NGOs want more influence in UN meeting

Activists from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have called for a greater role for civil society in the international talks on the post-2015 development agenda ahead of a regional meeting in Bali.

The UN-appointed High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 development agenda will be hosted by the Presidential Working Unit for Development Supervision and Control (UKP4) on behalf of the Indonesian government.

It aims to formulate a development vision, framework and target that will take effect once the existing framework of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expires in 2015.

“Many recommendations for developing countries did not work because the recommendations were dictated by developed countries,” International NGO Forum on Indonesia Development (INFID) executive director Sugeng Bahagijo said on Tuesday.

Involving civil society groups in the policy-making process would ensure that countries headed in the right direction in terms of achieving their development goals, he added.

INFID, along with several organizations including the Indonesian Women’s Coalition for Justice and Democracy (KPI), the Nusantara Alliance for Indigenous People (AMAN) and the Association for the Support of Female Entrepreneurs (ASPPUK), has outlined six issues that countries need to pay attention to during the meeting: development inequality, environment sustainability, social insecurity and conflict management, incorporating good governance principles post-2015, ensuring funding for the development agenda post-2015, and adopting an inclusive and participatory process in progressing the post-2015 development agenda.

A resolution agreed during the 65th Session of the UN General Assembly in 2010 mandated UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to appoint President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as a co-chairs of the UN high level panel on the post-2015 MDGs.

The panel has a mandate to support the drafting of the post-2015 development agenda. The draft will be discussed in the UN’s “International Conference on Population and Development Beyond 2014”, which will take place in September 2013.

“The Bali meeting is one of several meetings to be held in several countries, regions and at the global level with the aim of getting input from multiple stakeholders in the Asian region on the development agenda post-2015,” said Sugeng of the meeting that is scheduled to be attended by Yudhoyono as the high level panel co-chair.

In Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development last June in Brazil, the leaders of Columbia, Guatemala and Peru proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with poverty eradication as a sustainable objective of development. Elly Burhaini Faizal, The Jakarta Post