The Asia Civil Society Partnership for Sustainable Development (APSD) has published a proposal on the need to reform the HLPF and VNR processes.

This is based on discussions the regional forum held in 2018, where representatives from national, regional and global civil society participated and shared their views on the SDGs, voluntary national reviews (VNRs) and the High Level Political Forum (HLPF).

The key recommendations are:

• The national processes should be built through inclusive processes and decentralised meetings ought to be held to feed into the document. We need to have whole society approach, not just a narrow government approaching.
• The regional forums should provide space for CSOs. The APFSD (Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development) is very strong in inclusiveness of CSO
• It has to be an exercise and processes in entire year running to HLPF. Just not the last two months.
• Bring all stakeholders to a platform – not just CSOs
• The UN systems must ensure accountability and transparent process and the national governments should be held accountable in the UN system. Need of accountability at HLPF.
• So much of private investment will come in the garb of implementing SDGs. The private players should be transparent in their investments.
• The VNR process must report the nature of such investments and ensure that they do not violate human rights and damage environment.
• There should be a 3–‐tier process. Pre–‐HLPF, HLPF and the post–‐HLPF. Before HLPF the consultations ought to be held at decentralised level and with various stakeholders. In the HLPF itself there should be meaningful exchanges between the government and the other stakeholders. And after HLPF, back in the country the governments should inform the outcome and commitments made to the Parliament/Legislature and to the general public.

 GCAP is one of the founders of the Asia Civil Society Partnership for Sustainable Development (APSD) and also hosts the secretariat.