 of SDG 16 and we also manage a website where these data are accessible and may be used widely. This panel discussion brings together representatives of the partnership. It is not the full partnership but it is a very good spectrum that provides us insights into various of the chapters that will be produced in the global report. And we have also institutions that provide their own views on the same topic because they are very active in that respect. So we have Daniela Barba from the World Justice Project, Guillaume La Fortune from the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Toby Mendel from the Center for Law and Democracy, Mariana Neves from the United Nations Development Program, John Romano from the TAP Network, and my colleague Miguel Angel Lara Otaola from International Idea. Without further ado, I will now give the floor to Miguel Angel who will start by introducing the topic on SDG 16 and development. Please, Miguel, you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much. And well, hello everyone and thank you for joining this event. We're very happy to have you here. It's also an honor to be sharing this panel with you colleagues from different institutions. And well, today I will just give a brief presentation on what the SDG 16 data initiative is to give some examples, not all of them, of some of the data that we have and how this data can be used. And I will conclude with a reflection on the importance of SDG 16 and democracy because, you know, there's a very strong correlation, you know, and development. So without further ado, I'll share my PowerPoint presentation so I can begin. Give me a second. And it should be on your screens now. Yep. Okay. So the SDG 16 data initiative. We are a consortium of 17 different organizations that use official and non official data to track progress to monitor progress on SDG 16. And this is because official data sometimes has limitations. There's not complete time series measures and the data that is included in official measurements does not completely reflect underlying concepts. That is that, you know, for, for an aspect such as access to justice or the fight against corruption, we might have two or three indicators. Yes, do reflect aspects of that concept, but do not cover the entirety of this and I will provide an example a little bit later. And here I include a quote that I like very much because it summarizes in part what we do. And it says that while statistics by national governments and this is the official information form the foundation for assessing countries performance data provided by civil society organizations and, you know, from other sources, universities, intergovernmental organizations such as us that idea can be complimentary and serve to highlight discrepancies between data sets and also can be used to complement the tracking and to get a more comprehensive and updated view of challenges and progress made in the different targets. So this is the list of organizations you can see the different logos on screen that comprise the SDG 16 data initiative. Today, as Massimo mentioned, we have a representative sample of the entire list we have the Center for Law and Democracy. We have the world justice project. We have the TAP network, sustainable development solutions network. We also have a UNDP, but that's that's the full list. And as Massimo said, every year we put together a report to see where we are in terms of achieving SDG 16, but also providing recommendations, not only for having better data and better coverage of that data, but also recommendations that different actors can follow to achieve better countries with more accountable institutions with more participatory mechanisms. Here is a list, not comprehensive, not exhaustive, but a few examples of the data that we used to complement official statistics. So we have Pryo's armed conflict data set, the world justice projects rule of law index, the Uppsala conflict data program, the global global violent deaths data set from small arms survey, the right to information rating from the center of law and democracy amongst others, and these can help complement the measures that already exist officially. One of the data sets that we use, and here's a little bit of publicity because you know that's the institution where I work in I'm very proud of it is the global state of democracy indices at international idea. And these indices measure the quality of democracy, but we just don't stop at having periodical authentic, you know, free and fair elections, but we also measure other aspects other categories of democracy that also are very related to SDG 16. And these are fundamental rights representative government participation, not only understood as participation at the polls every four or five years, but the density of civil society participation. And of course, the rule of law that includes concepts such as judicial independence, the fight against corruption, the predictable enforcement of laws. In total, we have 29 indices of democracy that can help as a complement to track progress on different targets on SDG 16. Some of the advantages of this data is that we have a lot of information we draw from 20 different sources from academic and nonacademic institutions from Vietnam from freedom house civil liberties data set a bunch of you and statistics. UNESCO, the food and agriculture organization, and we have data that goes from 1975 to 2022, and it's updated every year. And we have data for, you know, good number of countries, 173 countries. The data that we have is useful specifically for tracking for targets of the 10 targets in SDG 16 16.3, which is promoting the rule of law 16.5 producing corruption 16.6 