SDG 9 - Widerstandsfähige Infrastruktur und nachhaltige Industrialisierung

On the eve of the (virtual) United Nations 75th anniversary event and the Global Goals Week authors presented this year's global civil society report Spotlight on Sustainable Development.

 

If you missed the virtual launching event you can watch the recording here.

Find the report & further information here.

 

Global Civil Society Report on the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs

New York, 18 September 

The COVID-19 crisis and the worldwide measures to tackle it have deeply affected communities, societies and economies around the globe. The implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been put at high risk in many countries. COVID-19 is a global wake-up call for enhanced international cooperation and solidarity.

But calls for “building back better” by just pushing the reset button will not change the game. We need structural changes [...]

By Corina Rodríguez Enríquez, DAWN

 

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been promoted as mechanisms to expand financing for development, opening up business opportunities to the private sector in sectors where public provision for decades was considered essential to guarantee rights. The healthcare sector is one good example.

Evidence from different countries of the global South shows that, instead of improving the coverage and quality of health provision and making it more efficient, PPPs have contributed to deepening the economic concentration [...]

By Daniel Bertossa, Public Services International (PSI)

 

Around the world, frontline public service workers continue to receive praise and support for their vital role in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. Yet these underfunded public services and brutal working conditions are not inevitable. They are the result of decades of deliberate erosion of our public services through budget cuts, privatization and understaffing.

Undermining the quality and accessibility of public services has been part of a deliberate strategy to loosen the [...]

Global civil society report assesses structural obstacles and institutional gaps in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda

New York, 8 July 2019: “The world is off-track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Most governments have failed to turn the transformational vision of the 2030 Agenda into real transformational policies. Even worse, xenophobia and authoritarianism are on the rise in a growing number of countries.”

“The implementation of the 2030 Agenda is not just a matter of better policies. It requires more holistic and more sweeping shifts in how power is vested, including through institutional and governance [...]

By David Boys, Public Services International (PSI)

Public infrastructure and services are the bedrock of our societies – they help families thrive, they allow communities and businesses to grow and prosper, they provide support for people in need. They include health and social services; education; water and sanitation; energy; public transport; roads; land use planning (both urban and rural); justice, security and more. These core government responsibilities are one of the main guarantors of fulfilling human rights and reducing poverty [...]

By Public Services International (PSI)

Quality public services are the foundation of a fair society and a strong economy. Such services make our communities and economies more equitable, resilient to downturn and disaster, and protect the youngest, sick, unemployed, disabled, aged and vulnerable. Quality public services are among the State’s primary mechanisms for fulfilling its obligations for the realization of human rights, gender equality and social justice. They are key to the implementation of the goals and targets of the [...]

by Prabir Purkayastha [fn] A longer version was originally published on https://newsclick.in/. [/fn]

Machine algorithms are taking over decisions that were made by governments, business and even ourselves.

Today, algorithms decide who should get a job, which part of a city needs to be developed, who should get into a college, and in the case of a crime, what should be the sentence. It is not the super intelligence of robots that is the threat to life as we know [...]

By IT for Change [fn] Extracted from the Submission to UNCTAD's Intergovernmental Group of Experts on E-Commerce and the Digital Economy by members of the Research Network on Policy Frameworks for Digital Platforms – Moving from Openness to Inclusion, led by Anita Gurumurthy, Geneva, April 2018. The complete text is available at: http://unctad.org/meetings/en/Contribution/tdb_ede2018_c03_ITforChange_en.pdf [/fn]

In a platformizing economy, e-commerce platforms need to be understood not merely as marketplaces, but also as digital ecosystems that provide a new architecture for the [...]

If the spread of ICTs only brings good things there is no need to regulate it and the only question is how to accelerate its expansion so that everybody in the world can benefit from it. Thus, under SDG 9 on industrialization and innovation, target 9.c commits to "significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020."

This formulation is a bit awkward. It [...]