PREFACE

The year 2015 was critical for the global development and human rights communities. The Millennium Development Goals were coming to an end, and the UN system embarked on an ambitious negotiation agenda to ensure that the post 2015 development agenda would be, in comparison to the MDGs, a fully-agreed upon development agenda by all Member States.

The process was sparked by the 2010 High-Level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the MDGs, as requested by the Secretary-General, to initiate thinking on a post-2015 development agenda. In 2012, after the Rio Conference, Member States launched the process to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which would build upon the Millennium Development Goals and converge with the post-2015 development agenda. An Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development was established, composed of the five United Nations Regional Groups and 30 Member States which carried out a series of 13 sessions from March 2013 until July 2014, over a 17 month period. A set of 17 goals and 169 targets were proposed for consideration. The inputs were synthesised into a report which served as a basis to the intergovernmental negotiations in the lead up to the Summit in 2015.

Some early successes for the SRHR movement out of this OWGs include the inclusion of targets on maternal mortality reduction, ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, ending child/early/ forced marriages, violence, harmful practices, and ensuring reproductive rights.

Of course, for us, edgy sexual and reproductive rights activists, these targets are simply no-brainers. But in the inter-governmental negotiations where language on SRHR and women's rights are used as trading chips for language on economics and politics, these could be seen as significant gains. The original MDGs had nothing more than maternal mortality reduction.

After the OWG sessions and report, the President of the General Assembly appointed two co-facilitators, one from Kenya and the other from Ireland, to lead those informal consultations and inter-governmental negotiations which ran from January to July 2015. At the same time, the Financing for Development consultations, a follow-up of the Monterrey and Doha conferences, were being held across the corridor. Though this was not part and parcel of the original post-2015 development agenda process, somehow these two became intertwined and the fate of one influenced the other.

The post-2015 process also identified the need to have an accountability avenue for the implementation of the SDGs, and formed the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development to provide follow-up and reviews of the implementation of sustainable development commitments and, the post-2015 development agenda, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Additionally, the process included the necessity of having the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), to provide necessary statistical support for the elaboration of the post-2015 development agenda. The Commission formed the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), which includes the national statistical offices (NSO), and the regional, international organisations and agencies as observers, to develop the indicator framework. This indicator framework would be potentially endorsed at the 47th session of the Statistical Commission in 2016.

ARROW and the 15 partners of the EU project on ensuring universal access to SRHR have been articulating the need for the inclusion of the SRHR agenda in the new development agenda from the beginning of the process at national, regional and international levels. This work will continue and the partnership will sustain its strategic work to ensure that universal access to SRHR remains high on the development agenda in the Asia Pacific region and that national and international policy and decision-makers are improving SRHR policies and investments to benefit the underserved and most marginalised groups, especially women and girls.

The ARROW team, especially Maria Melinda Ando and Mangala Namasivayam, worked closely with Emilia Reyes, who was also an advocate working the Women's Major Group, to enable the documentation of these learnings. We hope this will be useful to the communities working on women's rights, gender equality, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

We have our work cut out for us—although the UN Summit in Sept 2015 adopted the 17 goals, it was widely acknowledged by all that much more work lies ahead in moving these ambitious goals from paper to practice. We need to continue our advocacy efforts to sustain and capitalise on gains made during the post-2015 negotiations. The task of ensuring the formulation of indicators and developing a global mechanism that is practical, segregated, context-specific, rights-based and accountable is a huge challenge amidst competing priorities and technical challenges.

We also need to continue demands for collective commitment in FfD platforms—to stop illicit flows, to modify unfair trade regulations, to punish tax evasion and promote progressive taxation, and the need for good accountability and monitoring and regulatory mechanisms for all sectors. ARROW will continue to build capacities of national partners to ensure that advocacy gains made at the global level are sustained and implemented at the national level, not only in the areas of gender equality and SRHR, but also in the areas of accountability, means of implementation, and financing.

We live in an interconnected world. Today, more than ever, local action impacts the global dimension; events that take place in one country or one region may impact the reality of the rest of humanity. Some challenges, such as extreme poverty, climate change, and hunger, among others, are experienced worldwide, not just in selected countries. We are living in a time when collective action is required to face the challenges that humanity is facing.