effective accountable institutions and 16.7 more inclusive participatory and representative decision making. And to give you an example of the shortcomings of official data and how this can be complimented. If you look at 16.3 promoting the rule of law. Currently what official data includes has three indicators, the number of unsentenced detainees, the number of victims of violence, and people who have used a dispute resolution mechanism. Of course, that's part of the rule of law, but the rule of law is so much more than that. It's about having access to an independent and competence tribunal. It's about the presumption of innocence. It's about due process. It's about having speedy justice. So, to get a full measure of this target, we offer certain data and this is just a couple of examples of what we have as the SDG 16 data initiative. I already mentioned a couple of those we have indicators on access to justice judicial independence and the predictable enforcement of laws but also the world justice project for instance and Danila will probably tell us way more about this has some very interesting and relevant indicators on civil justice and criminal justice, in addition to the rule of law index. This is a couple of examples of how our data can can be seen in action. I won't deal too much in detail because I know we do not have a lot of time, but this is to show you that you know we can use the data to compare amongst different regions with a lot of new ones because I would say the main feature of the global state of democracy indices is that we just don't give a ranking or a score for a specific country. We do not do that. However, we measure specific indicators 29 in total, which give us more specific information, which is especially relevant for tracking SDG 16. And now also to conclude the big reflection. So here what I did is I did a quick analysis showing the second level indicators that we have an idea and compared countries with high mid and low scores in representation, which can be a measure to equate to democracy. And what we can see is that in all of them in 18 out of 18 of those democracies outperform non democracies. Of course, some of the names there, you will see of course you know democracies perform better than non democracies incredible elections. Of course you know it's it's self correlating but there are other measures there like basic welfare, gender equality, judicial independence rule of law, where democracies also perform better. And this has to do with the fact that you know democracy is a system that allows citizens to have a voice to influence public policy to protest to call for action. And that of course favors the views, the concerns of citizens, whereas in other systems it's just the decisions and the interests of one person or a small group of people. And I'm saying this, not only because democracy is important in itself and it matters for living lives of freedom and dignity, but also that system and the mechanisms that it entails allows for achieving other rights. And here I would like to end with this quote by Roberto Bobio and Italian political philosopher that shows exactly the mechanism of democracy of how empowerment can lead to better institutions lead to better public policies and lead to welfare. And he says that when the vote belong exclusively to property owners, they protected property. When the vote was extended to illiterate persons, they asked the state for the creation of free schools. So in franchising those people then they could bring their agenda to the public right. And when the vote was extended to non property owners to the dispossessed, those who have no other property but their own hands their own labor. The consequence was to request and obtain social protection from the state. Thus, the origin of the welfare state is a response to a demand coming from below. In essence, to a democratic request. And this is, I think, what matters here. I know I presented you a view of the data that we offer the data that we can use, and it's data that can be used to better track SDG 16 and tracking better SDG 16 can lead to better democracies better quality of democracies and to development and to, you know, the rest of the agenda from fighting poverty to fighting climate change. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Miguel for making this powerful argument on the linkages between all human rights and including of course political and civil rights, but also economic rights and the delivery side of democratic governance. I will give now the floor to Toby Mendel, who is the founder and executive director of the Center for Law and Democracy, a Canadian based international human rights NGO. Toby. Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be here. This is a very important conversation. As you said, we're not succeeding on the SDGs in general. We're certainly not succeeding on SDG 16. So my organization focuses within this package primarily on target 1610 access to information and fundamental freedoms. But for today, I'm going to focus more on some general comments about SDG 16 data collection and assessing progress. So more general presentation. I want to preface my remarks, though, by saying that most of the ways that we measure progress on the SDGs are statistical in nature. So we're looking at, you know, numbers basically, and essentially averages. So we sort of amass and the data that Miguel just showed us is like that. But the title of this panel is data so that no one is left behind. And I just want to highlight that we often need to dig more deeply into the statistics. Not just look at the global statistics, but then look at sort of subsets of the data and many of the unofficial