Resist, Reclaim, Rebuild:
The Peoples’ Demand for Development Justice

Position Paper of the Asia Pacific Regional CSO Engagement Mechanism (APRCEM)
on the theme of the High Level Political Forum 2026

1. Chapeau 

We, the representatives of civil society and peoples’ organisations, organised as 17 constituencies and 5 subregions from 38 countries in Asia and the Pacific, united in our commitment to Development Justice, urge member states to seize this moment of political and economic rupture together with environmental and social crises to deliver the system change necessary for a more just and sustainable future.

At the outset of the 13th Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development, the SDGs are far off track amidst a fragmenting multilateralism. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 revealed that only 35% targets are on track globally, with nearly half of them moving too slowly, and almost 18% regressing, posing a global development emergency. The multidimensional crises of climate change, cost of living, conflicts, debt distress, inequalities and governance have severely affected the progress on SDGs globally. Developing countries continue to struggle with a $4.8 trillion SDGs financing gap, while paying $1.4 trillion in debt servicing, with virtually no fiscal space for development priorities further skewed by structural adjustment programs and neoliberal trade regimes enabling illicit financial flows amounting to an average $7.8 trillion per decade.

The cracks in multilateral normative foundation reflect that the principles of sovereign equality, indivisibility, shared values and rule of law are facing ideological onslaught by unilateral tendencies of the powerful states promoting transactional relations ahead of collective gains. The lack of progress on the SDGs reflects the naivety of political will to address the underlying power asymmetries in global governance, systemic lock-ins that compound vulnerabilities in the Global South, and the failure to mobilize consensus on critical concerns. The pattern has essentially compromised the SDGs, its turbocharge commitments in the Pact for the Future, and its lifeline in the FourthFinancing for Development Conference resulting in diluted outcomes. This is compounded by the UN’s own existential crisis, reflective of the UN80 Initiative, fueled by its liquidity crisis and the current geopolitical tensions, resulting in a reactive and ad-hoc overhaul without a holistic impact assessment of its implications across its foundational principles of promoting peace & security, human rights and sustainable development around the globe.

The patterns clearly reflect the dominance of neoliberal development models that prioritize profits over people and the planet. The business-as-usual model undermines human rights, dignity, diversity, and democratic space by compartmentalizing the shared sense of solidarity among peoples and their ecosystems. The situation compels the dismantling of neoliberal development model to deliver on universal public education and health, social protection, standard of living, clean water and sanitation, renewable energies and transport, safe cities and communities, climate resilience for all the beings, and equal rights and inclusive governance for all, everywhere.  

Now is the time for international solidarity, the time to defend democracy and human rights, the time to create economies centered around care, not profits, the time to dismantle patriarchy and to commit to peace, the time for a global digital order that is democratic, participatory, inclusive, rights-based, and ecologically just and the time to redistribute global power for a more just, responsive and people-centered multilateralism.

It’s time for Development Justice. Join Us.         

II. Regional Implementation and Progress

The Asia Pacific region continues to feel the brunt of the multiple crises – from the pandemic to disasters and debt crisis to instabilities, increased vulnerabilities and widening inequalities have been more glaring than ever before.  The UN ESCAP SDG Progress Report of 2026 states that 88% of the target goals will not be achieved by 2030 in the region. The report shows a negative regression in the environmental sphere, and slow progress in most of the goals, whilst data availability remains a massive gap due to poor national statistical capacities. 

SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) have persistent data gaps, while there is stark contradiction between progress in the SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and regression in SDG 13 (Climate Action). Critical areas such as decent work (SDG 8), reducing inequalities (SDG 10), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), and partnership for the goals (SDG 17) also remain with very little progress. The report also reiterates that 103 of 117 targets will be missed, while lack of available data for 52 targets remains a major challenge to measure implementation. 

The report also presents the status of specific indicators and shows an alarming trend and stark contradictions. For instance, whilst some indicators in SDG 2 are on track such as 2.c.1 (food price anomalies), there is major regression in 2.1.2 (moderate or severe food insecurity in the population). It is similar to SDG 3.2.2 (neonatal mortality) with significant progress and positive outlook in five years, but 3.8.2 (household expenditure on health) is negative. In SDG 5, indicator 5.b.1 (ownership of mobile phone) among women and girls is on track while the rest of the indicators do not have enough data or face impediments. Similar to SDG 9.c.1 (population covered by a mobile phone network), it is on track but target indicator 9.2.2 (manufacturing employment) is regressing. Another case in point, SDG 17.8.1 (internet users)  is progressing, but SDG 17.19.1 (fiscal resources to strengthen statistical capacity in developing countries) is in regression. While access to mobile phones and internet connection are considered progress, these indicators are misleading and fail to reflect the fundamental root causes of challenges in these particular goals and targets – failing to capture the underlying systemic dynamics vis a vis various dimensions of transformation – either due to lack of consensus in the IAEG set of indicators or weak statistical capacities in the absence of CSOs and citizen-led data integration. 