In this context, three major processes have been undertaken by countries all over the world to promote a joint response: the climate change negotiation, the financing for development process, and the sustainable development platforms. The three are interconnected and are at the core of the developmental agenda for the coming years.

What does sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) have to do with these three processes? What is its place in the Post-2015 Agenda, or, as it has been called now, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development? This paper is meant to present that co-relation, and at the same time, to present the windows of opportunity to pursue an ambitious agenda for substantive implementation.

MAKING THE CASE FOR SRHR

This paper is expected to provide the linkages between the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda within the framework of the sustainable development process. At the same time, this is also meant to help advocates to identify opportunities to further promote the inclusion of SRHR in legal and programmatic frameworks at the local, national, and regional levels. In every section of the document, the points of entry for concrete action at different levels are highlighted to help the involvement of advocates in accordance with their interest and experience.

In the past years, fragmented agendas have led to partial results that, in the best of cases, improve the situation of some population groups but do not change the structural challenges that humanity faces as a whole. Countries are trying to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the agendas, the need to find complex solutions for complex problems, and the linkages between three dimensions: economic, environmental, and social. Under this light, civil society has insisted that human rights, gender equality, and sustainability criteria are the frameworks under which these three dimensions should meet.

Sexual and reproductive health and rights is a compound notion encompassing different elements.

The social dimension aims to achieve the well-being of all persons, with the health of the human body and its sexuality needs (in terms of education and health, but also of freedom, justice, opportunities, and other spaces of fulfilment) at the core of the priorities. No person lives in abstraction. Human bodies determine the way in which we interact socially. For example, persons with disability have specific needs that require measures to ensure they are not excluded; the age of a person is crucial to determine the type of action a government will make; a male baby will have different needs than those of an adult male. This is why human bodies determine the way in which governments are mandated to fulfil their commitments in regard to human rights. It so happens that the space in which governments need to guarantee human rights is in the geography of human bodies. Aspects such as sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, are part of the complexity of human lives, and as such, they require a comprehensive approach. At the individual level, its relevance is clear. Socially, it is evident as well that at some point, human bodies become objects of public agendas due to the influence on population dynamics (e.g., population growth, population movement—displacement, migration, and other phenomena). Thus, the need to guarantee SRHR for all persons has a dimension that concerns the well-being of societies as well, and therefore they are at the centre of the mandates of States.

With the environmental dimension, population dynamics relate as well with the way in which we engage with our surroundings, in particular, and our planet, in general. Our needs, our patterns of consumption and production, and our uses and practices all leave an imprint on the planet. Above all, the need to fulfil and guarantee the human rights of all persons, women and men, while acknowledging that we live in a planet with resources that are at risk of depletion, is a challenge that needs to be faced with a comprehensive response. Otherwise, women's rights will be violated either by restrictive measures on their bodily autonomy, or by a reinforcement of their reproductive role above their own choices. Governments have to find ways in which the rights of all persons, women and men, are guaranteed while at the same time a healthy planet is being ensured. For instance, if a government considers that there is an over-consumption of resources in a given territory, they may opt to restrict the number of children a couple may have, instead of addressing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption.

For all these reasons, SRHR remains at the centre of the Sustainable Development Agenda, and therefore is a crucial element that needs to be secured in the commitments that Member States will make in the processes that are defining the face of our current societies. The years 2015 and 2016 will be historic opportunities to connect the dots between the challenges we have and the creative solutions that we can promote at the local, national, regional, and global level. Evidently, given that SRHR are also rooted in the most fundamental beliefs against fundamental rights of all persons, in all the diversity of the human experience and across the span of life, it is an agenda that has met so far with numerous challenges. This will not be different in the process to follow, but it is a reality that needs to be acknowledged from the start. This document will try to help in the attempt to connect the dots, to present the main angles of the current global processes, to highlight the linkages with SRHR and, further, to emphasise the opportunity for advocacy work at the global, regional, and the national level, bearing in mind the differentiated realities of local contexts.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the result of an intergovernmental process called Post-2015 Agenda that stems from two different legal instruments.