or non official data that the people on this on this panel produce does exactly that. And it's very important to go beyond just the broad data. So I have a number of general points about special challenges, special considerations that when it comes to SDG 16 and data and assessment. And the first is a very general point. The metric that the UN has adopted for assessing whether we meet the SDGs or the 2030 goals is substantial progress towards them. And I would like to highlight at the outset that I mean, that's, that's, that's a, you know, slightly soft tool or soft measurement for all of the SDGs, but it's particularly challenging in the SDG 16 space. I think, for example, of assessing, you know, dealing with corruption, the rule of law that Miguel has just talked about effective accountable institutions, access to information and fundamental freedoms. I mean, what does substantial progress look like in those areas, not very statistical in nature, whereas some areas it's more statistical. And this is quite closely related. And then Miguel also referred to this, while I think many of us are quite satisfied with the targets that are found under SDG 16, the indicators are often quite a long way away from really hard measuring targets. And that's different than a lot of the other SDGs. And Miguel already mentioned about the rule of law. He outlined the indicators for that. And then he gave a whole long list of other features of the rule of law, which simply are not captured by those indicators under access to information and fundamental freedoms. One of the indicators is, you know, the number of human rights defenders and journalists and other unionists that are killed, disappeared, tortured. I mean, that's obviously an important thing to measure, but it's hardly equates to protection of fundamental freedoms in its wider sense. So I think that in an under SDG 16, the gap between the indicators and the targets is significantly larger than for most of the other goals. And many of us as CSOs operating in this space are, you know, calling for a broader assessment of how we're doing then just looking at the indicators. Thirdly, I would highlight that progress in this area and attention in this area is relatively highly politicized. Of course, the achievement of all of the SDG goals and targets and indicators depends on political will and, you know, governments making those things a priority and collaborating with civil society to achieve the goals. But in under SDG 16, we are specifically measuring good governance, participation, accountability. We're looking directly at how well the political system works and not just what its priorities are and how well it's doing in other areas of achievement. So it's more political than the other SDGs and that makes it complicated. And as a reflection of that, my fourth point, of course, progress is not steady on any of the targets, 169 if I've got my numbers right, targets under the SDGs and there's some up and down and some, but generally speaking, progress on a lot of them is, you know, positively incremental. We're moving forward over the world, even if progress is not always steady. That's not true for many of the indicators and targets under SDG 16. Here we can experience, excuse me, very dramatic declines, not just sort of a little bit of wobbling but falling off a cliff. And the last sort of five to 10 years, we've witnessed many cases around the world of very, very serious backsliding in terms of democracy and human rights and responsiveness in institutions. I mean, the kind of backsliding that we see under some of the indicators and targets under SDG 16 is qualitatively different, I would say, than for other areas. Again, making sort of assessing progress more difficult but also making, you know, achieving progress more difficult. My fifth point is that the SDG 16 indicators are very sensitive to sub trends and I'm going to go back here to the point I made at the beginning about how if we are going to leave no one behind, we can't simply look at overall progress at a country level. We need to look beneath that and break that progress down by gender, by age, by disability, by wealth, by a disadvantaged minority status, by all of these different characteristics which reflect the complexity of our societies and see how we're doing, you know, not just overall as a society but for everyone in our society. We may be moving forward on some of these things when we average things out, but for example, women are doing, you know, less well and then, you know, we're not achieving or certain minority groups are being left behind. So that's and that's not, you know, fundamentally that's not what the SDGs are about. I think that that is not a special feature of SDG 16 unlike some of the other things I've been talking about. I think that probably cost cuts a lot of the SDGs, but certainly is present for SDG 16. And then my sixth general point or introductory point and I mean, Miguel and Massimo both made this point. SDG 16, most of the targets and indicators under that are very cross cutting in nature. And there's been an enormous body of literature written about this. I'm not going to, you know, get academic here and refer to that. But a lot of it's just common sense. You are not going to progress on the SDGs in general, if your level of corruption is high, if your institutions are not effective, or if your government operates in a cloak of secrecy. I mean, you know, we don't need to look at academic studies to convince ourselves of this. It's pretty obvious. And I mean, I think Miguel's point about how democracies do better across a whole range of indicators is a broad point here. Let me end up by making some