08 February 2023
Bilbao Campus
In September 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres presented the report Our Common Agenda: "designed to accelerate the implementation of existing agreements, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)".
Our Common Agenda summarises and links together a series of political, economic, environmental and social challenges, and proposes lines of action across the multilateral system for States, the private sector, international organisations and agencies, sub-national and local authorities and civil society, with the United Nations at its core.
These actions are aimed at complementing this top-down and bottom-up multilateralism with a renewal of the social contract adapted to the realities and numerous problems to be solved in the 21st century.
This paper by Mariano Aguirre, professor of the Master's in International Humanitarian Action - NOHA and member of the Institute's Advisory Council for the Basque Government, analyses the political, economic and social context that has given rise to Our Common Agenda, the methodological perspectives on which it is based, and the prominent role it gives to sub-state and local actors. In the case of the SDGs, many of the recommended actions are decided, implemented and managed at the local level, even if it is the State that is committed to the UN.