Critical areas such as migration and mortality from disasters are also overlooked. For instance, SDG 10.7.3 (deaths and disappearances recorded during migration) and SDG 11.5.2 (economic loss and affected infrastructure and services from disasters) have major regressions. The environmental sphere with specific targets in SDG 14 Life Below Water and 15 Life on Land have also very slow progress, whilst SDG 13 (Climate Action) presents a negative outlook on all indicators. 

Over ten years into the implementation, with only four years left, the 2030 Agenda is clearly off-track, demonstrating repeated failures of multilateralism in the absence of a clear accountability mechanism in the diluted Follow up and Review process of the SDGs. The politics of measuring change, reflecting certain aspects while obscuring others, has deeply political implications on tracking genuine transformation. The multidimensional crises have cascading implications with increasing debt burdens on the global south, austerity measures, illicit financial flows, increasing poverty and hunger, indecent jobs and widening inequality. Extractivism, exploitation and environmental degradation have worsened, with disproportionate effects on women’s human rights alongside other marginalized groups, with wars and conflicts escalating in the backdrop of trade wars affecting populations around the world. Moreover, the crisis at the United Nations, struggling for legitimacy and relevance, faces tremendous backlash in the demise of liberal internationalism and intense geopolitics compounding the crises. 

In this time of rupture, we demand the governments to mobilize the political will and leadership to deliver genuine sustainable development. 

III. Goals under review 

SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

Water insecurity is worsening worldwide, with nearly two billion people lacking safely managed drinking water and over three billion without adequate sanitation, as population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and climate change place mounting pressure on water systems. These challenges are especially acute in the Asia Pacific region, which supports about 60 percent of the global population but has only 36 percent of its freshwater resources, intensifying inequality, pollution, and climate vulnerability. While regional conditions differ ranging from groundwater depletion and sanitation gaps in South Asia, to pollution and flooding in Southeast Asia, and climate-driven threats such as sea-level rise and glacier retreat elsewhere, many countries continue to face gaps where infrastructure expansion has not reliably delivered safe, equitable, and sustainably managed water and sanitation services.

The following are the key recommendations geared towards addressing issues and challenges on water and sanitation.

  • Affirm water and sanitation as fundamental human rights by prioritizing universal access; strengthening public provision, preventing privatization, and ensuring inclusive, disability-responsive WASH services in households and public settings, particularly in schools, workplaces, health facilities, and communal spaces through universal design principles. 
  • Scale up public investment in water security and climate-resilient systems by improving drinking water quality, wastewater treatment, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge, water reuse, ecosystem restoration, and genuine nature-based solutions, while protecting watersheds, rivers, wetlands, ponds, tanks, and mangroves, and supporting indigenous and community-based climate adaptation systems. 
  • Strengthen governance, regulation, and accountability in the water sector through robust monitoring of service quality, strict enforcement of industrial pollution controls, transparent reporting, mandatory social audits, community oversight and participation in citizen science and local monitoring, and effective grievance redress mechanisms. 
  • Advance inclusive, gender-responsive, accessible and community-led WASH governance by centering women’s leadership, safety, and participation, ensuring the meaningful inclusion of marginalized groups, especially persons with disabilities, and allocating adequate financial resources to remove structural and affordability barriers, including in disaster and emergency settings.
  • Promote sustainable and equitable water use across sectors by encouraging water-efficient agricultural practices such as crop diversification, reducing dependence on water-intensive farming, and integrating long-term water stewardship into development planning. 
  • Strengthen education, knowledge, and awareness systems for long-term sustainability by integrating water education and education for sustainable development (ESD) into formal and non-formal systems, and by recognizing, protecting, and promoting Indigenous Knowledge and water governance systems. 

SDG 7: Clean and Affordable Energy

Asia Pacific is central to achieving SDG 7, yet the region faces deep structural challenges shaped by profit-driven extractivism from the Global North. While accounting for over half of global energy consumption and emissions, many countries remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels, face inadequate and unequal energy systems, and are increasingly exposed to corporate capture of critical minerals needed for the energy transition. These challenges are compounded by climate vulnerability, weak infrastructure, regulatory and financing barriers, and the lack of equitable benefit-sharing from mining and energy projects. Rapid, carbon-intensive energy expansion, particularly in Southeast Asia, has intensified environmental degradation and social disruption, disproportionately harming Indigenous Peoples, women, workers, farmers, and other marginalized communities, while false solutions such as carbon offsets and greenwashing delay real climate action and exclude those most affected from decision-making.

To address the issues and concerns, below are the recommendations:

  • Implement inclusive, rights-based energy transition policies that center justice, equity, and human rights, ensuring Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, farmers, persons with disabilities, marginalized groups, and local communities have meaningful access to and decision-making power in energy planning and projects through bottom-up, participatory processes.
  • Advance community-led just energy transitions by shifting from top-down, externally driven programs to models where local communities lead the design, implementation, and governance of energy projects across the region.
  • Guarantee free, prior, and informed consent and fair benefit-sharing by establishing binding agreements that secure both financial and non-financial benefits for Indigenous Peoples and affected communities throughout the energy transition.
  • Ensure energy projects prioritize public well-being over profit by explicitly linking clean energy development to decent job creation, expanded affordable energy access, strengthened livelihoods, and strong social, labor and environmental safeguards.

SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Progress on SDG 9 in Asia and the Pacific is marked by sharp disparities: despite becoming a global hub for manufacturing and digital connectivity, many countries remain confined to low-value production due to weak industrial policies and structural constraints. Gains in manufacturing value added and internet access are uneven, with persistent urban, rural and income divides and growing concentration of technological control among multinational corporations. Rapid industrial and digital expansion has intensified resource extraction, energy use, and water stress, making the region the world’s largest source of CO₂ emissions despite limited efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, inadequate physical infrastructure, governance gaps, debt-driven megaprojects, high disaster risk, and rapid urbanisation often in informal settlements underscore that SDG 9 progress, while substantial, remains inequitable and environmentally unsustainable.

To realign SDG 9 implementation with development justice, human rights, and ecological sustainability, governments and international institutions must adopt the following: 

  • Advance inclusive, democratic, and sustainable industrial policies anchored in decent and regular jobs creation, implementation of living wages and universal social protection. Adopt people-led national industrial plans and institutionalize social dialogues and participation of marginalised communities in energy transition and digitalisation strategies. Implement agrarian reform to break land monopolies and achieve meaningful rural development and food sovereignty for all peoples.
  • Align industrialization with climate justice and ecological sustainability. Integrate climate resilience and just transition measures into infrastructure and industrial development. Enforce strong environmental and rights protection in mining and transition mineral extraction. Reject reliance on carbon credits offsets, and instead require multinational corporations to disclose resource use and implement real reductions in emissions, as well as shift to responsible, just and sustainable production.
  • Expand public investment in R&D and increase support for community-led innovation systems, including support for indigenous and traditional technology. Ensure infrastructure and ICT frameworks prioritise public welfare and support micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to generate and retain decent and regular jobs nationally, while expanding access for women, migrants, and displaced persons. Adopt quality, free, rights-based education and work pathways for the youth and strengthen ethical and responsible digital competencies that prepare the young people for meaningful employment and full participation in the evolving world of work shaped by technological transformation.
  • Ensure democratic, gender-responsive and disability-inclusive infrastructure that reduces unpaid care burdens, expands women’s and LGBTQI+ employment in construction, transport and tech sectors as well as leadership roles. Strengthen enforcement of disability employment quotas with transparent monitoring mechanisms. Daycare, breastfeeding stations, and other social infrastructure and facilities that promote bodily autonomy must continuously be improved. Prioritise roads, water systems, energy access and digital connectivity that genuinely serve rural communities. Apply universal design and accessibility standards to guarantee that infrastructure, ICT systems, and public mass transit systems are accessible to the persons with disabilities. 
  • Strengthen public governance, accountability, and democratic ownership. Enforce mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence for multinational corporations across supply chains. Implement just and transparent public procurement systems rooted in meaningful participation of the people. Integrate robust early warning systems to protect vulnerable communities. Respect self-determination and ensure that affected communities, specifically Indigenous Peoples, are consulted through Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) processes. Ensure that AI and digital systems serve public benefit while data sovereignty, privacy, and the right to information are protected.
  • Strengthen protection for platform workers. Support the adoption of the new ILO standards on decent work in the platform economy, and implement ILO Recommendation No. 204 to transition workers to formal employment. End false and misleading self-employment classification of platform workers and uphold workers’ fundamental freedoms.


SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

Asia and the Pacific region is the world’s most urbanized region, with over 2.2 billion people, more than half its population, living in the cities. Rapid urban growth is intensifying inequalities, climate vulnerabilities, and governance challenges while straining public services. The region is highly climate-vulnerable due to long coastlines, dense low-lying populations, and reliance on natural-resource sectors that generate about 75% of the regional GDP. According to UN ESCAP, the region is not on track to achieve SDG 11 by 2030, with uneven or declining progress driven by climate impacts, infrastructure gaps, weak local capacity and overpopulation in urban centers.

Enhancing the implementation of SDG11 requires the following:

  • Adopt disability-inclusive urban policies by mandating universal design in all public infrastructure and housing approvals; requiring regular accessibility audits of transport systems and public buildings with mandatory follow-up; institutionalizing the participation of persons with disabilities in municipal planning bodies; ensuring multi-format disaster communication (visual, audio, sign language, SMS); allocating dedicated municipal budgets for accessibility retrofitting; and integrating disability inclusion indicators into city performance and accountability frameworks for inclusive urban governance.
  • Ensure CSO monitoring and advocacy through enabling policies, regulations, and the institutionalization of CSO engagement in development planning and assessment processes for enhanced implementation and monitoring of SDG11.
  • Member states, through parliaments and relevant institutions, should improve SDG 11 data availability via coordinated collaboration among national statistical offices, administrative agencies, CSOs, communities and citizen-led data initiatives, with a strong focus on disaggregated data by income, gender, disability, location, and context-specific factors.
  • Civil society organizations can complement government performance and monitoring in informal settlements, focusing on sustainable urban financing, affordable housing, safe public transport, improved adaptation capacities, lifelong learning opportunities, climate-related human rights impacts, and disaster risk reduction, while strengthening accountability mechanisms to improve local implementation of national policies. 
  • CSOs should prioritize advocacy with city governments on SDG target 11.3, particularly indicator 11.3.2 by campaigning for regular, democratic participation mechanisms in urban planning and maintaining annual engagement on SDG 11 progress, aligned with SDG17 on MOI.
  • Regional and global SDG forums should institutionalize a coherent and holistic review of follow-up commitments from the previous cycles vis a vis a focus on beyond Goals Under Review during the Voluntary National Review (VNR) processes to enhance the implementation of SDGs priorities. 

SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals

Instead of strengthening state accountability and public responsibility, SDG 17 has evolved into a partnership-driven framework centered on multistakeholderism and private sector engagement. The current model places corporations and governments on equal footing despite stark asymmetries in power, resources, and obligations. The shift has allowed corporate actors to shape policy, financing priorities, and implementation strategies without being bound by human rights or social justice standards. 

There are also significant gaps in strengthening national statistical capacities leading to slow, perpetuating data gaps that hinder effective monitoring and implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

In the Asia‑Pacific, civil society and people’s organizations are systematically sidelined across global, regional, and national platforms in favor of private sector engagement. In this case, decision-making is dominated by governmental actors and corporate interests. In addition, over 85 % of the Asia-Pacific population lives in repressed or closed civic space environments, where freedoms of assembly, expression, and association are limited, and human rights defenders (HRDs) routinely face harassment, arrest, or criminalization.

Below are the key recommendations in order to address the challenges in implementing and achieving the targets under SDG17:

  • On Accountability. Strengthen SDG 17 through a rights-based, people-centered, and accountable approach. The shift in SDG 17 from means of implementation to partnerships shifted the narrative from North to South obligations toward partnerships that weaken accountability. Partnerships often deflect state obligations, especially where politicians and businesses overlap (bureaucrat capitalists). Accountability must be transparency-based and aligned with business and human rights principles. Also, promote stronger South-South and community-level partnerships instead of reliance on corporate and private sector reliance in implementation across all goals.
  • On Digitalization and Technology. Ensure inclusive access to technologies, and promote governance models where peoples’ governments, not corporations, retain control at national and multilateral levels. Digital and emerging technologies must respect rights to development, privacy, and freedom of expression. In addition, promote culturally appropriate, locally proven innovations that can be scaled. Technology governance must ensure equity, public oversight, and community ownership.  Provision of support, particularly, resources to enable developing countries and communities to develop is also critical, including enabling exchange of appropriate technologies that respond to their concrete needs and situations. The UN should adopt a mechanism on the evaluation of actual and potential impacts on basic needs of people, the environment, health, the labor market, livelihoods and society. 
  • On Data. Address major gaps in collection and accessibility of disaggregated data (gender, age, disability, geography, health status, income) through public financing for data systems to support evidence-based, inclusive policymaking. Also, citizen-generated and people-led data should be systematically integrated into decision-making.
  • On Participation. 
    • Ensure meaningful public consultation and disclosure of government agreements, including actively involving marginalized sectors such as persons with disabilities and their organizations in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of all policies and programs. Ensure Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples.
    • Uphold civic space, democratic values, and inclusive participation by protecting civil society, enabling meaningful CSO engagement in review and accountability mechanisms, and recognizing local and people-led development practices.
    • Repressive laws and restrictive measures that undermine human rights, democracy, and inclusive international cooperation must be actively discouraged.

IV. Issues beyond the goals 

Militarism, Conflict and Wars 

The Asia-Pacific is one of the world’s most militarized regions, with spending reaching $629 billion in 2024. This buildup, fueled by models prioritizing profit over human dignity, drives both geopolitical tension and ecological destruction. Militarism is a “hidden polluter,” while a “Green Transition” is exploited to justify military-guarded mining for lithium and cobalt in places like West Papua and the Philippines, further displacing Indigenous communities. People’s movements, led by civil society, feminist groups, and Indigenous peoples, continue to resist such militarism. However, those challenging the military-industrial complex face escalating risks, including surveillance, harassment, persecution and retribution. 

The following recommendations are critical for lasting peace and collective wellbeing: 

  • Dismantle the expansion of foreign military bases and occupation forces in the region, having deepened geopolitical tensions, undermined national sovereignty, and exposed communities to various risks and vulnerabilities. End foreign occupation and military interventions through prohibition of military agreements that enable foreign powers to establish bases, conduct joint exercises, or use national territories as military outposts.
  • Re-channel security and military expenditure toward social development programs such as universal access to healthcare, education, social protection, housing, climate action, and peacebuilding and conflict prevention initiatives. Decrease funding for militarized policing and “counter-insurgency” programs that only criminalize dissent, target Indigenous peoples, and protect corporate assets over human lives.
  • Ensure legal accountability for the private sector and security providers such as Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) that aid or abet violations of international law. To further hold these institutions accountable, Multilateral institutions must impose sanctions, restrictions, and accountability mechanisms on corporations that support occupation, surveillance, and repression of the people. The proactive role of the United Nations must be strengthened in preventing militarism, regulating arms transfers, addressing conflicts, and ensuring accountability for violations of international law.
  • Halt the plunder and extraction of natural resources and transition minerals for militarism and wars. Similarly, climate and natural resources must be protected during peace and armed conflict. Enforce strict environmental protections and corporate accountability and uphold the rights of the people including free, prior and informed consent. 
  • Dismantle the military-industrial complex driven by profit-driven policies. Regional security should be achieved through diplomacy and justice rather than “deterrence by denial.” 
  • Demilitarize and de-escalate toward genuine community-led political solutions that focus on addressing the root causes of conflict, such as land rights and resource equity, rather than military posturing.