general comments about how we're doing on the SDG 16 indicators. And Massimo referred to this a little bit in his comments. Overall, we're doing very poorly as a lot of different levels. Firstly, I would say that the official data collection and data reporting in this area is often very, very weak. Indeed, there are quite a few indicators under SDG 16 where there's not even really an established methodology for assessing the data. And I would highlight that non-official data I think is always crucially important. And I really like the quote that Miguel went out from Free Press Unlimited at the outset. It challenges official data. It supplements official data. It enriches the thing. But where official data is inherently weak, then it's really even more important. And it's not just that official data is weak, but official reporting is weak. And so if you look at the VNR reports of voluntary national review reports, we see a lot less reporting taking place under SDG 16 than the other SDGs. And let me end up by saying that our assessments and that's, you know, a number of different assessments are that we're just not achieving much actually under SDG 16. I think John will introduce a little bit later the TAP network report, which was just released today, halfway to 2020 report on SDG 16 plus. And the executive summary for that states that we are not progressing on any of the 12 indicators under SDG 16. That is a dramatic and remarkable conclusion. We are not going to make it on any of them. It's not just a few of them. The SDG 16 data initiative, as was mentioned, releases a report every year in 2022. Last year we did a report on nearly halfway and our conclusion was identical. So we have a lot of challenges on collecting data in this area. We are, we're not not only non official data is facing challenges, but official data collection is weak. And our assessment of progress is weak as well. So we've got a long way to go in this area. Thank you very much, Toby. Thank you. And I will now give the floor to Daniela Barba, who is the director of research on access to justice at the world justice project. Daniela. Thank you so much, Massimo. Just a second. Let me select the right. The right screen that I need to share. Just one second, please. I hear some echo when you talk. Can you see my screen? No. No. We practice this, but still. Daniela is loading the presentation. Just wanted to mention that we do have a representative of one of the custodian agencies from the UN, UNDP. And I know that Mariana will talk also about some of the issues addressed here on the on the quality of data, this aggregation of data, which was a very important point made by by Toby. Daniela, are you ready? Yes, I guess I am. I was trying to share my screen a different way, but it didn't really pan out. We had to borrow an office in New York for, you know, to participate in this event and I appreciate again for the invitation. I appreciate your invitation. So I wonder if you can see it now. Can you see it works? Perfect. Thank you so much. And how about now? Oh, no, you still, you can see my notes now. Can you see my notes? Yes, we can see the notes. Okay, so that's not what I wanted. Let me just go again. Apologies for this. All right, so thank you so much again. I'm Daniela Barba, director of research on access to justice at the World Justice Project. We're going to present today a team effort by staff at the World Justice Project in multi location, multi disciplinary staff at the World Justice Project. And this, this research is a justice data graphical report that is hopefully going to be cited as an example to what Miguel just added as listed as as possible data sources for the SDGs, particularly with regards to the SDG 16.3. So just to provide a little bit of context, this graphical report, the WJP justice data graphical report was so committed as a deliverable for the justice action coalition. And the deliverable is a promise to be presented in the SDG summit, the sustainable development summit in September. But so to capture the audience attention to create momentum, we decided to split the report also because it's quite a long deliverable in two parts. One part was is presented in this context in the context of the UN UN high level political forum and is what you were going to present the key findings about today. And part two is presented in the will be presented in September in the SDG summit. So just to give you a little bit of idea of what each part is going to comprehend or comprehends part one is presents a nuance analysis of the prevalence of legal needs, legal need problems. Operationalized as the indicators SDG 16.3.3 based on WJP global needs surveys, global legal needs surveys for 62 countries presents a country level estimation of the justice gap because of on met civil and administrative justice needs presents country level estimation of barriers to justice that helps us estimate the justice gap in turn and presents costs cost level analysis of the legal needs in terms of the GDP. Part two presents the analysis of gender based disparities in access to justice wealth based disparities in access to justice and analysis of legal the impact of legal vulnerability on access to justice capacity and integrity of justice institutions this goes along the lines of factors seven and eight of the rule of law index, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic pandemic both on justice institutions and on legal needs. There's also an assessment of data collection challenges. The part that we are discussing today is part one, and this is based on the WJP legal needs surveys. This is basically taking the best data available. Or the last data point available for