While globalisation and multilateral cooperation have increasingly come under threat in recent years, China has taken a leading position in promoting sustainable development globally. Beijing has been a strong proponent of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and during the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, President Xi Jinping announced the establishment of several new institutions aimed at promoting the sustainable development agenda both at home and abroad. The Oslo SDG delegation met with one of these, the Center for International Knowledge on Development (CIKD), during a recent visit to Beijing in January 2019.
CIKD serves as an important platform for researching and exchanging the Chinese development experience, and is an important channel for sharing the development experience of different countries to respond to global development challenges and achieve sustainable development. Several areas of mutual interest were identified during the visit, especially related to promising practices in SDG implementation and linkages between the SDGs and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Promising practices and critical perspectives
There is a keen interest among a range of stakeholders in Beijing to engage in dialogue on sustainable development, and Prof. Dan Banik also gave several guest lectures and talks during the visit. At UNDP China, Prof. Banik presented some of the major debates characterising the international SDG discourse as well as discussed country case studies on SDG implementation. Discussions following the lecture highlighted how previous Chinese experiences from aid and investments in the Global South can inform current approaches to promoting sustainable development globally.
Read Dan Banik’s blog from the recent visit to Beijing here.
Prof. Banik was also invited to give a guest lecture and interact with students and faculty at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, which is tasked with training senior and middle-ranking officials for the Chinese government. He shared perspectives on various national implementation and follow-up strategies for the SDGs, including cases from China, Norway, India and Malawi. In the ensuing discussions, several participants highlighted the synergies between international notions of sustainable development and China's concept of "ecological civilisation", which has been a part of the Chinese Communist Party Constitution since 2012.
The Oslo SDG Initiative also participated at the annual conference of the International Green Economy Association (IGEA), where hundreds of delegates familiarised themselves with the latest government regulations and information on subsidies and other incentives available for green entrepreneurship and the promotion of so-called “high quality development”. In his keynote at this event, Prof. Banik provided an overview of current debates related to sustainable development, and challenged the "win-win" nature of the discourse that often characterises discussions on green entrepreneurship.