Corporate Capture 

Corporate capture in Asia-Pacific is not a governance anomaly but a structural outcome of neoliberal capitalism. Decades of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation have reoriented states to serve capital accumulation rather than public welfare. Meanwhile, corporate activities in many industries including, extractive industries, manufacturing, electronics, and large-scale infrastructure projects funded by international financial institutions are fast-tracked with weakened environmental and social safeguards, increasing human rights violations, displacing communities and degrading ecosystems. Privatization and public–private partnerships guarantee corporate returns while social risks and rising costs are shifted onto citizens. Debt programs, austerity measures, privatizations, and structural reforms are implemented without meaningful democratic scrutiny. Reversing these trends requires binding corporate accountability, progressive taxation, debt justice, curbing illicit financial flows, protection of civic space, and strong public institutions capable of regulating the capital in public interest. 

We recommend the following to undo corporate capture of development: 

  • Re-center public finance as a major source of development financing. Replace corporate-led “green growth” and public-private partnerships with publicly financed, community-controlled systems prioritizing redistribution, gender justice, and ecological survival. Overall, development financing must not mean subsidizing the private sector or enabling corporate capture of multilateral institutions, especially the UN. 
  • Reclaim public ownership of services such as education, health, social protection, energy, water, and transport to ensure that affordability is not a barrier to people’s development.
  • End corporate financing by banning corporate donations, enforcing full transparency of political funding, and criminalizing illicit lobbying and revolving-door appointments. 
  • Establish enforceable mechanisms to hold corporations legally liable for human rights violations, corruption, and ecological destruction. Similarly, apply retrospective and restorative justice for historical harms committed by the Global North corporations and private institutions against marginalized communities in the South.
  • Advance progressive taxation, curb illicit financial flows, reject IFIs structural adjustment programs and neoliberal trade rules of WTO, to secure enhanced fiscal space for development, avoid debt traps, and abolish deregulation and privatization manoeuvres. 
  • Dismantle exploitative business models such as the migration-capital, which exploits migrant workers for cheap labor, by developing national industries to create dignified jobs. And, expose military-corporate conglomerates through strict anti-trust laws to ensure that conflicts and catastrophes are not converted into sources of profit.
  • Demand structural reforms across IFIs, MDBs and the WTO, in line with the Pact for the Future, to avoid the promotion of corporate-centric models like the “Doing Business”.
  • Protect civic space by safeguarding independent trade unions, journalists, small farmers and producers, and Indigenous communities from state-corporate repression.

Triple Planetary Crisis 

The irony of the least responsible for emissions facing the harshest consequences of climate change best describes the situation of climate crisis in Asia and the Pacific. Other than among countries, this also holds true within them between the very few of the elite controlling resources and power and the vast majority of the marginalized with lives, livelihoods and ecosystems at stake. It is critical to understand that such extreme vulnerabilities are driven by colonial legacies, asymmetrical power relations, pre-existing inequalities of wealth, power and resources, and perpetual mechanisms of exploitation that makes it impossible for people to adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change. This is compounded by the neoliberal macroeconomic governance, foreign and domestic policy stipulations enforced by IMF and World Bank conditionalities, and monopolistic trade regimes of the WTO pushing deregulation and liberalization to restrict state policy space, weaken domestic environmental standards accountability and promote false solutions that continue to prioritize profits over people and the planet.  

To address the multidimensionality of the triple planetary crisis, we recommend the following: 

  • Integrate Climate Justice into policy and financing frameworks and Means of Implementation, including the Scale Loss and Damage Finance and the fulfillment of state obligations through predictable, accessible, grant-based and direct to community finance, technology transfer and capacity-building. 
  • Member States should also heed to the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change.
  • Promote and support people’s climate action including nature-based and ecosystems-based solutions by institutionalising indigenous knowledge and community science, mainstreaming climate change education, promoting feminist and rights-based approaches, providing resources for local and decentralized climate solutions. 
  • Reject false solutions such as carbon markets, carbon capture, geoengineering, and other techno-fixes adversely affecting adaptation and mitigation capacities in the South.
  • Give equal focus on adaptation, specially community-based and inclusive disaster risk reduction frameworks.
  • Safeguard environmental and human rights defenders and expand civic space towards meaningful participation.