each country presented in this map over a over a period of five years. It's taken 104 countries looking at 104 countries. And just to provide a little bit more context, there are two audiences that we're trying to target with this report. First is country level audiences in order to inform policy making and also aggregating the analysis at the country level. And, you know, also, you know, to take into into account the time and it's a lot of findings, but at the country level we aggregate the findings at the global level to sort of, you know, provide more input for the community pushing the global people centered justice agenda. We also in this in this report present some analysis by country level income grouping. So this is an example of how it looks like the report basically we give a sense of the percentage of population facing legal needs. And now to those who is facing a barrier or what percentage of those facing legal needs are facing barriers. I'm going to delve into this. This is just an example. But basically the, the percentage in red or the subgroup in red is the percentage of people with legal needs who are facing a barrier. And just so that, you know, you don't have to, you know, really like stop me and ask me to stop in every single slide I present. I'm going to give you if you had a get a chance to download the report, a chance to download the report. This is the QRQ. I would recommend that you basically download it and not necessarily open it as a browser because it's quite a quite a heavy file. And what this would allow you to do is to sort of travel between two separate dynamics one looking at the global finding and the other looking at the country level finding. So the first key finding that we want to present and that I don't think is a surprise to anyone or at least not anyone in this audience is that legal problems are prevalent in four out of 10 countries observed at least half of the population experienced a legal problem. But looking into non-trivial core legal problems and we say core because of their severity and frequency and we specify here problems related to employment, family money and debt housing and public services in the two years prior to being surveyed. We find that these are also quite significant so in four out of 10 countries at least one quarter of the population experienced a non-trivial core legal problem. And we also find that these problems could occur or trigger each other. So for example, if you take the people who experienced a problem with housing, they are more likely also to over the same period of time or the previous two years prior to the survey, or the two years prior to the survey to experience a problem with money and debt by 45% or ranging between that and a problem with employment or related to employment by 29%. So another finding that I think is quite relevant, particularly for this audience is that we analyze the degree to which unmet legal needs are a question of socioeconomic development or are correlated. So in this graph what we are presenting is a correlation between the severity and the frequency of legal problems. And so the dots that you see in color is just for illustration of particular legal problems or types of legal problems that we want to emphasize. And we find that in high income countries, as you can see, frequent problems tend to be relatively less severe. But in low income countries, more severe problems. So in high income countries, if you look at it, for example, in the neighborhood disputes, which is at the far right, those problems are less severe and more frequent. For example, neighborhood disputes or consumer refunds are also quite frequent, less severe. But in low income countries, if you look at it, more severe problems such as access to utilities are also more frequent. And we also find that on average, people in low income countries rank problems as less severe than people in high income countries. So you take the example of homelessness, which in a high income country would rank on 7 out of 10 in terms of severity, but homelessness in a low income country is just ranked as 4 out of 10. Now, turning to the SDG 16.3.3 indicator, we know that there's a scarcity of data, official data available, only five to six countries have reported on this indicator. And what we do here is taking the data from the global legal service from the World Justice Project, we estimate the percentage of people, basically the SDG 16.3.3, the percentage of people with access to a formal or informal mechanism for dispute resolution out of those who needed access. And so here it's interesting because we present all the SDG 16.3.3 for 62 countries, as well as the inverse of the SDG 16.3.3. Basically what you see in the red subgroup is a percentage who needed access to a dispute resolution mechanism but couldn't find it. And you see the percentages out of those who needed access for yes access and no access in the columns on the right. Looking at the global, global aggregation of this indicator or the inverse of this indicator, we find that in 7 out of 10 countries observed at least 62% of the population more than half who needed access to a dispute resolution mechanism did not find it. And in this map we present the distribution for the 62 countries that we have of the SDG 16.3.3, so the regular indicator. Now, turning to what Miguel was saying at the beginning about looking at indicators beyond the SDG 16, and particularly with regards to access to justice. We know that there's many other justice solutions that we need to look into to assess the degree to whether there's offered access to justice for the people who needed. And we find that in at least 35% of people in one out of