As the ICPD agenda has advanced, the links with sustainable development have become more evident. However, the 2015 CPD session was met with many obstacles and, for the first time, it ended without an agreed outcome. This means that in the past, there was a negotiated document every year in which a revision was made in order to go further with the commitments. This time, however, governments could not agree on the larger issues of the agenda, and a regressive position was risking what was gained in the past years in terms of commitments. In the end, only a broad reference to the meaning of ICPD beyond 2014 was made, but that was it: there was no ambition to go further in the guarantee of sexual and reproductive rights for all persons. Precisely the year in which the decision would tie the CPD with the Post-2015 agenda, the difficulty to reach a consensus was a major obstacle. This is not to say that everything is lost: there is still room to integrate the agenda in the follow-up and review process (especially at the regional level), but a strong and concentrated advocacy effort needs to be set in place. This is a major element to bear in mind in terms of advocacy for the next stage in the process.

The social, environmental, and economic dimensions are at the core of a sustainable development agenda. The proper balance among them has been the major challenge for the Post-2015 process, given that different interests are behind each and every one of them. The geopolitics, as we knew it in Beijing and Cairo (two of the most important global instruments to promote women's human rights and gender equality) when fighting for a progressive agenda, has changed. In the past, countries of the Global North were quick in promoting some of the most progressive topics in the social dimension.

Thus, sexual and reproductive health and rights had many champions in the European Union, North America, and other developed countries. In contrast, developing countries were more reluctant to agree on progressive stances, and the most ambitious outcomes were challenged yearly by those positions. However, given that the Agenda 2030 was meant to address the interlinkages between the social, economic, and environmental dimension, developed countries soon found themselves speaking on behalf of regressive positions (such as refusing to grant migrant population human rights, or against promoting labour rights). In contrast, developing countries were promoting a more comprehensive position in which the three dimensions were intrinsically linked. We are therefore facing a new geo-political dynamic, in which the world seems to change the face of the allies and those who oppose the advancement of the full guarantee and fulfilment of human rights.

Given that the Agenda 2030 is universal, it will require all countries not only to implement it, but also to report on it. This is a major shift from the MDGs, which still conveyed traditional donor-recipient logic in that only the recipient countries reported back, but donor countries were never held accountable. Accountability is therefore a big battlefield in which implementation as well as finance should be placed as priority. Developed countries will now need to enhance their transparency practices and be accountable to the world as well in their social, environmental, and economic practices, not only in what concerns their own national policies, but also in those fields in which inequalities between countries are related. In this context, in which developed countries are not only used to report implementation on any kind, they feel that their major interests are at stake.

A. Environmental Dimension

In terms of the environmental dimension, the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) clearly addresses a major responsibility to those countries that have had unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, as well as an excessive reliance on fossil fuel and nuclear sources of energy, placing the rest of humanity in an ongoing hazard. For developed countries whose economic prosperity relied in industrialisation for many years, their historic responsibility is now weighing in them to lead the path towards a clean sustainable development. This means that developed countries are now at the centre of global scrutiny, and that is something that these countries do not like.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the main platform to discuss climate change, and at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP 21), it was expected that a climate agreement made out of voluntary pledges fulfil the need to remain below 2 degrees of global warming. An Agreement was indeed made in December 2015 with the hope to remain under 1.5 degrees of global warming, but the terms in which this was agreed leave room to wonder whether the aspirations will be met or not. To the eyes of a large community within civil society, the Paris Agreement is not ambitious enough to pursue the radical change that is needed in the current economic model. The relation to the 2030 Agenda is clear— there are indeed many goals related to the environmental dimension; goal 13 specifically refers to climate change— and it remains to be seen how countries will implement their commitments in both platforms. Given that the climate change and the sustainable development agendas promote a shift in the consumption and production patterns, many economic interests are challenged by these aims. Due to this, it is expected that the implementation phase meets many obstacles by those forces that refuse to change because they don't want to lose traditional sources of profit, such as extractive and automotive industries and fossil fuel economies, among others.

