable, persons with disabilities, indigenous persons, children, youth and older persons. We also encourage countries to consider setting nationally appropriate spending targets for quality investments in essential public services for all, including health, education, energy, water and sanitation, consistent with national sustainable development strategies.

Within this Addis pledge, the emphasis on nationally appropriate spending targets is crucial. Addis did not envisage a single point estimate of spending needs for all, but instead allowed for country differentiation. Hence each country has a unique fiscal path to developing its own SDG economy.

Ultimately, SDG economies require building public services and societal systems that do three things: ensure essential public services are available to every human being; build fast-growing cities and industries that succeed on environmental and social terms too; and retrofit currently “advanced” cities and industries that are still not delivering on a range of SDG outcomes, such as the global food system and its adverse effects on health and the environment. In moving towards this vision, all segments of society must contribute. The private sector is crucial for many tasks, but the public sector is dominant for tackling market and coordination failures that cause SDG challenges to persist.

In this paper, we concentrate on what governments themselves must do through public spending, not because it is the only form of spending relevant for the SDGs – far from it – but because it is the form of spending most directly under the purview of policymakers. In doing this, we are able to clarify order-of-magnitude-type assessments of the nature of public spending volumes required for the SDGs. Presuming private dollars are complements to public dollars, the estimates in this paper can be considered as rough lower bounds for SDG spending and financing requirements.

October 23: The paper has been updated with revised Figures 2A and 2B, along with slightly revised text describing the slope of the graph.