two countries surveyed from those with legal problems, at least 35% could not find adequate information to solve them. And at least 50% of people did not have access to appropriate assistance and representation. Looking into those who did manage to finish their justice journey or concluded the process resolution process, we find that there are important process barriers to justice. At least 37% of people found the process unfair in one out of two countries. At least 17% struggled to afford the cost in one out of two countries and at least 10% took more than a year to complete the process. Now, in terms of the effectiveness of the justice resolution or the justice solutions that people find, we find that those who managed to finish their justice journey, even though they found a resolution, they didn't solve their problem. At least 31% in one out of two countries found a resolution and yet did not solve their problem. Now, looking into, I think this could be like an idea like you have maybe another minute. That's fine. I think I'm about to conclude. Thank you. So, yes, looking into the indicators that we can think of beyond substantial progress in the SDG 16, one possible indicator is the justice gap, which the World Justice Project estimated in 2019. In 2019, this figure at the global level was 0.4 billion people who are in the justice gap because of their own med civil and administrative justice needs. So here we aggregate like the previous dimensions of or barriers to justice as we just presented me meaning information assistance and representation process and now come or effectiveness of the justice process. We see that by country for 104 countries 104 countries, we have the estimate the subgroups of subgroups of population who have 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 barriers and those we present the estimate of the justice gap as accumulative barriers as a accumulation of barriers to justice. And we also present the percentage at the country level who are in the justice gap because of their civil and administrative justice needs. In the aggregate, we observe that in out of two of the other countries, at least 50% of people have an unmet civil or administrative justice need or are in the justice gap. And finally, turning to also very related to the topic of this discussion, we find that on average the economic cost of legal problems for individuals arising from lost income health issues or the resolution of such problems legal problems amount to 1.7 of the GDP and the estimates range between 0.01 and 5% of the GDP. Thank you so much for your attention and for your invitation to present. I hope you can distribute this. Thank you very much, Daniela. We'll read the report with interest. Now I'll pass on and give the floor to Guillaume La Fortune, who is vice president and head of the party's office at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Guillaume? Massimo, thank you so much for the invitation to join today. So thank you to idea and also to Miguel for organizing this important conversation. It's really great to be here with so many incredible organizations that do such great work. It's also great when I was thinking just before that it's very nice to be here also with Mariana, with who we were in touch back in the days around the prior group when I was at the WCD at the time trying to work on standardizing the statistics for SDG 16, which is of course not easy as it's been mentioned several times in the conversation today. And so I work for the SDSN, which is the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, where we try to bring science, be the knowledge brokers between science and policy makers or a global network of research institutions and scientists. And we build tools to support long term direct to change, which the SDGs require. One of them is the SDG index and dashboards, but we do also a lot of work around long term planning, budgeting to strengthen governance, because as you said, Massimo, governance is really an enabler for all of those transformations. So I'll be making, I think, not more than five quick points. First of all, you know, we all know it. This is not news. We just published actually a few weeks ago, the 2023 edition of the Sustainable Development Report, which tracks the performance each year of all UN member states were completely off track, very off track. But not only this, there's a risk that by 2030, the gap in SDG outcome between rich and poor countries will be larger than when we started this agenda in 2015. That means a complete last decade in convergence in SDG outcomes during the entire period. And part of this is due to the fact that rich countries mobilize 17 trillion, more even USD as post COVID recovery, not the case for a lot of the poor countries around the world that face deep fiscal space issues on metrics like extreme poverty, life satisfaction, unemployment rate, many of the poorest countries in the world are still not back to pre pandemic level. So I just want to put it out there. So we are off track on the SDGs as a whole and SDG 16 is particularly off track. We do a world average population weighted SDG 16 is read on the dashboard dashboard. That means major challenges remain and the arrow is completely flat. Which means basically very limited progress. If anything, you know, and I would echo what Toby was saying also none of the targets on SDG 16 are actually on track. And just to say a quick word about our methodology, we use about 100 indicators in the case of SDG 16. We use around nine indicators. Some of them come from official statistics, the UN system, but we also use non official statistics, including from the great work of the world justice