If 2015 was the year for setting goals and signing on to global commitments, 2016 could be the year of figuring out how to pay for it.
Financing to support the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate change accord will have a distinctly different feel than that of the era of Millennium Development Goals. The development finance picture today bears little resemblance to that of only a decade ago.
At that time, official development assistance, public funds given by donor governments through concessional loans and grants, had risen sharply from $85 billion given by Development Assistance Committee countries in 1990 to $128 billion in 2005. The wall between public spending and private investment in developing countries was also more intact. Debates centered on the differences between official development assistance and foreign direct investment and their relative effectiveness at creating results like job growth and reducing inequality, but not on how one could complement the other.