It’s no coincidence a global meeting with severely limited civil society participation produced disappointing outcomes. When the world’s most marginalised voices aren’t heard, the solutions advanced continue to serve the powerful – and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), held in Seville, Spain from 30 June to 3 July, again proved this to be true.

FFD4 had the difficult task of finding ways to bridge the gap between vital global commitments, such as climate targets and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the financing available to achieve them. But following a process in which civil society participation was tokenistic and marginal, the meeting’s outcomes were deeply unambitious. They reflected a broken approach that prioritises business interests over the rights of the world’s majority.

A crisis of unprecedented scale

The scale of the financing challenge can’t be overstated. The SDGs – a set of progressive goals to improve human lives and protect the planet, agreed by every United Nations (UN) member state in 2015 – are badly off track. Only 16 per cent of targets are on course to be achieved by the 2030 deadline, while climate change is having daily impacts and all evidence suggests that targets to limit global temperature rises will be missed.

Financing is a big part of the problem. For the SDGs, there’s an estimated annual funding gap of US$2.5 trillion to US$4 trillion, while the shortfall on what’s needed for countries to transition to low-carbon economies and adapt to climate impacts stands at US$1 trillion a year.

The current context is particularly challenging. The second Trump administration, with its brazenly transactional policies, is riding roughshod over the concept of a rules-based international order. Trump has shut down what was the world’s biggest aid agency, USAID, eliminating some US$23 billion of annual funding.

In March, the US government went further, saying it ‘rejected and denounced’ the SDGs, particularly because of their focus on climate and gender. This meant that for the first time since FFD meetings began in 2002, the outcome document was adopted without US support. Trump’s government pulled out of the meeting, objecting to proposed funding mechanisms, UN-led debt initiatives and even the word ‘gender’.

The USA offers the most egregious example, but other states, including France, Germany and the UK, are also cutting back on aid funding even as they talk up their multilateralism. They’re choosing to finance militarisation over addressing global challenges of poverty, exclusion and injustice. The rising influence of right-wing populism and nationalism in donor countries is driving a retreat from multilateralism towards narrow national interests.

Civil society: essential but excluded

One of the major failings of FFD4’s outcome document was the absence of any explicit commitment to protect civic space. This is a critical omission: over 70 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries where civic space is routinely repressed.

Civic space restrictions undermine civil society’s vital role in sustainable development and climate action. Around the world, groups formed by members of excluded communities challenge their marginalisation, while other civil society organisations support them when governments don’t, making a crucial difference to people’s lives. Civil society also scrutinises development decisions and spending, safeguarding against corruption, inefficiency and negative impacts. As many countries are experiencing democratic regression and a shift towards more authoritarian governance, civil society’s oversight role is becoming even more critical, but also much harder.

SDG17 recognises the importance of civil society partnerships to achieve all goals, while SDG16 emphasises the need to respect fundamental freedoms, including freedoms of association, expression and peaceful assembly, which make up civic space. The failure of FFD4’s outcome text to acknowledge the need to respect civic space will make it much harder to realise any of its recommendations.

Business over people

FFD4’s failure to acknowledge the importance of civic space resulted from its exclusion of civil society. Its processes kept reform proposals off the conference agenda and out of preparatory discussions on the outcome document, prompting a protest by civil society groups on the meeting’s final day.

Civil society still did what it could to make its voices heard. Feminist groups were active, successfully resisting moves to erase references to gender from the outcome text. The final declaration of the Civil Society Forum, which brought over a thousand people together ahead of the formal meeting, made clear civil society has a credible blueprint to fix the broken development model and the global financial architecture, including reforms to debt and tax regimes.

While civil society had the ideas, it didn’t get the audience. Despite all evidence that the business-as-usual approach is failing, the meeting didn’t break from failing policies. Global north states in particular remain unwilling to consider changes that might challenge their power and privilege.

While civil society was excluded, the private sector received red-carpet treatment. In so-called ‘multistakeholder spaces’, non-government participants were typically business representatives and private philanthropists. The International Business Forum played a particularly high-profile role, with national leaders encouraged to attend. Unwilling to take civil society’s ideas on board, states pinned their hopes on leveraging private sector finance. But this comes with pressure to liberalise tax regimes and soften business regulations, with impacts that run contrary to the SDGs, including on labour rights and climate, environmental and human rights standards.