Gender Inequality, Women’s Human Rights, and Marginalized Identities

Women bear the brunt of unpaid care work and the collection of  unclean, non-renewable waste products including fuel, with lack of access to safely managed sanitation services and hygiene facilities required for menstrual health, sexual and reproductive health service delivery including obstetric emergency services and safe abortion care. These barriers restrict women and girls’ access to essential services, economic and political spheres. Meanwhile, extractivism, imperialism and privatization continue to curtail development justice, while marginalized communities including but not limited to Women and Girls, Dalits, Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent, Persons of diverse SOGIESC, Persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, Migrants, People living with HIV, People living in rural areas or in remote geographical and maritime locations, continue to bear the impacts of these crises. Moreover, the recent ideological onslaught and the crisis of multilateralism threaten normative progress on gender equality and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), with well-funded anti-rights groups, in the backdrop of shrinking ODA. Parallelly, the liquidity crisis at the UN, and the ad-hoc UN80 Initiative, proposing the potential merger of UNFPA and UN Women, shrinking space for feminist and women’s rights organisations, and authoritarian governance, constrict gender equality prospects in the region.

To enhance gender equality, justice and rights, we call for the following recommendations:

  • Recognise, account for, socially protect, and work towards the redistribution of unpaid care work, precarious work and informal labour done by women in all their diversity, including aging women, and robust  social protection systems. 
  • Invest in practical economic & life skills for women including digital, market-competitive skills, bridging gender gap beyond the binary in formal labour force, addressing gender pay gap and promoting economic empowerment for the most marginalized groups.
  • Promote community-led, publicly accountable, and feminist technology ecosystems where women, girls and young people, in all their diversities, co-own their solutions, govern data, and lead monitoring and evaluation processes.  
  • Resource and undertake collection, analysis and use of individual-level gender-sensitive, multidimensional disaggregated data on poverty and inequality to strengthen insight into the inter-relationships between inequalities in water, sanitation, hygiene, energy, work and time, and how these vary by gender, age, socioeconomic status, health status, caste, work and descent and geographic location.
  • Ensure the inclusion of SRHR information, education and services in universal healthcare coverage plans, policies, and financing mechanisms by providing rights-based training to healthcare professionals, integrating SRHR and gender-responsive approaches into urban planning, humanitarian responses, and climate adaptation strategies, and strengthening crisis care and psychosocial support for the survivors of violence.
  • Recognize the specific hygiene needs of people who menstruate, including women and girls during menstruation; and that women have specific hygiene needs during pregnancy, childbearing and rearing and throughout the life course; mothers living with HIV; and dalits and Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent, women with disabilities and women from other marginalised communities.
  • Invest in safe, accessible, and gender-responsive water and sanitation infrastructure in communities to prevent sexual and gender-based violence and protect the rights of women and girls in all their diversity.

V. Rights Holders’ Engagement in the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) 

At the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) 2026, a total of 36 countries, including three from the Asia-Pacific region, will be presenting their VNRs. The VNRs must be open to civil society and other stakeholders, the meaningful civil society participation in the consultative and drafting process remains compromised mainly because private consultants hired by the government to produce the VNR report. Therefore, the VNR reports mostly highlight member state achievements without depicting the realistic situation of the SDGs implementation and their associated challenges. This also compounds the issue of data unavailability, due to the weak capacity of national statistical commissions, until the CSOs and Citizen Data initiatives are meaningfully formalized to ensure genuine complementarity enhancing the accuracy of the VNR report.     

We forward the following principles and recommendations: 

  • Shift VNRs’ focus away from GDP growth narratives to ensure that overarching statistics and proportionate averages do not obscure the intricacies and nuances of the realities of the most marginalized, in line with the LNOB principle, to prioritize the furthest left behind. 
  • Ensure an enabling environment for meaningful CSOs participation through rights-based approaches across planning, implementation and review of the Agenda 2030 to enhance complementarity as well as accountability processes.
  • Promote greater transparency and access to data, emphasizing disaggregated data by age, gender, ethnicity, disability, health status, location, and income to expose disparities. Incorporate citizens’ led data, including qualitative insights to ensure holistic tracking of transformations on the ground. Localize SDGs at the national, subnational and local levels integrating SDGs into planning processes while grounding strategies in previous VNRs, lessons learnt and commitments.
  • Institutionalize major groups and other stakeholders’ engagement, including women, children, youth, Indigenous communities, women living with HIV, LGBTQ+ individuals, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities, across all levels for holistic outcomes. 
  • Enhance policy coherence through alignment of national plans, policies, budgets and institutional processes to maximize intersectional gains across sectors through coordinated SDGs implementation mechanisms.  
  • Protect civic space by repealing restrictive laws to protect freedoms of expression, assembly, and association, while protecting rights defenders from reprisals during VNRs.
  • Establish post-VNR action plans with clear mechanisms for follow-up, utilizing the regional fora on SDGs, involving meaningful civil society contributions as shadow reports to effectively enhance progress tracking beyond Goals Under Review. 

VI. Financing for Development Justice

The neoliberal framework of macroeconomic global governance remains neocolonial, failing to deliver people and planet-centered outcomes by addressing the gaps in financing sustainable development. In the recently concluded Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, the Global North governments obscured their unmet Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments, amounting to $7.2 trillion by 2025, by diverting the focus to blended finance, diversifying sources of funding to tap the potential of private capital, which might further entrap developing countries in debt distress. This is compounded by the great power rivalries for control of critical minerals, reflecting the imperial undertone of dominating territories and markets, further complicating the development landscape for Global South. Meanwhile, the calls for reparations, debt resolution and illicit financial flows remain unheard across negotiations, reforms of the international financial architecture continue to be blocked by the IFIs and big economies, and democratizing global governance remains a pipedream for the Global South.  

