By Nicholas Booth and Beniam Gebrezghi for the Daily Star.

Earlier this month, the world took a momentous step forward: the 193 member states of the UN reached an agreement on the new sustainable development agenda that will be adopted this September by world leaders at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York. Concluding a negotiating process that spanned more than two years, the agenda features 17 new sustainable development goals (SDGs) that aim to end poverty, promote prosperity and people’s wellbeing while protecting the environment by 2030.

Civil society is now a key partner in every area of UNDP’s work in Asia and the Pacific.

That agenda is set out in the draft outcome document for the forthcoming General Assembly meeting, titled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” It makes repeated references to the need for a broad global partnership to ensure effective implementation of this ambitious new agenda. Throughout the document, the civil society is repeatedly and consistently mentioned as a core part of this partnership, including an explicit target in the new goals themselves to “encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships.”

Precisely because of civil society’s role in representing the interests of the poorest, most marginalised and excluded groups, its role seems more urgent than ever before in every aspect of a new agenda which seeks to ensure that no one is left behind, whether in terms of access to health and education, a better environment and more effective action against climate change, and gender equality. And its role in ensuring transparency and accountability of state institutions, facilitating access to justice and access to information, and as a dialogue partner in conflict transformation makes it central to the new goal on peaceful and inclusive societies, one of the most innovative and important of the new pledges to which the world will sign up in September.

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Photo: worldthatchangestheworld.wordpress.com.