Foreign Direct Investment and Effective Development Cooperation

"London has retained its position as fDi’s European City of the Future 2014/15, while Germany’s Nordrhein-Westfalen has sailed to the top to rank first among Europe’s regions." Quoted is the FDI intelligence website of the Financial Times. 

The Dutch city of Eindhoven was also a new entry to the Top 25, ranking third. The city ranked first in the FDI Strategy category for all small European cities, thanks in part to its offer of incubation facilities at both the High Tech Campus in the city and the University of Technology Science Park, as well as its provision of ‘soft-landing’ services, which allow investors to establish links and develop a base in the city.

Outside Europe Mexico appears as a good achiever in fDi terms having recorded the highest growth in fDi in 2013.
Is fDi something to be proud of? What does it bring to the cities and countries concerned. More importantly, what does it mean if foreign funds find your town or country.

Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation
I am not sure about the linkage, but it may not be surprising that Mexico City will be hosting the successor of the Aid Effectiveness dialogues since 2002 successively held in Rome, Paris, Accra and Busan. The Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation as it is now called will open its doors in Mexico in April this year. The partnership has a steering committee that is comprised of representatives from receipient and donor countries, multilateral development banks, civil society organisations, parliamentarians, the private sector, the UN Development Group and the OECD. The forum is led by three co-chairs from Indonesia, Nigeria and the UK.

In such meetings what usually needs close attention is the side meetings that are organised. Also during the recent ExCom meeting in Abuja a side-meeting was held under the heading: The Role of Businesses in Development Cooperation staging a serious input from the business society in the upcoming Mexico meeting.

Sustainable Development Goals and the role of the State
The partnership links strongly to a UN based multi-layered mechanism underpinning the 68th session of its General Assembly that prepares for the post 2015 era trying to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals te replace the Millenium Development Goals.

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One of the processes underpinning the work of the UN is the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development. Since Rio+20 in 2012 they have met several times to do some stock taking on the achievements of the MDGs and prepare the ground for new goal setting. Following their last meeting earlier this month a draft report of the stock taking exercise was issued full of process and with little content.

Also in these meetings the programs of the side meetings may harbour the real change makers. During the recent Open Working Group meeting, a session was held with the International Forum of the Social and Solidarity Economy Entrepreneurs. This group comes together since 2007 in the so called Mont-Blanc Meetings. Their Mont-Blanc declaration is worth reading. The declaration argues in favor of a stronger state, not so much as redistributor of wealth but as facilitator of a Social Economy that obtains results in areas where capitalist enterprise, obsessed with short-term profits and subject to the dictates of its shareholders, has demonstrated its failure.

Jeffrey D. Sachs and the role of the Private Sector
In the meantime  Jeffrey D. Sachs, former special advisor to Kofi Annan and now to Ban Ki-Moon, was asked to head a Network to do
basically similar work to the Open Working Group. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) mobilizes scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable development problem solving at local, national, and global scales. The SDSN Leadership Council published its report An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development in June 2013, following an extensive public consultation on an earlier draft. The Action Agenda maps out ten operational priorities for the post-2015 development agenda and proposes 10 goals with 30 associated targets (3 per goal). 
 
Also the SDSN presented a draft containing 100 indicators for the goals and targets already identified in the Action Agenda. The draft report is still  open for public consultation for a month (starting February 14 and ending March 14).

Mr. Sachs envisages four basic pillars
1. Ending Extreme Poverty
2. Social Inclusion (Economy and Society that works for all)
3. Environmental Sustainability
4. Good Governance for Sustainable Development (not only of governments but also of corporates)
 
Sachs is known as an advocate for engineering approaches to solving the worlds problems. He was also one of the architects of the MDGs.  His preference for a stronger role for businesses can easily be noticed in his introductory talk for the SDGs. Mr. Sachs advocates for 'soft landings' of pre-commercial technologies in the public domain.

Who is developing, who is investing?
What strikes me in all these global processes is the absence of those impacted by all these policies and 'brave' decision making. Whether you belief in a Utopia created by Sachs or prefer a Civic Driven Change approach towards sustainable development, let us revisit the Foreign Direct Investment thing. Can FDI be conceived as foreign aid to rescue economies from failure? Is FDI disaster capitalism in duplicate creating new cross-border dependencies between public agencies and private equity.

Reading the witness reports of many of the Master students reflecting on the impact of Foreign Direct Investment in their countries there are certainly two sides of the coin. Like with aid funding the question that every citizen needs to ask himself is: "Why are they minding our business?" For what reason did Mr. Guy Verhofstad and Mr. van Balen of the European Parliament support the uprising in the Ukraine. Was it really to comfort them in their political strife for a liberal democracy? Or were there some business interests to protect? 

For an overview of all the post-2015 processes and actors click here