The Compromiso de Sevilla presents a corporate-first narrative that legitimizes the role of the private sector in mobilizing development finance. It also provides access and power to international financial institutions and big economies to maneuver the reforms in the international financial architecture. It fails to call out the increasing military expenditure, anti-people and anti-gender policies, and divestments in public financing for development. Across regions, there is notable increase in military spending alongside increasing austerity measures on basic social services, which detrimentally affect women & girls and marginalized segments of the society. The responsibility for technology transfer, capacity building and governance strengthening support, from Global North to South to attain the SDGs, have largely been eliminated from the outcome document. The outcome also fails to defend the foundational principles of multilateralism in sovereign equality, shared values and rules-based order, facing existential crisis.  

To enable Financing for Development Justice, we put forward the following recommendations: 

    • Establish a UN led intergovernmental process on a global regulatory framework, featuring a legally binding instrument, on public-private partnerships, blended finance, investment bonds for SDGs and other private finance instruments for their impacts on state policy and fiscal space, human rights, labor and environmental standards.  
    • Establish a comprehensive framework of international investment based on the principle of human rights, SDGs and core treaty compatibility, replacing neoliberal instruments like the Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement (ISDS), underpinned by cooperation, accountability and transparency. It should also include a comprehensive review of the liberalisation reforms and deregulation measures implemented by the World Trade Organization.
    • Cancel all unsustainable, odious and illegitimate debts, and demand reparations, and debt-free support for education, health, and universal social protection, including loss and damage. Establish a UN-hosted binding and transparent multilateral debt workout mechanism that convenes all creditors – bilateral, multilateral, and private – under the United Nations while enhancing the agency of Global South countries. 
  • Implement wealth taxes and corporate tax structures to ensure equitable contribution to national revenues, through a minimum tax floor set at 25%, addressing both the concentration of wealth vis a vis equitable financing for critical sectors. Prioritise the adoption of the UN Tax Convention to curb illicit financial flows, enhance tax effort on cross-border services, and provide a framework for tax dispute resolution. 
  • Establish the UN Convention on International Development Cooperation to provide a new normative framework for development cooperation, which recognizes the historical responsibility of Global North for reparations to the South, and dismantles the neoliberal grip and corporate capture of development frameworks.
  • Establish a UN led technology and AI governance mechanism to protect the people, their livelihoods, and ecosystems from their adverse impacts. The mechanism must also enable technology transfer, curb the concentration of technological innovation in the private sector, and enforce an effective regulatory framework for digital platforms, in line with the international human rights law. It should also address the digital divide by capacitating developing countries to develop, share and exchange context-sensitive technologies and digital infrastructure to avoid the imperialism of the 4th industrial revolution.   
  • Enact transformative reforms in the international financial and trade architecture based on a comprehensive review of the IFIs, MDBs and WTO’s mandate, policies and practices through a UN led process to enhance transparency, inclusivity and accountability. Establish a regulatory mechanism under the ECOSOC for Credit Rating Agencies, including a comprehensive review of their risk and vulnerability assessment instruments, and their role in increasing economic burdens on the Global South countries. 
  • Create an inclusive mechanism for meaningful civil society participation enabling substantive inputs and effective engagement in the follow up and review of FfD4 commitments implementation. This includes institutionalising the FfD4 review alongside the full scope of SDG17 at the APFSD and HLPF processes, in line with the principle of accountability in the MOI of the 2030 Agenda. Replacing the SDG17 with FfD4 will compromise the review of non-financial aspects of the MOI with critical implications for the overall implementation of the 2030 Agenda while setting a regressive precedent for the post-2030 process.   

VII. Multilateralism for the Peoples of Asia Pacific 

The crisis of multilateralism requires a multifaceted response by all multilateral entities to address the multidimensional crises. It would require policy coherence, compatibility and compliance across multilateral institutions, especially IFIs, MDBs and the WTO, with the UN, to avoid going one step forward, two steps back on development priorities. Any conceptualization of reforms must:

  • Recognize the colonial origins of underdevelopment to accentuate historical responsibility across negotiations 
  • Must be grounded in Southern narratives to dismantle colonialities across multilateral entities, governance mechanisms and development frameworks 
  • Ensure alignment with normative frameworks to safeguard the hardfought gains of peoples’ struggles across multilateral spaces
  • Enact accountability for actors and entities (multilateral, member state, corporate) exacerbating underdevelopment, especially in the Global South
  • Integrate regional process outcomes and inputs into global policy processes
  • Ensure policy coherence across multilateral processes including Pact for the Future, Financing for Development, World Social Summit on Development, UN80, CSW and the post-2030 discourse to leverage synergies for holistic outcomes.  
  • The UN80 Initiative must be grounded in a holistic impact analysis across the three foundational pillars principles of the UN. The process must: 
    • Ensure that regional process outcomes (RFSDs and Regional Committees such as Macroeconomic and others) inform global policy processes through defined tracks
    • The mandate implementation review must be cognizant of the principle of no regression, based on Rio +20, with safeguards for normative frameworks, principles and considerations
    • The structural overhaul must ensure deepening and widening of mandates, where necessary, based on the impact assessment as opposed to reactive crisis response

