The policy somersaults that we are feeling right now, I guess they feel them in the United Kingdom, they feel them in countries in Europe now that ar… - Amina J. Mohammed

The UN’s approach to that, as the secretary general firmly puts it in his vision, is: We have got to look at how we prevent conflicts and once we come out of them, how do we sustain the peace and development. And in the middle of this, we are saying that the SDGs are the frameworks that we need to invest in. There are therefore no quick wins in this discussion. If we are to have sustainable development, we cannot put a band-aid on things. And if you don’t address the root causes, we are never going to have sustainable development. Therefore, we have to go back to the drawing board and we have to be courageous about it; and the UN has to come together and be much more responsive in the way in which it supports countries, in order to move them forward.

I think it’s a real struggle and the response that we are seeing right now is how countries are grappling with what they are going to do about the current order. Let me just underscore here that we are in transition time with the SDGs. As we have always said, it would take a couple of years to transition from the MDGs to the SDGs.

But while you are right that we don’t see as many conflicts as before, we do, however, in those pockets, see much more larger scale conflicts, which have larger regional implications. I therefore think it’s much more challenging because they are bringing cross-border issues. Here again, the mechanisms are around putting mediation into place, ensuring that there is a plan straddling the peace process with development. And clearly addressing the fact that when we talk about the humanitarian development nexus, in theory, we have so many red lines. But in practice and on the ground, people are dealing with this in the same context and trying to move the humanitarian crisis to reintegration on a development trajectory that achieves the SDGs. So, it is difficult.