North‐South Negotiations about Financing for Development: State, Society and Market in the Global Age
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Author | Dena Freeman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12551 |
North-South Negotiations about Financing for
Development: State, Society and Market in the
Global Age
Dena Freeman
London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract
In contemporary global politics different actors seek to create contrasting world orders through the existing mechanisms of
global deliberation and policy making. This article draws on the anthropology of policy to elucidate some of the different
potential world orders that are being discussed today. Developing the concept of ‘policy vision’, the article seeks to bring into
focus the different policy visions currently being proposed by the countries of the North and those of the South in global pol-
icy negotiations at the United Nations. To do this it critically scrutinizes the divergent North-South positions in the negotia-
tions leading up to the 2015 UN Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa and draws out their divergent visions
of alternative world orders. The conclusion sets these alternative world orders within Dani Rodrik’s‘political trilemma of the
global economy’and considers their implications for the future of state, society and market in the global age.
Policy Implications
•A forum or working group to discuss the nature of the future world order should be established at the United Nations.
•The G77 should organize a commission to review their view of a desirable future world order in light of the contemporary
context and should give serious consideration to the possibilities of democratic state-society relations at the global level.
•Civil society should organize wide-ranging consultations on possible future world orders, and feed their conclusions into
the UN forum or working group suggested above.
•Ultimately, decision-making about the nature of the future world order should be democratized through a global parlia-
ment in which the views of world citizens are represented.
This article is concerned with the way in which different
actors seek to create contrasting world orders through the
currently existing mechanisms of global deliberation and
policy making, and with the nature of the different potential
world orders that are being proposed. Drawing on the
anthropology of policy, this article seeks to bring into focus
the different world orders that are currently being proposed
by the countries of the North and those of the South in glo-
bal policy negotiations at the United Nations. While it is
well-known that discussions at the UN tend to be marked
by contrasting positions of the North and the South –as
represented by the Northern countries, the EU and the
OECD on the one hand, and the Southern countries and the
G77 on the other –there has been little analysis of the con-
tent of these positions taken as whole policy visions, and
even less consideration of the implications of these different
visions for global society as a whole.
In 2015 three major UN conferences took place –one on
Financing for Development in July, one on the Post-2015
Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development
Goals in September, and one on Climate Change in Decem-
ber. The agreements made at these three conferences set
out a new universal vision regarding sustainable develop-
ment. While the other conferences set out goals and targets,
it was at the Financing for Development (FFD) Conference
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that difficult negotiations took
place about what kind of activities should be carried out in
order to reach these goals and how these activities should
be funded. It is in these discussions about the so-called
‘means of implementation’that it is possible to view the dif-
ferent visions of the future world order called for by the
North and the South, even while they agreed on the shared
goals of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This
article thus draws on insights from the anthropology of pol-
icy to critically scrutinize the divergent North-South perspec-
tives in the negotiations leading up to the Addis Ababa
conference. The next section briefly discusses the anthropol-
ogy of policy and then develops the concept of ‘policy
vision’. The following two sections draw out the policy
visions of the North and the South from the negotiations at
the Addis FFD conference, and the conclusion considers the
implications of the two contrasting policy visions for the
future of state, society and market relations in the global
age.
Global Policy (2018) 9:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12551 ©2018 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 9 . Issue 3 . September 2018 377
Research Article
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