Beginnings The creation of GPEDC was mandated by the 2011 Busan High Level Forum (HLF) on Aid Effectiveness. – may be regarded as GPEDC's founding document. It particularly recognised the importance of relationships between developing countries (South-South co-operation) and welcomed a broader range of non-governmental actors: "private sector" or profit-making bodies as well as more purely socially- and environmentally-purposed ("
civil society") organisations. It sketched a road-map wherein the existing
OECD Working Party on Aid Effectiveness (WP-EFF) would hand over to a GPEDC directorate in 2012, with a support team provided jointly by the OECD and
UNDP. The co-chairs that emerged were
Justine Greening,
Armida Alisjahbana, and
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: government ministers of, respectively, the UK, Indonesia and Nigeria. The co-chairs met in October, and the first full meeting of the Steering Committee took place in December of that year. The meeting was well-attended and lively, The wide range of participants gave some credibility to GPEDC's ambition to be a more inclusive global partnership than its precursor, but the absence of official representation by China, and tepid or ambivalent participation by India, South Africa and Brazil, weakened attempts to focus on the roles of middle-income countries (MICs) and South-South co-operation.
Progress indicators and results, 2010-2015 Having been created to pursue the commitments of the 2011 Busan forum, GPEDC attempted to distill these commitments into a set of indicators and targets for monitoring and assessing progress. The first monitoring cycle was projected to run from 2010 to 2015, following on from the monitoring of the
Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which had taken place from 2005 to 2010. However, for GPEDC it was more difficult to devise a limited number of suitable indicators because its participants were more numerous, various and changeable. The process of devising, testing and agreeing the details of the indicators took years. Although an initial draft was agreed in June 2012, the indicators were still not definitively finalized by 2016 when it was time to report on the cycle. Accordingly, some baselines were late or missing, and some targets were inapplicable or largely irrelevant. The following table summarises the results reported by GPEDC in 2016.
Second High-Level Meeting, Nairobi 2016 At the second High-Level Meeting, at Nairobi in 2016, the participants formally affirmed and clarified GPECD's relevance under the
2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the Sustainable Development Goals having replaced the
Millennium Development Goals the previous year). The meeting was attended by over four thousand people from more than 150 countries, but very few government ministers. The
BRICS countries were even more sparsely represented than in the 2014 Mexico meeting. It showed a mixed picture of improvements and regressions. Regarding the new monitoring of SDG Indicator 17.16, it found that 45% countries "reported progress towards inclusive, transparent and accountable multi-stakeholder partnerships". A "
Senior Level Meeting" of GPEDC was held in the margins of an HLPF meeting in New York, July 2019. It celebrated GPEDC's creation of a Knowledge Sharing Platform and compendium of good practices, and also the establishment of a Business Leaders' Caucus and a set of "Principles for Effective Private Sector Engagement" (the "Kampala Principles"). The co-chairs acknowledged the "mixed picture" of the monitoring results and "lack of progress in the 'unfinished business' agenda" (i.e. meeting the commitments made by the 2005 Paris Declaration and subsequent high-level meetings). They encouraged proposals for reviewing GPEDC's monitoring function, and creating a Global Action Plan in time for the Third High Level Meeting. == References ==