The #SDG16Now
Campaign Priorities
As the world faces more conflicts than ever before, lack of access to peaceful, just and inclusive societies remain a great threat to sustainable development. The SDG16Now Campaign aims to build a more peaceful, just, and inclusive world and strong institutions for and with all people. The #SDG16Now Campaign priorities span across five themes: Peace, Justice & Rule of Law, Inclusion Civic Space & Human Rights, Institutions & Accountability, and Interlinkages & Financing.
SDG16Now campaigning includes advocacy, communications and mobilization to influence norms, policies and practices with partners working together at local to international levels through a common vision and coordinated activities.
Our #SDG16Now Thematic Priorities
Peace
- Reduce military expenditures and re-direct financing towards peacebuilding and conflict prevention
- Increased investment in militarism and arms/weapons production not only undermines peacebuilding efforts, but also exacerbates global insecurity and has a negative impact on the realisation of the SDGs
- Fostering People-Centered Approaches to Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention
- Approaches to peacebuilding must be people-centered and solutions ranging from global to local must utilise the power of communities and peace in peacebuilding and conflict prevention.
- Governments, donors, and the peacebuilding community must reframe the narrative understanding of peace.
- A more holistic understanding of peace better integrates challenges and connections to climate change, gender, youth, access to justice, food insecurity, and root causes of conflict and violence.
Justice & Rule of Law
- Governments, donors, and practitioners must redefine “Justice” narratives
- Justice narratives should be broadened beyond punitive measures to include multiple dimensions of justice–including social and economic justice, while also recognizing local communities as experts.
- Efforts for access to justice must link more concretely to people-centered justice
- Access to justice interventions must not only focus on formal justice institutions but also value community-led processes (Informal and Customary Justice mechanisms, legal empowerment) etc. and reforming the laws on the books to serve people (and reduce penalization and criminalization of status etc.).
- Security, police, and justice sectors must exist as apolitical institutions, independent from the executive branch
- In order for justice interventions to act in the best interests of people and communities, without overly-militarized approaches to criminalizing and penalizing marginalized status or identities.
Inclusion, Civic Space & Human Rights
- Governments and the international community must protect human rights and fundamental freedoms at all levels
- Human rights and fundamental freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression should be seen as critical to ensuring transparency, accountability and participation in achieving the SDGs.
- Governments must regulate emerging technologies and address misinformation and disinformation
- Through regulations on AI and other emerging technologies, governments must prevent the spread of dis/misinformation while respecting freedom of expression.
- Expand and Protect Civic Space, Promote Openness and Responsiveness within institutions and processes
- Ensure transparency in decision-making processes and provide civil society with access to these processes to create meaningful and inclusive opportunities for civil society engagement and true participation in policy-making and governance.
Institutions & Accountability
- Supporting greater, and universally-applied accountability to international laws
- International solidarity in holding member states accountable to their commitments under international law and the role of parliamentarians in holding executives to account.
- Governments must strengthen democratic institutions, cultures, structures and values all levels
- To create cultures of accountability and strengthen the enabling environment for rights-based civil society organizations to also hold governments accountable, democratic values and principles must be strengthened at local, national, and international levels.
- Public institutions at all levels of governance must be independent and impartial
- In order to protect justice and service-delivery from political interference and to ensure public servants act in the best interest of people first and foremost, public institutions must remain independent and impartial from politics.
- Donors, governments, and the international community must bridge the gap between the global and local
- Efforts must be made to localize the global agenda by resourcing local CSOs and local governments, investing in building capacity of local institutions.
Interlinkages & Financing
- The global community must make additional funding investments in support of SDG16+
- SDG16+ issues at all levels need greater and additional financing, namely including investments in civil society organizations and the local-level.
- Donors and the global community must strengthen the narrative of SDG16 as an enabler for the 2030 Agenda as a whole
- Acknowledging how SDG16 unlocks progress on other goals demonstrates clearly how investments in SDG16 are worthwhile for donors and governments.
- Current funding mechanisms and donors must also improve, addressing their prefixed and rigid mindsets
- Inflexibility of donors in their project funding and in calls for proposals constrains the work of civil society and greater flexibility, including possibilities for civil society, donors/development partners, and the government to collaborate will lead to more effective interventions.
How to Engage with the #SDG16Now Campaign
SDG16Now campaigning includes advocacy, communications and mobilization to influence norms, policies and practices with partners working together at local to international levels through a common vision and coordinated activities. Initiate real progress for global SDG16+ implementation through participating in any one of these Campaign activities, and by doing so become a part of our #SDG16Now Campaign.
1.Mobilize
To mobilize civil society and all stakeholders to publicly call for transformative action on SDG16+
2. Advocate
To advocate for governments to commit to accelerated action and additional
resourcing to realize SDG 16+ at all levels
3. Connect
To connect civil society to key global processes and national stakeholders, and showcase the leadership role of civil society in advancing SDG16
Why this campaign now?
With the international community facing a convergence of crises around peace, justice and human rights, the global SDG16+ community has an opportunity to re-shift its efforts and commitments to ensuring that SDG16+ is prioritized at global, regional, national, and local levels.
Why SDG16+ Matters
The world is facing a convergence of global crises around peace, justice and good governance. Even as global poverty has declined, the number of people in need of emergency humanitarian aid has doubled since 2020. More people than ever live in countries without genuine access to democratic decision making bodies. Worryingly, access to justice and accountability for human rights violations remains elusive for over a billion people in the world.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals represent humanity's most ambitious blueprint to create a just, peaceful and inclusive world. 2023 marked the halfway point for implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. In 2015, the international community adopted the 2030 Agenda, which featured the ground-breaking inclusion of SDG16+, which outlined ambitious commitments towards fostering Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies. The 2030 Agenda recognizes that “there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development,” SDG16+ as both an outcome and enabler of sustainable development and the underpinning nature of SDG16+ for achieving the 2030 Agenda in its entirety. Delivering on SDG16+ is a prerequisite to implementing all of the SDGs.
Under the auspices of the #SDG16Now Campaign, the Transparency, Accountability and Participation (TAP) Network, an international coalition of civil society organisations working to help realise the human rights and development aspirations enshrined in SDG16+, will provide curated spaces for a broad range of SDG16+ stakeholders to advocate for renewed commitments, increased resourcing and civil society space to advance SDG16+.
Join the #SDG16Now Campaign Community
Join a growing community of partners engaging in activities to advance SDG16+