The stakes of the UN conference on financing for development
From December 3 to 6, 2024, United Nations members met in New York to negotiate the first draft of a text to be adopted at the Seville Conference on Financing for Development in July 2025. This article analyses the content of the proposed recommendations, highlighting the most relevant ones and areas for improvement.
Analysis by Antoinette Van Haute
What are the stakes of the Seville Conference?
The stakes are enormous: debates on development financing encompass not only development aid, but also national and international taxation, debt, international trade, the international financial system, and global economic governance. Seville could therefore help to redress the power imbalances between countries of the Global North and the Global South in all these areas.
To begin negotiations on the final text of the Seville Conference, the United Nations published in November an initial document called " Elements Paper ," which includes proposed recommendations that could be included in a first draft of the official document, scheduled for publication in January 2025. Let's analyze the most relevant recommendations from this Elements Paper , and its most notable shortcomings.