By Futuro en Común
We are in a truly complex global context where the pandemic and its consequences, the deepening of inequalities, the climate emergency and the war in Ukraine show the limits of our development model. Futuro en Común has consistently indicated that #Agenda2030 should be our compass guiding towards a sustainable development model and global justice.
#NextGeneration Funds’ ambition is to build back better, aiming at economic and social resilience. However, we are seeing how the concrete application of these funds recovers (a model that has already proven obsolete) but does not transform (towards a new resilient, sustainable and fair model).
The Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD) approach allows for identifying whether all the resources and all the policies are rowing in the same direction or one against the other. Sadly, many projects with opposite objectives are promoted, and even worse, many of them projects with objectives contrary to sustainable development. By analysing the #NextGeneration Funds under this perspective, it is clear they are not tackling the causes of the multidimensional crises in which we find ourselves. The reason is that they continue to place economic growth as the central driving goal, with the increase in competitiveness as the way to achieve it.
Furthermore, these Funds strongly focus on the EU’s need to achieve strategic autonomy and reduce its dependence on some global value chains. It does not consider its proposals’ impact on other countries, specifically on the most vulnerable populations in the countries of the global south, whether in regard to global warming, respect for Human Rights or conditions of economic dependency.
The #NextTransformation we need to achieve the SDGs should:
- promote the proposals that have not only a positive economic impact but also social and environmental ones.
- take into account their impact in Europe, but also in the rest of the world (especially in the global south), and
- not only think about their impact today but also in the future.
This is the great change that must take place and that we ask for.
