Trade and Sustainable Development: Options for follow-up and review of the trade-related elements of the Post-2015 Agenda and Financing for Development

Trade is reflected throughout the draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of June 2015 and the May 2015 draft outcome of the third international Financing for Development (FfD) conference.

The first aim of this paper is to map where trade-related elements are found in the SDGs and FfD. The second aim is to describe the trade-related architecture for review and follow-up that could support these outcomes and to map where it exists or could be built. Trade’s contribution to the post-2015 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. The paper identifies six clusters of trade-related elements in the draft SDGs and in the draft FfD outcome, which range from improving access to markets for small-scale producers to strengthening the multilateral trading system. For each cluster, the paper identifies current thinking on indicators, where the necessary data are already collected (if they are) and where progress against these political commitments could be reviewed. The paper then presents the information from another perspective, focusing on the potential roles of a variety of review mechanisms. 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 of the interrelated effects and trade-offs between goals.