During the meeting with civil society organizations on Wednesday 18 June, Ambassador Kamau, OWG Co-Chair, gave an explanation of his expectations of the process going forward.
He stressed that the document would need to be shrunk without losing any of the “good suggestions.” These suggestions, even if they are not included in the limited number of targets, will be available when we move into intergovernmental negotiations in the General Assembly setting. They would also be useful when member states plan their national development strategies. The issue now was to work to strategize and “squeeze them down.”
Looking at interlinkages, it was absolutely important to understand that we have an integrated agenda for what are often “three-dimensional goals.” The next iteration will include what has come from the informal process, after which it will then be necessary to go through the same exercise again, looking for concise language.
In going through the goals and targets, it will be helpful to include values of measurements and to break a target into two separate targets, if necessary. It will also be important to come up with the top four or five most transformative targets under each goal. In going beyond this number, as he said “You’re forcing us to put all of that back into the annex” He continued that we should remember that if we have too many targets on everything on earth, they will become indicators in the annex. In referring to the means of implementation (MoI) Ambassador Kamau said what was wanted was “the top three or so targets that will help implement this process.” He stressed the importance of being disciplined and setting an early deadline to get the necessary work done.
He urged CSOs not to shy away from sharing their ideas with all governments stressing that they might never know where their constituency lies, as it is not always in the obvious place. He wished to maximize the value of having civil society involved throughout the process. Finally once the exercise has been done and CSOs have got their five top targets and three top MoI targets, with the rest being put in an annex, they should go through the “mind exercise” of asking themselves where are there inherent contradictions in the targets.
In the final session of the OWG, (which was also the “second” session as all the other meetings had been informal, Co-Chair Kamau said that the Co-Chairs did not expect to do more than make some “tweaks” to the document, which would include fewer targets and reflect a “better balance of the voices in this room.” The updated version of the document will be available on 30 June and the OWG will meet again for “informal informal” sessions on 9 – 11 July before its final session 14 – 18 July. After that the Co-Chairs would be responsible for any fine-tuning. He re-iterated that the report would include an annex of all the goals and targets that had been removed in the various iterations of the draft report, with a note as to why.
Finally, it has been learned that the report of the OWG should form a substantial part of the Secretary-General’s synthesis report, as it is the major contribution to the process by Member States. It should, however, be remembered that the Secretary-General’s report for the General Assembly Special Event was not as progressive as some of the documents that contributed to it, eg the report of the High Level Panel of Experts. At the end of the year, the next phase of the process will take place in the General Assembly, as part of the post-2015 development framework.