B. Economic Dimension

In the economic dimension, the MoI discussion merged with the Financing for Development (FfD) platform (derived from the Monterrey Consensus and the Doha Declaration, both of which were meant to address systemic global issues after the financial crisis at the beginning of the century). It is the hope of civil society that the merging of the discussion does not end up merging their mechanisms of follow-up and review. In the year 2016, more clarification will be made in this regard, and it is another space for advocacy that needs to have both regional and global engagement.

Developing countries, however, have said that aid will not be sufficient and we need a world in which the financial and economic dynamics are changed to become more just and fair. The MoI agenda that is expected to address financial needs, technology management or transfer, and capacity building, was the subject of one of the most contentious debates. For developing countries, this is an agenda that depends on the willingness and commitments of developed countries to deliver the sufficient MoI for implementation in the South. The G-77 strongly voiced this position in the Post-2015 platform. For developed countries, this agenda was avoided by shifting the actors, and they placed it more in terms of South-South cooperation (arguing that the North-South divide is no longer in place), national budgets—so that the global responsibility will be left aside—and a private sector opportunity.

There was strong pressure to include the private sector as the main actor to finance the implementation, and the agreed language in this regard is worrisome. For starters, the terminology is blurred. The term “stakeholders,” used to define the actors engaged in the process, gives no room to distinguish different types of non-state actors (such as civil society, intergovernmental agencies, and the private sector). Moreover, Member States have been insisting in enhancing the role of Public-Private Partnerships which reduces the scope of the State to fulfil its commitments. That is to say, private resources blended with the public, leaving room for many conflicts of interests, and there is a high possibility that the private sector will keep the benefits and the public sector will pay the damage.

The FfD platform then becomes crucial: it is under that roof that systemic global issues are addressed in an intergovernmental manner. Civil society has emphasised that rather than leaving single countries to solve their challenges (and thus fall prey to the private sector), countries need to address globally the real obstacles local economies face. Thus, there is a broad list of demands that civil society and developing countries presented in the FfD platform: to stop illicit flows, to modify unfair trade regulations, to regulate the so-called “fiscal paradises,” to punish tax evasion and promote progressive taxation (those who are richer pay more taxes), and to promote accountability on the social and environmental impacts of the private sector, among others.

An interesting discussion is also on the table when it comes to FfD, related to the Official Development Assistance (ODA) that flows from developed to developing countries, because ODA indeed is important to support the implementation of many agendas in the South, but it is a fact that FfD is the instrument to move beyond ODA. That is, FfD is the only global platform with the potential to change the rules of the financial and economic global game, so that in time, ODA will no longer be needed.

It is quite clear that all these elements are intertwined in a complex way to address the challenges of the current world. The best example is Goal 5 on gender equality: it encompasses only six targets and three segments for the MoI. As it is, with no clear mandate to mainstream gender equality with the other goals and targets, it is quite clear that Goal 5 cannot replace our comprehensive agendas for women's human rights, including Beijing, Cairo, and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), among others. From a comprehensive point of view, both Post-2015 (addressing specific issues) and FfD (the systemic instrument to change the rules of the game) are needed to achieve the full realisation of women's human rights. The follow-up and review of FfD, in relation to the new international architecture for FfD, is then another space for advocacy at the regional and global level, so that civil society has an institutional space for meaningful participation in the years to follow.

C. Social Dimensions

As for the social dimension, contentious issues are still in place. Geopolitics in this field is perhaps more changed than in others. Maybe the clearest sign of a global change in this regard occurred during the 46th CPD session in 2013 where the theme focused on “New trends in migration: demographic aspects.” Usually, under the traditional geopolitical map, Northern countries were allied with the progressive feminist advocates: they were always willing to push for ambitious language on women's human rights. However, for the first time in 2013, developed countries refused to include strong language on human rights to guarantee migrant population's access to services. That is, it was seen in that session that as long as commitments in a global instrument were all rhetorical or did not affect their policies, Northern countries have no problem with an alliance with the feminist agenda. However, when it comes to change in any respect to their own policies and framework, the North presents the same resistances as the South, but in a more perverse way, because they have the economic power to put pressure on Southern countries to follow their lead.