A blueprint for change

Civil society will keep up the pressure for systemic reform, because it must. The UN, for all its flaws, remains the only space where every state can cooperate as equals to try to tackle global problems. If anything, the frustrating experience of Seville has made civil society more convinced and determined to advance its agenda for change.

Among the key issues is tax justice. Fairer taxation would make those with the most contribute more for sustainable development. Challenging tax avoidance – which currently costs around US$492 billion a year – would unlock vast resources.

Central to the campaign is the call for a global tax convention. De facto control of the global tax regime has long been in the hands of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of 38 wealthy economies, consistently accused of setting rules that favour richer countries and not doing enough to tackle low corporate tax and tax avoidance. But in 2022, despite heavy global north opposition, a UN General Assembly vote approved a proposal from African states to start negotiating a convention.

The treaty should be agreed by 2027, but faces a difficult path. The US government walked out of talks in February, urging others to follow. None have done so yet, but a group of powerful and wealthy states including Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan and the UK are seeking to block consensus. So far negotiations have focused on procedural issues, but when substantive discussions begin at the next round of talks in August, civil society will try to work to advance the convention, including through advocacy towards uncommitted states and building public understanding and support.

Civil society is also calling for wealth taxes. Such ideas are popular with the public across a wide range of countries but governments are largely reluctant, even as economic inequality soars and elite fortunes reach unprecedented levels. Taxes on the wealthiest people have fallen in recent decades, and in 2024, the world’s 2,769 billionaires added US$2 trillion to their wealth, equivalent to around US$5.7 billion a day. It’s estimated wealth taxes could raise US$2.1 trillion a year, significantly filling the SDG financing gap.

Debt is another key issue. Global south states struggle with massive debt levels, which worsened under the COVID-19 pandemic. They owe a staggering US$29 trillion to development banks, other states and private institutions, typically on much harsher terms than global north states enjoy. When debt repayments take priority, they unravel the progress aid is intended to support.

Global south countries pay an estimated US$50 billion a year more in debt payments than they receive in aid from global north donors, while 3.3 billion people live in countries where the state spends more on debt than education or health. Debt traps countries in cycles of powerlessness and poverty. But powerful creditor states stripped any ambitious text on debt out of FFD4’s draft agreement. Civil society is demanding a UN convention on sovereign debt to drive policies to cancel, restructure and limit debt.

Civil society is also advocating for an international development convention to make aid coherent, fair, just and predictable – another recommendation FFD4 ignored. Current failures indicate that more, not less, international cooperation is needed, and a convention that sets inclusive and just development standards and gives the UN a stronger coordinating role could make a difference.

A convention should set fair and inclusive development standards, strengthen UN coordination and enshrine the right to development and aid targets in international law. It could enable initiatives such as global public investment, where states provide predictable resources to meet shared international commitments. If developed with strong civil society participation, there’d be no contradiction between a global convention and the need for development to be locally led. Rather the convention would set global standards to ensure development decisions are attuned to local needs instead of defined by donors’ increasingly narrow priorities.

The meeting also avoided the issue of fundamental reform of international financial institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, such as calls to bring them fully into the UN system. Since their inception after the Second World War, they’ve been controlled by global north states and have a track record of imposing funding conditions that weaken public services and deepen economic inequality – the opposite of the intention of the SDGs. This is another big issue that won’t go away merely because powerful governments don’t want to grapple with it.

Time for democracy

There were minor positive steps, such as a commitment by some states, including Barbados, France, Kenya and Spain, to tax private jets as a contribution towards climate action. But FFD4 agreed to largely technical fixes and cosmetic solutions that leave the big problems unaddressed.

The outcome text is awash with promises of further consultation, discussion and exchange – which can be a way of avoiding rather than making decisions. It amounts to a less ambitious agenda than that agreed at previous meetings.

This wasn’t an isolated failure but part of a trend of international summits failing to address financing. FFD4 was preceded by the annual round of climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for the next global climate summit, COP30 in Brazil this November. The previous summit, COP29, failed to solve the climate funding problem, and discussions in Bonn, dominated by this unsolved issue, were also largely fruitless. Global biodiversity processes have similarly left the financing gap unresolved.

There’s no hope of achieving the global justice promised by the SDGs without democratising economic decision-making. The only path to progress lies in opening up processes to civil society. There’s an urgent need to reform global development processes, including FFD meetings, to put the groups that speak for the world’s poorest and most excluded people at their heart. The alternative is to keep repeating failures while problems pile up.

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