Trade and trade policy are central to transforming our world, the objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Trade can make a crucial contribution to sustainable development objectives, including economic growth and poverty reduction, but requires a coherent policy framework that links helping businesses harness trading opportunities with managing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of trade. Ensuring policy learning about how trade can contribute to the 2030 Agenda requires robust follow-up and review of the new global framework.

The first aim of this paper is to map where trade-related elements are found in the 2030 Agenda. The second aim is to describe the architecture for follow-up and review that could support these commitments, and to map where it exists or could be built. The 2030 Agenda in itself will not cause anything to change, let alone ensure policy coherence, but the review process might.

The contribution of trade to the 2030 Agenda is diffuse, which means follow-up and review will be a challenge, but it need not be overly burdensome, and it will be useful. This paper presents options for how progress towards these trade-related commitments could be reviewed over the next 15 years. The process would provide information on progress based on inputs from governments, civil society, and international organisations. This information would be reviewed through self-assessment by states themselves, through peer learning by other governments at the regional level (for example in United Nations regional commissions), and at the global level in multilateral agencies and the High-Level Political Forum, the apex of the follow-up and review process. The point of these review processes is not “evaluation,” but the sharing of experiences as a way to facilitate learning and policy improvement.

The paper identifies six clusters of trade-related elements in the 2030 Agenda. These elements range from improving access to trade finance to strengthening the multilateral trading system. They include commitments to the reform of perverse subsidies to agriculture, fisheries, and fossil fuels, and to ensuring that regional trade and investment agreements are coherent with sustainable development. For each cluster, the paper identifies options for indicators, where the necessary data are already collected (if they are) and where progress against these political commitments could be reviewed. The analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive, but to provide a starting point for further discussion.

The paper then presents the information from another perspective, focusing on the potential roles of the various peer review mechanisms. These mechanisms range from multilateral reviews, like the Trade Policy Review Mechanism of the World Trade Organization and UNCTAD’s voluntary policy peer reviews, to regional mechanisms that could review groups of states, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or regional economic integration organisations like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

The last part of the paper explains how the various reports could be brought together. Given the profusion of options for review mechanisms, an inter-agency task force on trade could provide an analytical synthesis of reporting and reviews useful for discussions at national, regional, and global levels on the interrelated effects and trade-offs between goals.

Follow-up and review of trade in the 2030 Agenda

Mechanisms for reviewing progress will be essential to the interconnected challenges of achieving the 2030 Agenda commitments. Having articulated the goals, states have to decide on whose agenda they should be placed. Follow-up mechanisms will enable the world to understand how things are working so that programme adjustments can be made. Review will also allow states to learn from the experience of others; and shed light on whether states are individually and collectively on track to meet their objectives.

Achieving the 2030 Agenda will require coherent systemic support, but most of the needed action on sustainable development is national, even local. In this sense, the new accountability paradigm is bottom-up not top-down. The great achievement of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change is that governments agreed to provide information on what they are doing on climate change, and to allow public scrutiny of such action as well as collective review. The Paris Agreement requires governments to notify their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC Secretariat, along with the steps being taken to implement those NDCs. These notification processes provide an incentive for governments to act to fulfil the expectations created by the notification. Success will require robust surveillance of these notifications at the international level. This type of reporting is about effort not outcomes, but a review process should also ask if objectives are being met and how to identify necessary follow-up. Follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda requires comparing what we have achieved when measured against our initial aspirations and comparing ourselves to our peers. Review should ask if we are meeting our own goals? Are we doing as well as similarly situated communities or countries? Are we trying as hard as we can? What can we learn from the achievements of others, and what can we learn from how others see us? Are we collectively doing enough to support each other in these efforts? What systemic followup is needed and from whom? These are the questions that countries, and the international community, should ask themselves.

The purpose of review mechanisms is, thus, to allow consideration of whether national law, policy, and implementation are consistent with each state’s aspirations for achieving the SDGs. But the 2030 Agenda is also a universal agenda, in at least two senses: the goals address all countries, at all levels of development, and in many cases will require collective efforts to solve trans-boundary problems (like illegal trade). Regional and global as well as national review will be needed, therefore, because what happens in one part of the world has effects in others, and because of the interrelated effects and trade-offs among the goals. Global review is also needed because countries in different regions or at the same level of development may face similar challenges and, hence, have lessons to share.

The 2030 Agenda is complex with many moving parts – 17 SDGs, dozens of targets, hundreds of indicators monitored by dozens of international organisations, and hundreds of think tanks and NGOs. The most important place to review implementation of the SDGs will be at the national level, and it will already be a challenge to facilitate engagement by a range of actors at this level. Regional reviews will allow comparison of similar countries, taking advantage of existing review mechanisms. The task of the new UN (United Nations) High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on sustainable development, therefore, is to identify obstacles to implementation of the 2030 Agenda and find ways to deal with them. Its role involves orchestration, (Abbott and Bernstein, 2015), providing incentives and a framework for everyone to participate, coordinating and encouraging the efforts of states, UN entities, business, NGOs – all the stakeholders who should be involved in the process.

Review should identify achievements and critical success factors, support countries in making informed policy choices, and mobilise the necessary means of implementation and partnerships. Mechanisms should build on existing platforms and processes, and be rigorous and evidence-based. We have looked for places where SDG-related data could be enhanced using existing reporting mechanisms, and where existing review mechanisms could continue to function as before, but with a stronger orientation to the 2030 Agenda. The essential objective is to ensure that the new system does not place an excessive burden on states. Our second aim in this paper, therefore, is to describe the architecture for follow-up and review, and to map where its elements exist or could be built.

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This paper builds on a working draft published in 2015. This version is substantially revised in light of the outcomes of the third international Financing for Development conference of July 2015 and the UN Summit in September 2015; and of the work of the UN Statistical Commission on indicators, and the Secretary-General’s January 2016 report on follow-up and review.