08 ISSUE IV
MARCH 2025
MARCH 2025
Drawing up a budget for the world
Two New School students reflect on their experience at the United Nations in New York City observing negotiations ahead of the UN’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development.
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By Mara Levi and Nikki Veltkamp
We’re in the final year of a two-year Masters at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School. For our final capstone project, we decided to forgo a thesis and work on a Practicum. This usually involves working with a faculty member to receive field-based experience with a client organization. In our case, it was with Global Policy Forum, a renowned INGO monitoring global policymaking processes at the United Nations (UN). For a faculty supervisor, we were fortunate to be paired with Barbara Adams, who teaches here and has vast experience with the UN, transnational activism, and the political economy of international governance institutions.
In the UN system, conferences are a central mechanism for progressing on complex issues. They shape UN Policies and decision-making. They are typically established through resolutions by the General Assembly and organized by intergovernmental committees, often over a year or longer.
This is how we found ourselves, two student researchers, at UN headquarters in midtown Manhattan every day for four days in mid-February. We were attending the third Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) session for the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) to be held in Sevilla, Spain at the end of June and beginning of July. That conference aims to strengthen global financing mechanisms and promote sustainable development to better address the challenges of our time.
To put it mildly, it was an insightful experience. Sitting in on three-hour negotiations for the first time was intense, with each member state having only five minutes to express their support or opposition to the Zero Draft, which basically means one gets to see whether countries want to strengthen or weaken parts of the draft.
As we closely observed more plenary sessions of PrepCom, it became clear that this was quite an unusual moment – the negotiations were still in their early stages, yet Member States (how UN members are officially known; every country has one vote) were already making detailed line-by-line edits to the draft. Entering the process with an idealistic yet critical vision of the UN in the back of our heads, we were quick to realize that the session was not going to be showcasing the cooperation and international governance one might wish to see in a world shaped by global challenges. Some Member States, especially those commonly referred to as “developing” countries - even though it was and continues to be their exploitation that is allowing for the “development” of others - sought to use the session to express a desire to strengthen multilateral cooperation. On the other hand, those with the upper hand in global wealth pushed for their national interests. This became particularly clear in the realm of climate change, the major cross-cutting issue of our time.
Finance gaps have long been identified as the biggest barrier to climate action, with an estimated US $1.3 trillion per year currently missing to fund climate action in developing countries. Nevertheless, countries could agree to no more than a financing goal of US $300 billion per year at last year’s climate conference, COP29, and it is far from clear if this undoubtedly insufficient goal is even going to be met. It thus came as no surprise that for many countries, especially those already facing the impacts of climate change, Financing for Development is closely tied to matters of climate change adaptation and mitigation. These countries called for stronger acknowledgment of climate change in all sections of the negotiations, including those where the zero drafts did not refer to it, such as in the Trade (II-D) and the Science, Technology, Innovation, and Capacity-building (II-G). They urged differentiation between climate finance and development assistance and sought to strengthen climate finance instruments (e.g., by expanding debt-for-climate swaps or tying the suspension of IMF surcharges and the expansion of Special Drawing Rights to climate-related issues). In contrast, developed countries resisted these efforts, citing national sovereignty and the limits of international financial institutions' mandates - a predictable but ironic position given that these same countries contributed the vast majority of emissions that are causing climate change.
What was interesting was to observe that not all developing countries approached the issue the same way. Some advocated for ambitious changes, while others took a more pragmatic approach, seeking improvements to the current system rather than aiming for something new. For example, some developing countries (Colombia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania) expressed support for reviewing the current debt architecture, an issue closely linked to climate change, through existing financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, whereas others (Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan) strongly oppose these institutions to lead on such reviews. It is clear that these Member States agree on what needs to be done, but it opens up the question of how to achieve their common goals. What united all those pushing for a stronger draft was the acknowledgment that to leave no one behind (a central promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), national interests cannot be placed above multilateral cooperation. Despite the tension between this position and the pushback by developed countries throughout the PrepCom, we found the issue of digitalization and technology to be different, maybe even a reason for slight optimism when it comes to multilateral cooperation.
Digitalization and technology are significant in Financing for Development, since the digital divide, both between and within countries, is a growing concern, as the world increasingly relies on digital public goods and infrastructure. Throughout the FfD4 negotiations, Member States frequently brought up emerging technologies, such as AI, and the need for enhancing technical capacities. The lack of existing regulations and general uncertainty about the impact of these technologies on labor, business, and development, among others, led many Member States to call for a stronger mandate for better governance, regardless of their position in the world. Developing countries, in particular, advocated for increased financial support to build their digital capacities in the sections on Domestic and Public Resources (II-A) and Private Business and Finance (II-B). At the same time, both developed and developing countries pushed for coordinated responses to digitalization in the context of Financing for Development in section II-G on Science, Technology, Innovation, and Capacity Building.
Nevertheless, some countries sought to limit this mandate, particularly regarding the flow of domestic resources, one recurrent reason being that many developing countries do not want to commit their resources to digitalization if they lack the capacity (e.g., Yemen, Guatemala, and Brazil). Over time, this is likely to perpetuate tensions between developing and developed countries as the former will continue to call for financial assistance from the latter. Another potential issue is that once the developing countries have come up with their own frameworks and regulations, they might lose interest in discussing digitalization and technology in the multilateral space. For now, however, Member States seemed more willing to strengthen the UN mandate about FfD4 on digitalization and technology than about any other aspect discussed at the PrepCom.
Taken together, the issues of climate change and digitalization highlight major tensions and trends within international cooperation on Financing for Development. It is important to keep in mind that while we analyzed tensions among Member States at the FfD4 PrepCom, stakeholders from UN agencies such as UN Women and UNICEF also faced their own challenges elsewhere. Tracking all the ongoing processes at the UN, let alone concurrent changes in national politics, is difficult, but, no process happens in a vacuum, and certain pushback in FfD4 can be attributed to external circumstances.
It will be fascinating to see how the FfD4 process will evolve in the coming months, with more PrepCom sessions and rounds of negotiations to be held ahead of the FfD4 Conference in Seville (30 June – 3rd July). The Third PrepCom was expected to be an initial round of comments, with more detailed line-by-line negotiations after the release of the first revised outcome document on March 10. The intersessional meetings between Third and Fourth PrepCom are also expected to be closed to civil society organizations. To have gotten the opportunity to sit in on a PrepCom that did largely evolve into line editing is thus a unique moment, offering insight into the rifts between different positions regarding the role of multilateral cooperation in international financial architecture.
Mara Levi is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.
Nikki Veltkamp is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.