Evidently, the same resistances against women's human rights from usual countries in the South were met as well, so it was central to devise a mapping of Northern and Southern allies and address them with different messages. It is clear that the feminist movement is expecting ambitious outcomes in every pillar and in every document, and this is why 2015 has become the most complex scenario of recent years. Differentiated messages were needed to address developed and developing countries if an advocacy strategy was to be effective in 2015 and subsequently in 2016. This is true for the challenges that will be met in 2016, and therefore a comprehensive thematic and geopolitical mapping is required to reinforce advocacy activities.

As has been said already, gender equality is a means to a different end when it comes to Member States. Some are fully committed to the agenda, but when many interests are at stake, gender equality becomes an issue of medium or low degree of importance in the mind of negotiators. It is sad to say that the agenda of women's human rights in general, and SRHR in particular, are battlefields for the most conservative countries, and they are determined to fight until the very end to refrain the advancement of women. Throughout the Post-2015 process, the feminist movement has seen this happen over and over again.

Overall, it can be said that in the 2030 Agenda, there were no specific gains on SRHR. The explanation for this is that the context in which the Agenda was negotiated was one of a regressive backlash, in which every gain of the past was defended from being lost. Therefore, rather than advancing, the battle was made to include agreed language to the 2030 Agenda. The fact that there are references to the overall agenda (with details that will be addressed further in this paper) is important regardless of the fact that there is no advancement. That is to say, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda will be under a general scrutiny; it will receive important financial flows and will be highlighted in every other global platform. So even with the agreed gains, it was important to have the SRHR agenda referred.

As it is then, those advocating for the advancement of the agenda will have to turn to the specific platforms: the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the Commission on Population and Development (CPD). However, it must be said that this is not necessarily a bad thing: the implementation of the 2030 Agenda can be as wide as a government's will, and therefore there is an opportunity to enhance the ambition at the regional and national levels. This is why an advocacy work in these two fields will be crucial in 2016.

For a bigger picture on the SRHR agenda, the 2030 Agenda is not the best reference. Many references were lost in the way of the negotiation (Comprehensive Sexuality Education is the most heartfelt), and others never made it to the draft (Sexual Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity). In a platform made entirely of political will, this is no surprise. But the way in which indicators address a comprehensive implementation, and the pressure from citizens across time to strengthen the language in further revisions of indicators, could be other windows of opportunities in the future.

In the following sections, this paper will refer to the process in which the 2030 Agenda was devised across the years, and the challenges that the SRHR agenda faced in that time. This will be useful to see the possible points of entry on specific points, but also to highlight the main obstacles encountered so as to learn from past experiences.

• High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons Report on Post-2015

However, the substantive weight of this Report faded almost immediately after it was released. Politically, it was dismissed in the intergovernmental spaces almost in the first week (exception made for those countries whose representatives were part of the Panel). Nevertheless, the language of the account of facts around SRHR in the Report is a clear signal of the pressure made by both pro-rights and anti-rights positions. It was also the inauguration of a debate that would be at the core of the Post-2015 negotiation, to decide on its agreement or its overall failure.

• The Open Working Group

The last round of negotiations of the OWG was held in July 2014. From the first draft, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the goals on Health and Gender Equality were present in the documents released by the co-chairs. It was not an easy thing: during the first sessions, many governments called for the inclusion of that agenda. In their “Summaries,” however, the co-chairs practically eliminated any reference to it. It required a lot of work on behalf of the SRHR advocates to gain some ground in every draft. On the day prior to the final approval, four parallel sessions were opened to discuss the more contended issues. Those were also used as bargaining chips for the entire agenda: the Rule of law, energy and subsidies to fossil fuels, SRHR, and trans-boundary cooperation.