VIII. The Peoples’ Demand for Development Justice 

More than ten years after its inception, Development Justice is more relevant today than ever. The not so transformative agenda, as dubbed at its adoption, is failing miserably with the overall progress at barely 17% and the projected timelines stretching to 2062 based on 53% of the available data. In the backdrop of emergent multidimensional crises, we are affirmed that the SDGs could never be achieved in the business-as-usual model unless systemic barriers and structural lock-ins are addressed. The absence of emphasis in the neoliberal model on prioritizing people and the planet ahead of profits undermines the fundamental principles of the Right to Development – envisioned to recognise the human rights to economic, social, cultural and political development – without which sustainable development, peace and justice cannot be achieved. 

Development Justice lens will interrogate redistribution of wealth and resources –  It is alarming that the concentration of private wealth in the region is among the highest globally, with the top 5% of the population in several countries controlling nearly 70% of total private wealth. More than 2 billion people in the region are still living on less than USD 6.85 per day, 876 million living on less than USD 3.65 and 219 million living on less than USD 2.15 per day (UN ESCAP, 2025), with many residing in South and South-West Asia. An economic justice lens will look at  the serious economic risks the region is facing including uncertainties as a result of rising geopolitical tensions, high-level corruption, climate change induced disasters, high levels of inequality, including the widening digital divide and its impacts on the right to education and information access, high levels of debt and fiscal constraints, trade wars, among others. An environmental justice framework should look at the  catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis with many countries in the region unprepared, lacking the “sizable financial means to support adaptation and mitigation efforts and the data necessary to inform climate action,” according to the UN ESCAP report (2023). The report also revealed that the infrastructure and services are insufficiently climate-resilient. It is estimated that average economic losses caused by natural and biological hazards amount to USD 780 billion (UN ESCAP, 2023). This is forecast to increase to trillions if urgent climate actions are not taken. A gender justice lens will look at the impact of patriarchal norms and systemic discrimination remain entrenched, manifesting in high rates of gender-based violence, unequal economic opportunities, and limited representation in decision-making.

In that context, we advance the call for Development Justice as the only solution to usher in macroeconomic, geopolitical and rights-based transformations to safeguard our dignity, democracy and destiny untowards a fair future for all.  

Development Justice (DJ) offers a holistic framework of the future, moving beyond narrow, growth-driven interpretations of sustainable development, centering redistributive justice, economic justice, gender and social justice, environmental justice, and accountability to the people as transformative shifts to address the multidimensional crises. Development Justice helps reframe the SDGs not as a checklist of targets, but as policy coherent, holistic and transformative solutions to realize inclusive governance, just economies, safe ecologies and sustainable societies. 

With the theme of RESIST, RECLAIM, REBUILD, the Peoples’ Forum pushes a strategic and resounding call in the last five years of the 2030 Agenda. RESIST means calling and confronting systemic barriers, structural injustices, and false solutions that perpetuate inequality and oppression. RECLAIM involves restoring narratives and advocacy spaces from corporate capture to revitalize multilateralism that advances peoples’ lens for development. REBUILD means forging a collective future founded in solidarity across movements, strengthening collective strategies, and advancing people-led alternatives that embody justice, sustainability, and peace beyond 2030. Development Justice is the peoples’ narrative that pushes to:  

  • Redistribute resources, wealth, power and opportunities equitably within and among countries, dismantle neoliberal macroeconomic frameworks that resonate colonial exploitation of Global South’s wealth and resources through illicit financial flows, structural adjustment programs and monopolizing trade rules, and challenge the domination of westernized knowledge regimes promoting false solutions. 
  • Enable economic justice that ensures dignified lives for all, with gender transformative social protection floors in place, and economies enabling dignified lives, and decent work, with living wages and safe working conditions for all, and recognise unpaid care work and democratise access to resources. We call for a complete stop to the exploitation of people and the planet, and make the economies work for people, and their well being.
  • Ensure meaningful engagement of people in all their diversities, and the elimination of all forms of discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion of people on the basis of gender, ethnicity, caste, sexual orientation, and gender identity.  We call for structural and systemic reforms that will eliminate institutionalised patriarchy across state and societal institutions  and deliver on gender and social justice.
  • Environmental degradation is the historical responsibility of Global North, and their corporations and elites, who have advanced extractive patterns of production and consumption leading to violations of human rights and planetary considerations. We call for those responsible to pay reparations, loss and damages, for those who suffer the most including farmers, indigenous peoples, and marginalised groups, parallel with efficient and immediate accountability of repression against environmental defenders.
  • Democratic, just & inclusive governance is crucial to enable people to exercise agency over their own lives, territories and futures. Shifting power to the people and informed decision-making and holding governments accountable is crucial for the survival and sustainability of democracies.

We demand Development Justice as the framework of the future for people and the planet and future generations. 

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