August 2015: The UN Economic Commissions for Africa (UNECA), Europe (UNECE), Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and Western Asia (ESCWA) have published a paper on their role in implementing the post-2015 development agenda. The paper is titled ‘UN Regional Commissions and the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Moving to Deliver on a Transformative and Ambitious Agenda.’

The publication highlights the regional commissions’ role in: offering platforms for sharing knowledge, experiences, good practices and lessons learned; providing greater voice to subregions and countries in special situations, including least developed countries (LDCs), landlocked developing countries (LLDCs), small island developing States (SIDS) and countries in conflict; promoting a balanced integration for sustainable development – through forums designed to foster integrated approaches, multidisciplinary analyses, policy advice and technical assistance; supporting South-South cooperation and sustaining the rise of middle-income countries (MICs); helping to create a solid follow-up and review architecture; strengthening national capacity to harness the data revolution, by supporting regional harmonization of statistics and national capacity development efforts to improve data and statistics collection, processing, comparability, dissemination and use; promoting multi-stakeholder partnerships and policy coherence; and coordinating the UN system at the regional level.

The paper notes that regional commissions support integration across different regions in areas such as infrastructure, trade, norms and standards, food security, macroeconomic coordination, water resources management and energy, further stressing that this integration is crucial for creating an enabling environment for the effective implementation of the post-2015 development agenda. [Publication: UN Regional Commissions and the Post-2015 Development Agenda: Moving to Deliver on a Transformative and Ambitious Agenda]