UNDP's Development Futures Series Briefs and Working Papers

Extreme poverty has been rising in Mozambique for the past decade—the analysis in this Development Futures Series Working Paper suggests that this trend has been aggravated by the cost-of-living crisis induced by the onset of the war in Ukraine in early 2022. The authors of this working paper estimate that, compared to December 2021, 1 million additional Mozambicans lived in extreme poverty as of December 2022 due to the soaring food, energy and transport inflation, with 60% of these individuals being concentrated in urban areas. The analysis underscores the limited mitigation potential of tax measures, such as the reduction in Value Added Tax (VAT) implemented by the Mozambican government in December 2022. The analysis finds that alternative policies, such as cash transfers, have nearly three times greater mitigation potential. While this is a national analysis, this paper includes important policy implications for countries with significant shares of subsistence farmers, economies that have implemented or considered implementing a VAT reduction to mitigate income or consumption shocks, and countries facing compound shocks through the cost-of-living crisis, extreme weather events and armed conflict.

This UNDP Development Futures Series policy brief explores the potential of leveraging cultural and creative industries, especially through music, to assist in the recovery from crisis and post-crisis settings. It focuses on music, not to elevate it above other art forms, but because engaging with it provides lessons and tactics, understanding and benefits across all other performative art forms and forms of intellectual property (IP). This study emphasizes the pivotal role of music and cultural participation and its engagement as a coping strategy, adding resilience to affected communities, and the expansive impact of music if it is regarded as an economy and an ecosystem. The policy brief proposes an innovative approach: to incorporate music and cultural production into programmes and strategies to support affected communities for livelihood recovery. The objective is to explore how music, and the wider creative economy, can be a powerful tool in supporting economic diversification in a non-extractive manner, by leveraging potential passive income streams inherent in music and cultural intellectual property.

This policy brief describes the creation of the Women Leaders Network in Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru, and how it serves as a successful model for transformation and structural change for gender equality. This network has been able to unify existing and rising women leaders around a common cause, addressing gender based violence (GBV), while maintaining an intersectional approach. Once unified, the women pushed the local government to create a permanent taskforce for preventing and responding to GBV in which the women leaders and representatives of the local government, judiciary, police, healthcare and others participate.

The planetary crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, an existential threat calling into question the future of civilization. Unless collective action is taken to halt and reverse the decline of the planet’s ecosystems, the road to 2030 will be defined by accelerating levels of social vulnerability, poverty and crisis. The polycrisis experienced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the past decade is a case in point, providing critical insights on the role of ecological change in the emergence of complex multidimensional crises. This paper explores lessons and insights from a new generation of integrated local solutions that have emerged across the region to manage risks and build resilience and makes the case for a new systems orientation to development paradigms and practice to achieve goals of transformational change. In moving towards 2030, a new paradigm is needed in which development is seen no longer as a linear set of goals and targets but as the emergent property of a complex socioecological system.

As the world races towards 2025, the midpoint of the last decade of SDG action, the need for swift identification of actionable strategies becomes an imperative for policymakers. With a focus on Malawi, a country grappling with uneven SDG progress, this policy brief highlights the pivotal role of human capital development (HCD) in areas such as health, education, skill building and infrastructure development in the attainment of the SDGs. Based on a set of simulations, the brief underscores the transformative impact of an integrated HCD approach, whereby policy design, planning and programme implementation converge to unlock the potential of human capital as a driver of sustainable development. This analysis builds on the ‘Human Capital Push Scenario’ employed by using the International Futures (IFs) model.

The 2030 Agenda calls for the collection of data at the local level to contextualize sustainable development challenges and monitor the progress of the SDGs. While local governments in fact use data, the level of analytics that are used to construct regional agendas is not homogenous. We propose a systematic approach for the creation of local agendas that identify development gaps, while fostering the multidimensionality and interconnectivity of public problems that become systemic development bottlenecks at the local level. We systematically identify local priorities in terms of how much the existence of such problems aggravate other issues. Our approach builds on the acceleration and MAPS framework and includes community participation to appropriate priorities. While further analysis is required to assist policy analysis and recommendations, this first step for identifying local priorities is easily replicable and promising for harnessing data and fostering deeper analytical projects for the creation of local agendas.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030) is a guiding star for countries, establishing a common vision for human and planetary well-being. However, approximately half of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are severely or moderately off track for achievement by 2030, in part because decision-making around the SDGs is often undertaken by just a few governmental ministries. While the Agenda 2030 declares that the SDGs are “integrated and indivisible”, goals related to the environment often take a back seat to economic goals during national implementation. The UNDP led project ‘Mapping Nature for People and Planet’ demonstrates how countries can apply integrated spatial planning to facilitate inclusive decision-making for policy targets around the SDGs, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global conventions and frameworks. The project supports countries in developing a singular map of Essential Life Support Areas (ELSAs) that shows pathways for action to achieve multiple targets at once, including those at the nexus of nature, climate and sustainable development. At the base of the map are the country’s most pressing policy targets and current spatial data layers, hand-selected by national experts. This policy brief captures insights from this project to help policymakers use integrated spatial planning to support the achievement of SDGs, with a focus on those that are the most dependent on nature.

Extreme weather events and rising sea levels are having an increasing impact on human mobility, especially within specific countries. In 2022, for example, there were 32.6 million disaster-induced displacements around the world, the highest figure seen in a decade, and 70 percent of these took place in Asia Pacific regions. Policy actors need to anticipate and prepare for future human mobility patterns exacerbated by the effects of climate change to ensure that those who move have their human rights protected and can contribute meaningfully to the communities in which they arrive. Knowing how to anticipate, invest and act on these futures now and needing to react to immediate priorities is, however, challenging. This paper outlines the promise of an anticipatory policy design approach that blends predictive analytics with qualitative foresight to provide the data and space that stakeholders need to effectively adapt and anticipate such events. The approach is introduced here as part of an initiative to analyse the scale and effects of migration to Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam and Karachi, Pakistan by 2050 as a result of the effects of climate change.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) financing is gaining global interest in the Decade of Action (2020–2030). Without an adequate assessment of the SDG financing flows, government actions can fail to accelerate SDG achievement. This document presents an SDG budget-tagging methodology to measure and strengthen countries’ SDG financing diagnostics. The methodology can be applied to (i) national and subnational budgets; (ii) international development cooperation to strengthen its monitoring; and (iii) identifying potentially eligible projects in private financing strategies. In addition to strengthening SDG financing diagnostics, when accompanied by data visualization tools, SDG budget tagging can strengthen fiscal transparency by communicating government action to the public using the 17 SDGs and inform SDG-oriented budgetary policymaking.

According to UNDP estimates from the early days of the energy crisis in Moldova, 71 percent of households were in the most vulnerable energy category, spending 90 percent or more of their available income—after the minimum expenditure—on energy and heating during the cold period. Highly dependent on energy imports, the country risked tripling its population living in poverty from 11 to 35 percent. In the context of a compounded crisis and the war in Ukraine, the Moldovan Government, in close collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), developed an innovative and targeted on-bill energy compensation mechanism, the first of its kind in Moldova, the Energy Vulnerability Reduction Fund (EVRF). The aim of EVRF is to create an inclusive solution that minimizes the negative impacts of the sharp increase in energy prices on energy-vulnerable and income-poor households, therefore safeguarding social cohesion. At the same time, in the longer term, the EVRF aims to incentivize the transition towards sustainable energy sources and to achieve higher levels of energy efficiency in the residential sector. This paper presents the main outcomes of the UNDP support for the establishment and implementation of a robust EVRF, along with an impact assessment and lessons learned that are applicable to other country contexts.