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14 January 2025

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 170 (Special Issue): Reimagining financing for the SDGs - from filling gaps to shaping finance

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are dangerously off track. The prevailing “gap-filling” approach to SDG financing has proven inadequate, failing to deliver the scale, impact or equity required. Global efforts remain fixated on mobilizing additional financing rather than embedding the SDGs at the core of economic and financial systems. Blended finance, often heralded as a silver bullet, has fallen short: public resources dominate blended deals, often de-risking private initiative in lower-risk, lower-impact projects. To redirect this trajectory, the international financing architecture must be reshaped around the SDGs.

04 December 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 168: Net Wealth Taxes: How they can help fight inequality and fund sustainable development

Ensuring effective taxation of wealth is a tool to address inequality, increase progressivity in the tax system, and raise domestic revenues to finance sustainable development. This policy brief outlines the advantages and disadvantages of net wealth taxes, lays out some policy instruments that help in their administration, and explains why and how international tax cooperation can aid countries in successfully levying net wealth taxes.

04 September 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 164: The integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals as a lever for trust, institutional resilience and innovation

Renewed efforts in enhancing policy coherence are required to leverage synergies at different levels and unleash the transformations needed to achieve the SDGs. However, public entities face challenges in identifying and leveraging SDG interdependencies and translating relevant plans into action. There are actionable ways to support integration and address existing barriers to unlock SDG progress in a way that contributes to building trust, enhancing resilience and advancing innovation.
23 August 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 163: Policy Choices for Leaving No One Behind (LNOB): Overview From 2023 SDG Summit Commitments

Prioritizing leaving no one behind (LNoB), 31 countries have introduced new policies and commitments aimed at eradicating poverty, enhancing human capital, addressing uneven access to basic necessities, improving decision-making processes on sustainable development and ensuring no country or locality is left behind.

23 August 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 162: Multilevel Governance for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Effective climate action requires multilevel governance and coordination across national, regional, and local levels of government, as well as with non-state actors, to maximize synergies and ensure inclusive, coherent approaches. By integrating equity into governance arrangements at all levels, global, national and local stakeholders can foster a more effective and sustainable response to climate change.

11 March 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 158: How can we accelerate transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Insights from the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report

Progress on the SDGs requires integrated approaches operating at a systemic level that address multiple goals simultaneously. Interventions toward progress on a given target must also generate positive synergies with other targets, while resolving tradeoffs. Transformative change does not follow a linear path, and policy needs will vary across contexts and phases of transformation. Policies should respond to impediments unique to each phase – emergence, acceleration, or stabilization.

11 March 2024

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 157: How Can Governments Strengthen Their Relationships with Society to Meet the Sustainable Development Goals? Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked innovation and experimentation in public institutions. Institutional and policy changes can improve Governments’ relationships with other actors and highlight opportunities to accelerate SDG progress. Renewed social contracts, built on trust, are crucial if societies are to meet today’s compounding challenges, better respond to future crises, and achieve the SDGs.

29 December 2023

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 156: Enhancing Public Institutions’ Risk-informed Communication to address Multifaceted Crises for Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Climate Action

The ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable information to the public and responders in crises situations is central to risk-informed communication. This brief seeks to examine how to strengthen risk-informed communication for addressing multifaceted crises management, disaster risk reduction, and climate action. It identifies key challenges for strengthening government institutions that are responsible for effective communication, provides guidance on how to integrate risk-informed communication strategies into disaster management and proposes policy recommendations.

08 September 2023

UN DESA Policy Brief Special Issue: Financing the Sustainable Development Goals through mission-oriented development banks

There is an urgent need for channeling long-term risk-tolerant finance towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper argues that National Development Banks (NDBs) and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) can play a crucial role in mobilizing the needed capital.

06 October 2022

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 139: Strengthening Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Climate Action through Risk-informed Governance

Ensuring risk-informed governance for climate action requires citizen-centric approach through the whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches including the leverage of government innovation and frontier technologies for DRR and resilience.

02 February 2022

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 128: Addressing climate change through sport

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times. Sports plays an important role as part of the solution.

14 January 2022

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 126: Partnering with the private sector towards a future of sustainable transport

Documenting more evidence around post-COVID 19 transport measures can provide useful references in revamping transport systems.

03 December 2021

UN DESA Policy Brief No. 123: Sandboxing and experimenting digital technologies for sustainable development

Institutions and regulators could consider investing in requisite resources and building capacities in deploying sandboxes and experiments, with the medium- and long-term aims to advance agile, responsive and resilient approaches in adopting new technologies and in preparing for the future of digital government and sustainable development.

01 October 2021

UN/DESA Policy Brief #116: A view of changes in institutional arrangements for SDG implementation at the national level since 2015

There is a trend of broadening and deepening institutionalization of the 2030 Agenda. Yet institutionalization at the country level remains a work in progress – with many countries still putting in place or adjusting parts of their institutional systems for SDG implementation.

24 September 2021

UN/DESA Policy Brief #115: Horizontal and vertical integration are more necessary than ever for COVID-19 recovery and SDG implementation

Integrated policy-making has been critical in responding effectively to the pandemic, and will be paramount in post-COVID recovery to realize the Sustainable Development Goals.

30 April 2021

UN/DESA Policy Brief #103: Transformational partnerships and partnership platforms

Multi-stakeholder collaboration has proven to be critical to tackle the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and will be essential in the recovery efforts to ‘build back better’ towards more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies.

17 February 2021

UN/DESA Policy Brief #92: Leveraging digital technologies for social inclusion

COVID-19 is accelerating the pace of digital transformation. In so doing, it is opening the opportunities for advancing social progress and fostering social inclusion, while simultaneously exacerbating the risk of increased inequalities and exclusion of those who are not digitally connected.

21 December 2020

UN/DESA Policy Brief #89: Strengthening Data Governance for Effective Use of Open Data and Big Data Analytics for Combating COVID-19

Governments are using big data analytics to get prepared, react effectively, and develop both short term and long-term strategies. Yet, increasing public concerns about data privacy and security put in jeopardy public trust in data collection, use and dissemination by government, business and relevant non-government institutions.

11 June 2020

UN/DESA Policy Brief #78: Achieving the SDGs through the COVID-19 response and recovery

The impact of COVID-19 on SDG achievement will only be known with certainty in the months to come, but assessments for 2020 are bleak. If responses are ad hoc, underfunded and without a view to long-term goals, decades of progress stand to be reversed. However, as countries begin to move towards recovery, coherent and comprehensive actions can place the world on a robust trajectory towards achieving sustainable development.

14 May 2020

UN/DESA Policy Brief #73: The impact of COVID-19 on sport, physical activity and well-being and its effects on social development

This policy brief highlights the challenges COVID-19 has posed to both the sporting world and to physical activity and well-being, including for marginalized or vulnerable groups. It further provides recommendations for Governments and other stakeholders, as well as for the UN system, to support the safe reopening of sporting events, as well as to support physical activity during the pandemic and beyond.