Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Food for Thought...

Annual Ministerial Review

By: Felix Dodds, Stakeholder Forum

There is another key sustainable development event that those attending this years CSD should have in their diaries. That is of course the 2-3rd July meeting of the Annual Ministerial Review (AMR). Some of you may not realize that this is a new function of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) mandated by Heads of State and Government at the 2005 World Summit. Its purpose is to; assess progress made towards the MDGs and the implementation of the other goals and targets agreed at the major UN conferences and summits over the past 15 years, which constitute the United Nations Development Agenda (UNDA). It also contributes to scaling-up and accelerating action to realize the development agenda, by serving as a global high-level forum with broad-based participation, where lessons learned are exchanged and successful practices and approaches that merit scaling-up are identified.

The AMR session consists of three main elements:

1. A global review of the United Nations development agenda

2. Thematic review

3. Series of national voluntary presentations by countries on their national development strategies.

The theme of the 2008 Review is “Implementing the internationally agreed goals and commitments in regard to sustainable development ". This year, the Council therefore has an opportunity to: assess the state of implementation; explore key challenges in ensuring that the global consensus on sustainable development is translated into action at the national level; promote the implementation of Agenda 21 and the Johannesburg Programme of Implementation (JPOI); contribute to the efforts to integrate the implementation of MDG7 with other MDGs and finally, it will consider recommendations and proposals for action, including new initiatives.

Similar to the CSD, it has a space for partnership to show what they are doing, called the ‘Innovation Fair’. This offers groups the chance to show what they are doing in relation to implementing the sustainable development agreements.

Preparations for the AMR July session are on track. Eight countries have already come forward to make voluntary national presentations at the 2008 AMR. A new feature this year is that the voluntary presentations will also include contributions from developed countries; The United Kingdom, Finland, Belgium and Luxembourg. There will be an attempt to create an interactive discussion based on the national reports. This will be done by bringing David Hales in to facilitate what has been seen as some of the best stakeholder dialogues with the Bonn Water and Bonn Energy Conferences.

So a big question is how many of us are planning to attend the ARM? Probably not many, and that is a big mistake. Environment groups mostly gave up on the Millennium Development Summit in 2000 and that is why MDG7 wasn’t more encompassing of the key environmental issues. The event in July will form a big input to the Heads of Government meeting in September on the MDGs. If you are interested in influencing that event, you need to first prioritize the July meeting of the AMR.