Diplomatic ‘dance on the head of a pin’ led to global agreement

In the end, everything hinged on a single letter. After almost a year of talks, months of redrafting, an all-night negotiating session and the largest consultation programme in the history of the United Nations, the process had hit an unexpected roadblock. It was August 2nd, 2015, and the deadline for a deal had just passed. Now, with representatives of almost 200 countries packed into an airless conference room in the basement of the UN building in Manhattan, about to sign off on a carefully crafted blueprint for human development for the next 15 years, everything was suddenly threatening to unravel.

The unexpected problem was a reference, one-third of the way through the 15,000-word document, to the full realisation of a right to self-determination of “people living under foreign occupation”. The phrase is often included in international agreements to refer to the plight of the Palestinians, but not everyone was happy about it. An earlier move by the United States delegation to have it removed had been resisted by other states, but now a number of developing countries wanted the wording widened.

They were insisting on “peoples”, not “people”. And as consensus was required for the process to work, this was a serious problem. A stand-off developed. “One letter, literally,” recalls an official. “It was getting a little bit awkward because, by mid-afternoon, people were beginning to feel nervous. Was the whole document going to collapse?”

From early on in the process, a small group of delegations had been entrusted with finding an agreed wording on the “foreign occupation” issue. Now that group was reactivated; as they tried to hammer out a deal, the others waited anxiously. After a few hours, a new phrase was proposed: “peoples living under colonial and foreign occupation”. That was the green light.

The two facilitators – Ireland's Ambassador to the United Nations, David Donoghue, and his Kenyan counterpart, Macharia Kamau – decided to immediately put the text to the floor. One by one, the parties gave their assent. Then, with a theatrical flourish, the two diplomats joined hands and brought down a gavel. Cheers and applause rang out across the cavernous room. "We were gambling that we would get the consensus in that final session," the official says. "It was a great moment when that gamble paid off."

Getting 193 countries to sign off on the Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the 2030 Agenda, which formally came into effect last month, was widely considered a major achievement for the UN. It was also a fillip for Ireland's diplomacy, strengthening its reputation as a serious player on international development. The Government hopes the successful finale will help its campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council for 2021-2022.

Bilateral relationship

For those involved, the agreement was the culmination of an intense year’s work. Having been asked to co-facilitate the negotiations by the then president of the

General Assembly

,

Sam Kutesa

of Uganda (officials believe Ireland’s good bilateral relationship with Uganda played a part in the selection), staff from the Irish and Kenyan missions got to work in autumn 2014.

In negotiations of this kind at the UN, countries break into informal groups: the so-called G77, a loose coalition of developing states; the European Union; the Alliance of Small Island States; and so on. Regular meetings of these groups were held in tandem with a series of "global conversations" – an attempt to involve the vast constituency of NGOs and interested parties in the discussions. These included 11 thematic and 83 national consultations as well as door-to-door surveys.

Within the UN system, informal groups were set up to look at individual themes, such as climate change or financing for development. By October 2014, more than 90 per cent of the work of the Irish and Kenyan missions was devoted to the negotiations. The first draft was tabled at the beginning of June.

As a veteran of the Belfast Agreement talks in 1998, when he was the chief Irish diplomat at the Inter-Governmental Secretariat in Maryfield, outside Belfast, Donoghue applied some of the lessons he had learned. One, successfully deployed by George Mitchell at Stormont, was the value of a deadline. Donoghue and Kamau chose July 31st. They insisted they were absolutely serious about it, even dropping hints that they had flight tickets booked for the following day. Another lesson from Belfast was the need to inject a bit of drama into proceedings. Hence the all-night session, during which the water-vending machines ran out, delegates had to order in takeaway food and more than one ambassador nodded off. "It was probably on my mind that that had been an important part of the agreement on Good Friday," one official recalls.

Guiding mantra

Just as in Belfast in 1998, the parties adopted as a mantra the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Trade-offs abounded. A number of human rights references were diluted to accommodate objections from certain states. For example, an early draft referred to the need to ensure the goals were implemented for all nations, all people and “all economic and social groups”.

To a number of vocal African countries, a phrase that might even obliquely signal the declaration supported gay rights was a problem. Yet for northern states it was an important line, not least because it underlined the importance of drilling down into national data and measuring progress for individual groups such as women, children or old people. The compromise, after many hours of verbal contortions, was “all segments of society”. “That shows the kind of dancing on the head of a pin approach we had to take,” says one delegate.

All through the process, there was a tug-of-war between states on how the development goals were to be implemented. Some wanted a highly systematic, rigorous and robust set of arrangements for monitoring how countries were doing. Others wanted the exact opposite. Hence the many references in the implementation section to “voluntary” and “taking into account national circumstances”.

Those caveats were the price paid for getting everyone on board, officials say. Without them, for example, it would have been difficult to get the Gulf states to accept some of the language on sexual and reproductive health. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t implement the goal, it just means that we have built in a little bit of national room for manoeuvre. The thing wouldn’t have worked otherwise,” says an official.

Some parts of the negotiations turned out to be more straightforward than anticipated. A one-page preamble largely drafted by Donoghue was expected to be contentious but was waved through virtually unchanged. Some developing states were cool on language about peace and security, fearful that it might imply that peaceful countries would get more money. The text was tweaked but remained essentially the same.

Human rights

In the closing stages, there was input from some surprising quarters. As the negotiations came to a head, the co-facilitators were approached with a seemingly innocuous phrase for the human rights section. It was indicated to them that the pope would welcome the reference. In it went. (A separate line in the declaration is a direct lift from a papal encyclical, borrowed because the facilitators felt it captured a point particularly well. It was agreed without the facilitators letting delegates know the source, which could have proven controversial.)

The result was a document that sets out 17 goals and 169 subsidiary targets, spanning a vast agenda that touches on everything from poverty and human rights to environmental protection and gender equality. Secretary general Ban Ki-moon, whose legacy is burnished by the deal, hailed it as a "transformative vision for a better world" and a promise by world leaders to "end poverty in all its forms". When the deal was done, he phoned Taoiseach Enda Kenny to thank him for Ireland's successful co-steering of the process.

The process has not been without its critics. For some, the UN managed to secure agreement largely because it was willing to throw in every constituency's wishlist. In Foreign Policy, the economist William Easterly of New York University wrote that the goals were "so encyclopaedic that everything is top priority, which means nothing is a priority". Moreover, the goals are not legally binding.

Donoghue acknowledged the criticism but insisted there will be serious monitoring and review of countries’ performance.

“Most countries in the world want to show that they are operating according to collective norms,” he said. “I suppose we’re gambling that the moral pressure behind this framework will be so strong that it will be difficult – not impossible, but difficult – for countries to do their own thing.”

Tomorrow: How will the development goals be implemented? An interview with David Nabarro, special adviser to the UN secretary-general on the 2030 agenda