LESSONS FROM BRAZIL: Applying the U N’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
As reported in Citiscope (25 July 2017), the United Nations recently hosted a review of progress on the SDGs, the broad anti-poverty framework that went into effect last year. The Brazilian government was among dozens of countries to take part, presenting a national report that under normal circumstances could be expected to rouse little excitement — but which this year turned out to be controversial.
Initially the report was going to be the product of close consultations with NGOs and local governments that work on the ground. But ultimately, the government largely sidelined those external voices, Once this became clear, activists took matters into their own hands. They drafted a parallel report, the Relatório Luz (or Spotlight Report), presented last week across the street from U. N. Headquarters.
Despite the challenge of working without cooperation from Brasília, SDG advocates in the country are pressing on, focusing their attention on several strategies for working at the subnational level. Their recent experience translating the U. N.’s agenda to the Brazilian context offers three lessons applicable to any country.
The seeming unwillingness of the Brazilian national government to engage with the country’s local governments and civil society groups in the run-up to a major U. N. gathering is a step backward for a country known for including mayors and activists alike in its official delegations to international conferences. At last year’s Habitat III conference, for example, activists who pushed for a controversial position known as the “right to the city” were nevertheless official Brazilian delegates. Indeed, the country’s diplomats defended the plank in the conference’s outcome document, the New Urban Agenda.
Lesson 2: Go metropolitan
Anotbher innovation from the Brazilian experience is not just “municipalizing” the SDGs but also “metropolitanizing” them. Brazil’s major cities are surrounded by smaller municipalities, but the issues affecting everyday citizens don’t restrict themselves to the city limits. Rio de Janeiro, for example, is home to about 6 million people. Add in the other municipalities that surround it, and that number jumps to 12 million people. The map above by the NGO Casa Fluminense shows the 21 municipalities in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro showing the percentage of commuters who work in Rio proper and each municipality’s performance on indicators for urban mobility. Cities’ traffic woes, for example, stem from regional commuting patterns as lower-wage workers live in peripheral municipal areas and travel into the central city each day.
Lesson 3: Embrace the apolitical
So when the SDGs entered the scene, they offered convenient external validation of Casa Fluminense’s ambitions. As an international agenda agreed by 193 countries, the SDGs are ostensibly free of any political affiliation at a difficult time for Brazilian politics. While their work is just getting started, Casa Fluminense envisions an observatory that would track the SDGs at the metropolitan level, similar to how the Sustainable Cities Programme follows a set of indicators at the municipal level. Ultimately that would require robust data collection not just in the central city but in the peripheral, often poorer, municipalities that make up the rest of the metropolitan area.
Read the full story: Gregory Scruggs, “3 lessons from Brazil on how to deliver on the SDGs — sans national government,” Citiscope (25 July 2017)
