The consultation is a response to an increasing demand from various actors over the past few years, especially civil society, to discuss governance and accountability bottlenecks in the context of the MDGs and to assess how these gaps can be addressed in a new global development framework.

Several meetings have been organized as part of theconsultation:

• African Regional Dialogue (hosted by the Pan-African Parliament), Johannesburg, 11-12 Oct 2012
• Asia Pacific Sub-regional Parliamentarian and Civil Society Fora:Manila, 20-21 Nov and Dhaka,10-11 Dec 2012 – resulted in the Manila Declaration and the Dhaka Declaration
• Arab Governance Week (with CSOs, governments, NHRIs and media) Cairo, 26-29 Nov 2012Workshop at 15th Annual Anti-Corruption Conference, Brasilia, 7-10 Nov 2012
• A technical meeting was also organized: “Measuring Governance and Human Rights Commitments in a Post-2015 Agenda” (New York, 13-14 Nov 2012)

The online discussions have been very active withover 200 contributions as of December 2012. They are divided into two phases:-

• Phase I: What should be the governance building blocks for a post-2015 agenda?
• Phase II: How can we ensure an accountability framework that takes into account human rights principles and obligations to assure effective delivery on the post-2015 development agenda?

A Global Meeting (Johannesburg, 27-28 Feb 2013, hosted by the Pan-African Parliament) will bring together participants from all regions to build a shared vision and ownership and to develop suggestions on how global, regional, national and sub-national governance and accountability could be integrated in the post-2015 development agenda.

Initial results show that throughout the regions, stakeholders called for the Post-2015 Agenda to be aligned with international human rights standards and principles, including civil and political rights, andto build on existing accountability mechanisms at sub-national, national, regional and global levels.

Parliamentarians, civil society and academia emphasized the centrality of governance to sustainable development, taking into account capacity development needs of both people and institutions for good governance at different levels, from local to global. Suggestions included streamlining governance into the vision and outputs of other sustainable development goals and a regional approach for governance with national and sub-national indicators.

Achievement of the MDGs is hampered in some contexts due to corruption, for example the siphoning of funds from budgets targeted at alleviating poverty and improving the well-being of the people. It was proposed that corruption risk assessment should be a key strategy to ensure that the post-2015 agenda will be better achieved.

Experts agreed that a new development framework can serve three main objectives: building normative consensus, boosting neglected policy issues and strengthening accountability, while being easilycommunicable. Clear criteria to prioritize goals, targets and indicators were suggested. It was stressed that many governance and human rights variables are now measurable and can be justified for inclusionin the new agenda. It was recommended to consider different data sources and to strengthen capacities for data collection and analysis.

The consultation is co-led by UNDP and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in association with the Governments of Germany and South Africa. A reference group with 20 members, including UN agencies and more than 10 CSO (networks) is also supporting the consultation.

For further information, please contact Serge Kapto (serge.kapto@undp.org), Roshni Menon(roshni.menon@undp.org)and Julia Kercher (jkercher@ohchr.org)and visithttp://www.worldwewant2015.org/governance