On Financing the SDGs, Privatization, and Human Rights

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Sustainable Development Goals face an uphill battle. That’s the message that many left with after a recent conversation about “Financing the SDGs, Privatization, and Human Rights” with Jeffrey Sachs and Philip Alston on January 30.

Every seat in the auditorium was filled as Sachs, the special advisor to the UN Secretary-General for SDGs, and Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, converged and diverged over the values of human rights, SDG frameworks, and China, among other topics. The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment hosted the event at Columbia Law School’s Jerome Greene Hall.

“U.S. domination is coming to an end right now,” said Sachs.

What that end looks like, he said — whether chaos is inevitable, or if something positive can come out of it — is the central question that the U.S. government and international community seem to be grappling with right now. Finding the answer entails understanding the space of the the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Sachs explained that, historically, these institutions have been used to reaffirm American power and policy. Since the U.S. Reagan administration of the 1980s that has largely meant the shrinking of governments and the shift towards privatization.

When it comes to the SDGs, however, Alston and Sachs agreed that cutting back on government spending would not be the solution to the world’s most pressing issues.

“Privatization is not the answer,” said Alston. “We need to start looking at it infinitely more critically.”

Alston said he had only recently come to this conclusion that it is not solely a question of meeting a need; the framework by which services are supplied is important, too. Indeed, both speakers agreed that the rights framework should be fundamental to how people understand the provision and realization of these public goods.

Sachs put it bluntly: “The human-rights approach provides a moral edge to this. Child education shouldn’t be considered a favor. It is a right.”

Furthermore, corporations that are hired for these privatized projects are often loath to approach their work in such terms.

“Corporations talk in very general terms to avoid taking on any human-rights obligations,” said Alston.

This ultimately threatens what governments hope to achieve when contracting these entities — especially when it is revealed that a particular contract is not profitable and a company fails to fulfill its end of the bargain.

At the same time, the SDGs need investment, and many low-income countries simply do not have the taxable income to oversee these goals. While privatization is one way to fill this funding gap, Sachs proposed another.

“I want the rich world to pay for the poor world to implement these things,” he said.

The reality, Sachs said, is that most low-income countries simply do not have the taxable income to meet SDG obligations. He suggested that rich countries can raise 30 percent of their GDP in taxes while low-income countries, which already need more investment, can only make 10 percent.

At the same time, he observed, there has never been much of a political will around drumming up global assistance, and as the United States shrinks back into “America First” policy, it seems less and less likely that multilaterals are trending in the right direction.

During the Q&A that followed, the two experts disagreed on how China’s foreign development projects should be understood.

Alston, who had recently been invited to the country to assess its poverty alleviation programming, said China’s human-rights record in areas other than poverty has been less than exemplary; he suggested that Chinese foreign investments share equally challenging and divergent goals, helping to build infrastructure in developing nations on one hand, but perhaps leaving them trapped when China calls those debts in.

Sachs, in turn, said he was loathe to vilify China and start a new cold war. For him, these projects are part of a normal stage of development where emerging countries build up their international networks.

— Alexandra Feldhausen MIA ’19

Watch the complete event >