The Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.

More generally, each country will need to monitor its progress toward each SDG, and revise its approach as needed. This will require diligence from all policymakers. But the potential return on investment, not least a better planet for generations to come, is enormous.‘Project Syndicate’ published 6 June 2017 the article ‘A Scientific Method for the SDGs’, inspired by the ICSUorganized study of how different goals and targets relate to one another, and how an independent analytical framework was developed to help leaders prioritize policies within their own countries and came up with SDG-specific insights for world leaders to follow: A Guide to SDG Interactions: from Science to Implementation.

"We can build cities like Rome, New York, ….. or put a man on the moon and create microchips". Science could actually save the world, because it can help us solve our greatest health and development problems. Those problems are at the heart of the UN’s SDG’s. But comprehensiveness can come at the expense of effective action. Few people can actually name all of the SDGs, much less explain how every country can achieve them over the next 13 years. And some SDGs have reinforcing relationships, whereby achieving one will make it easier to achieve others or, conversely, some SDGs may be in conflict, if progress in one area comes at the expense of others.

Reflecting upon the present Pact for the Future (UN) negotiations, as well as related discussions in the Executive Boards of the World Bank and IMF, this dialogue explored ways in which discussions on international financial architecture reform within New York and Washington, D.C. could be made more complementary, particularly in light of the generational opportunity provided by the 22-23 September 2024 Summit of the Future (where, for instance, Chapters 1 and 5 of the summit’s chief outcome document, the “Pact for the Future”, was spoken to how a strengthened and innovated World Bank and IMF can help countries to better deliver on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development).

This event was convened by the Stimson Center (in connection with its 35th anniversary commemoration) and timed to coincide with the World Bank-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings (15-21 April 2024).

In his opening statement Jean-Pierre Diserens, Secretary-General of CIFA stressed that, thanks to the collaboration with ECOSOC and G77 it was the first time for CIFA to meet in New York. He further urged participants to have a frank and open discussion on how CIFA can assist the UN on reaching its Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The meeting addressed 6 major themes including:

I. Fighting poverty is big business. But, who profits the most?
Answers to that question were not clear cut. But it was clear that besides aid, there is need to allow developing countries to have access to trade, use their own national resources, and authorize the return of funds sent abroad to their countries of origin.

II. Financing for development (FFD)
FFD is at the root of UN priorities for financing the 2030 Agenda and needs to be reinforced.

1. valuation by supply and demand. This also applies to labor, so that its market value is the real value;
2. the efficiency of the free market. The expectation was that a market without government intervention would automatically come into equilibrium and come to full employment, because the market does not tolerate waste. Inflation was only expected from government intervention.

Capitalist values lived on through the dissemination of libertarian ideas, in particular through the highly popular novel of Ayn Rand’s bestseller Atlas Shrugged, “a capitalist manifesto” that depicts a utopian picture of capitalist, transforming society as a whole and reduce all interpersonal relations to money trade in contrast to human capital, the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value (World Bank, World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work).