The SRHR session, presided by Palau, lasted a day and a half. It was a micro-replica of the debates given at CSW and CPD in 2014. That is to say, the most conservative positions were fighting the most progressive proposals. The arguments were strong in either case, and the gaps were so wide that it was feared no agreement would come out of it. It was quite clear that reproductive rights were at stake, and that was the issue of contention among the countries involved during those three sessions. It was never possible to address sexual rights, and even the more moderated language was rejected over and over again. A discreet civil society participation was allowed, although in many occasions, the Vatican, Saudi Arabia, and Iran called for a session closed to observers.

Chad, Iran, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the Vatican were the most radical countries in their regressive views by rejecting reproductive rights. That was the entire issue that would be discussed, trying to save reproductive rights language. Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia were the most vocal countries to push beyond the minimum. The session ended with difficulty, with a perpetual threat of getting reservations by Saudi Arabia and Chad (as well as Nicaragua, Iran, and the Vatican). Palau's chairing was at all times very progressive, and that position was useful in the end.

• The Secretary General Report

In March 2015 (from the 20th to the 27th), Member States discussed whether the Goals and Targets would be reopened or not. No consensus was achieved, so the co-facilitators presented a proposal. During the March session, Northern countries stated that the SDGs needed to be “communicable,” and therefore required to be “edited” to comprise themes under a smaller framework. The G-77 and China clearly said that the OWG outcome was the result of an inclusive negotiation, and therefore they maintained their position that the agenda should be approved as such, fearing that everything that has been gained was at risk of being lost if any goal or target was open for revision.

The co-facilitators presented a list of 19 targets that needed to be reviewed under the “technical” criteria, thus giving way to a discussion of wide implications: why open some targets under certain criteria and not others? Until the very last session, this was a contentious issue. The co-facilitators proposed a clarification of those targets that had an “X” in them (referring to an “X” numerical factor to signal its fulfilment) that, in the end, was more or less agreed in the final moments of the negotiation. The other two criteria that were at stake in the technical revision were: a) that some targets were below international law and, b) that they had a different timeframe than 2030. That was addressed properly in the final session, and, in the end, a full 2030 Agenda was approved with Goals and Targets included. Thus, in the implementation stage, it will be important in the advocacy work to always aim towards the most ambitious agreements, whether they are global or regional, and keep them in mind as frameworks for national provisions.

• Means of Implementation and the Global Partnership

Of relevance in this paper are the MoI that are defined in the Goals referred to health, given that they apply as well to link in a comprehensive manner the implementation of the SRHR commitments:

And those that apply to Goal 5, the “Gender Equality” Goal:

• Follow-up and Review

The HLPF is not legally binding (i.e., it has no legal force), and therefore the countries are not obligated to report in terms of implementation. However, the body will be in charge of providing incentives and technical support in case a country is willing to undergo the process alongside the HLPF. Furthermore, it will be a place to share experiences and good practices.

All these elements are devised under the premise that Agenda 2030 is the result of the sum of political wills, and therefore there is no obligation on behalf of any government to fulfil the main objective. So, regardless of the demand by CSO, and the fierce advocacy in that regard to explicitly devise an accountability body, the HLPF will be a space for “follow-up and review,” but with no enforcing capacity to ensure that Member States are held accountable in fulfilling their commitments.

Despite the elements mentioned above, the HLPF is still an important mechanism that, under the right provisions, may have a central role in shaping the face of the global dynamic in the following years. This is why a focused process of advocacy will have to be in place to strengthen the technical provisions of the HLPF in 2016. It will be time to devise a new global architecture to follow up on a global agenda. The HLPF is a hybrid body that is under the ECOSOC mandate, but still reports to the General Assembly, and it is therefore in a unique position to improve the way in which Member States have been engaged in the UN processes so far. Given that developed and developing countries will need to engage in terms of follow-up and review of their implementation processes, this is the first time in history in which a universal agenda will have a body that will require the same from both developed and developing countries.

Under the HLPF are existing provisions that refer to the need to strengthen civil society participation, both in the modality of Major Groups as well as within constituencies as part of the “Stakeholder” definition. These references are quite general, and still require further elaboration to explicitly explain how civil society can have a central and meaningful role in the process of implementation of the Agenda. References to the regional and national processes are in the section, but only in general terms. It is clear that governments were reluctant to give a broad mandate on these two levels, and therefore this is a big priority for advocacy in the months to follow.

