Integrating sustainable development goals into development aid strategies

There is a complex web of issues - environmental, trade, investment, agricultural, political, security and financial - which affect the development prospects of poorer countries. Realising development objectives depends on securing complementarity between all these different policies as they affect the developing world. It requires governments and agencies to work in partnership with developing countries to strengthen common efforts to eliminate abject poverty and to help mobilise the political will to achieve the international development targets.

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities. Agenda 21 recommends that existing assistance consortia, consultative groups and round tables should make greater efforts to integrate environmental considerations and related development objectives into their development assistance strategies, and consider reorienting and appropriately adjusting their membership and operations to facilitate this process and better support national efforts to integrate environment and development.