Photo © Marie Jacquemin
Today’s global financial system is failing people and the planet. Many governments, financial institutions, intergovernmental organisations and incumbent economic systems continue to accelerate the climate and biodiversity crises, exacerbate poverty, entrench inequality and injustice and are unfit to fund the transformation urgently needed to address these compounding and interlocking crises.
The provision of grant-based assistance from developed to developing countries is inadequate. Many developed countries have yet to meet the annual 0.7% (of their GDP) for development assistance, a target agreed prior to the UNCED conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992 or deliver on the UNFCCC goal of USD 100 billion for adaptation and mitigation in poor countries. In reality, much higher targets for grant-based and other assistance flows from developed countries are needed for climate and development.
In November 2022, following Bridgetown-inspired discussions at COP27 in Egypt on the need for global architecture reform, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Paris will host a conference on “a new financial pact with the global South”. This Summit is taking place on 22nd and 23rd June 2023.
The Summit’s framing centers on the ideas for the need for significant scaled-up financing for climate change, sustainability and poverty reduction. Against a backdrop of other global processes and decision-making taking place on these questions, the Summit has been designed as a ‘stepping stone’ or ‘boost’ on these issues to build consensus and provide a ‘wide platform’ for discussions. The overarching objective is to “set up an architecture that will be robust enough to deliver more resources, protect them from economic or geopolitical shocks, and meet the strongest standards of fairness in the international community, resuming a steady long-term trend towards global poverty reduction.”
While we share the French government’s concerns about urgent development and climate financing needs and global economic architecture reform, it has and continues to expressly and consistently reject transformative proposals for global economic architecture reform and financing for development called for by coalitions of governments of the global South and Southern social justice movements. Instead, it is championing solutions that only deepen the status quo.
The Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris is an iteration of that approach, platforming proposals that largely rely on instruments that create or further intensify sovereign debt, deepen privatization and financialization of development and climate finance and are rooted in a market-based, extractive ideology. These proposals ultimately entrench the illegitimately-gained power of major creditors and polluters, as well as empower deeply undemocratic international finance institutions.
Today’s global financial system is failing people and the planet. The Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact must acknowledge the urgent need to phaseout all fossil fuels. We call for concrete outcomes from the summit:
- Shift Financial Flows
- No Climate Justice Without Debt Justice
- No Debt Swaps / Debt Cancellation
- Make Polluters Pay
- Tax The Rich
- Stop Tax Dodging
- Deliver Climate Finance through the UNFCCC