• INDICATORS

The UN Statistical Commission presented at the beginning of 2015 a battery of indicators that will reflect how to measure the advancement towards the fulfilment of the goals and targets approved as SDGs. This battery of indicators was to be reviewed by Member States as an example on how indicators would look like, even though its mandate is to produce their official proposal to be approved in 2016. UN agencies gave support to the UN Statistical Commission. In the case of the gender equality and SRHR agendas, UN Women, UNFPA, WHO, and others, delivered their proposals. Indicators are one of the most important agendas for the implementation, and it could be the point of entry to gain what was lost during the negotiation. This is a good opportunity to reinsert Comprehensive Sexuality Education, or to deepen some of the issues that were agreed in broad terms. Moreover, this might be an opportunity to strengthen the human rights framework at the level of implementation.

However, the risk might be that the SRHR is reduced to a merely epidemiological agenda, and therefore a comprehensive implementation will be avoided. Two new bodies will be created with regards to indicators: an Inter-Agency and Expert Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (IAEG) and a High Level Group (HLG). The IAEG will develop the new set of indicators, and will be composed of Member States with international organisations as observers. On the other hand, the High Level Group will be in charge of monitoring the indicators, composed as well by Member States and will have international organisations as observers.

Also, the FfD outcome document this year states that there will be a Financing for Development Forum that will be related to the HLPF. Given that this is a new Forum under the UN, nothing has been decided about this, not even the dates. It is expected to take place around the Bretton Woods Institutions Interactive Dialogue under the UN in April 2016. So during the first quarter of 2016, a new institutional design will have to be made in this regard. This is the opportunity to devise a new institutional architecture linking sustainable development with the financial and economic global dynamic, and therefore civil society needs to assess the best way in which these bodies will relate. Both of these global processes (Sustainable Development and FfD) will also have an equivalent regional body, hence opening a new door for advocacy at the regional level.

The HLPF may be a body to supervise the fulfilment of those agendas related to SRHR, but only in the extent that we advocate, in 2016, for the explicit definition of the linkages with the mandate of Beijing, Cairo, and CEDAW, or at least with the UN bodies that are in charge of its implementation. Also, at the regional level, indicators for follow-up and review will need to link the advancements made in this agenda, so that the global aggregation do not eradicate the windows of opportunity that have so far been opened in each region.

The year 2016 will be a time to question the current multilateral system and, for the first time in many years, we can ask ourselves: what is the multilateral system that we want, as citizens, at the global and regional level, and how come the national and local dimensions will be related to that scheme? It is the role of CSO to dream, and make the dreams come true.

• AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL

The SDGs present a wide agenda that will be prioritised at the national level. This means that governments will pick and choose the elements that they foresee as achievable, those that are closer to their political vision, and those that are closer to their goals. In every case, the harmonisation of legal and programmatic frameworks will require of civil society a strong process for national advocacy, in order that the comprehensiveness of the agenda is maintained.

With the Legislative Branch

• —  A mapping of the laws that need to be harmonised at the national and local level for an accelerated implementation of the agenda.
• —  A mapping of the laws and conventions that are an obstacle for the implementation of the agenda.
• —  Capacity building of legislators and staff in the legislative branch in terms of the SDGs and the linkage with SRHR for the overall achievement of the objectives of the agenda.
• —  Advocacy so that the legislative branch, in the space of its faculties, engage with the budgetary provisions to allocate resources for programs related to SRHR targets and indicators.

With the Executive Branch

With the Judiciary Branch

• —  To promote new judiciary interpretations under the sustainable development framework that preserves the well-being of persons within planetary boundaries.
• —  To mainstream the human rights framework in the judiciary dimension.

With Other Actors

• —  Engagement with the media to socialise the agenda and promote a comprehensive approach that involves SRHR from the start.
• —  Engagement with other networks of civil society to promote a comprehensive approach that involves SRHR as a core issue for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda aims.
• —  Active engagement with diverse groups of population that have been marginalised, so that the ownership of the agenda includes SRHR from the start, and the beneficiaries of those who have been left aside.