project but also from a reporter Saint-Francia when it comes to mapping the freedom of the press and the corruption, perception index and a few other metrics we were limited to nine just to avoid also issues around collinearity and so on. And I think Toby's point on the targets is very important because of course depending on what's your threshold for the target, your estimate of whether you're on track or off track might be very different. So we do set systematically normative target on all of the indicators, building on the SDG as a framework, building on other international agreements, building on what science is telling us for certain goals. So we are able to compute an estimate of whether we are on track or off track and clearly on SDG 16 were off track. If we look at the world region, most of them are flat or declining. We do see some progress in upper middle income countries driven by some improvement on homicide rates and a few other variables but overall the picture is pretty bad. On the persisting data gaps, I don't want to spend too much time on this but the point here is that it takes a lot of time to standardize official statistics, especially when there's no methods available. We need to agree on questions that we're going to ask citizen methods, sampling size and characteristics and so on. I mean, Mariana knows this very well. And it's true that you know we're reaching the midpoint so we're sort of taking stock of the progress that we made on the SDGs but also in terms of data, where are we standing and it's true that it's a little bit disappointing but that by now when it comes to comparable data on citizen satisfaction with some services and so on, we're still missing a lot of comparable data. We do have improvements in methodologies but the data is still not there. On an indicator like for instance, do governments take into account those so-called spillover effects, those negative impacts from the consumption and so on on other countries. So this is a bit more part of SDG 17 but there's still no good indicator right now or comparable metrics on policy coherence for sustainable development. So I think it's important to use alternative data sources because there's no point in waiting until 2030 before starting to track some of those things so that SDSN when we do these assessments, we use two thirds of official statistics complemented by one third of non-official statistics. The point I want to make is so there's the SDG 16 the outcome and you know we're reaching the midpoint right now, there was no expectation that at midpoint in this agenda we would have achieved the goals. Now I do think I do think that we could, you know, we could expect that governments would be committed to this agenda by the midpoint would be talking about the SDGs would have integrated the SDGs into some public management practices and procedures into investment policies would have done a VNR would have a set of indicators would have integrated long term planning pathways into sectoral policies would also be working with other countries and collaborating with other countries to advance on this agenda. What we call it is the SN government efforts and commitments. So this year in the sustainable development report, we released an assessment for 74 countries, and this is building off on a primary data collection that we do at this DSN collected from our global network of scientists and researchers around. Where are we, how are we doing, not on the outcome metrics but more on the input and process metrics in terms of government efforts and commitments to integrate the SDGs within public management practices and procedures. The results are quite interesting because at the midpoint there's really a wide difference across those countries and how the SDGs are being integrated within public governance essentially and what Miguel was showing also at the beginning I think at the top of this because we published a ranking and we show also by dimension what's going on. So we do find many democracies actually at the top of this ranking many are, you know, the usual suspects, Sweden, Switzerland, we do have also some more lower middle income countries a country like Benin, for instance, does does very well. But at the bottom of the ranking, we find three countries, no matter what we do in terms of weighting scheme aggregation methods, no matter what we do we did the stats the Monte Carlos and no matter what we do. We have the three same countries the Russian Federation, Israel and the United States. Some of them are so called democracies. Right. In the case of the United States I just want to, to, to, to remind one thing which is that at the midpoint five countries did not embark into a VNR process. These are Haiti, Yemen, South Sudan, Myanmar and the United States. So I think it's important now that we're reaching the midpoint we're going to have a number of important events has been mentioned also by by Massimo we have the SDG summit in September. We also have COP 28 the G20 also in India very important and then at the end of that road, the, the, the summit of the future also in September 2024 and I agree with you Massimo I think this is a very important also milestones for making both on good governance but also on the financing question around, around those goals and then the final point and I'll, and I'll stop here for now. You know, the question of, I really like what you were showing Miguel on the relationship between democracy and SDG 16 I think it would be interesting to look more generally on the relationship between democracy and the ability to do long term directed change. You know, progress on the SDGs as a whole or a bunch of proxy proxy or headline measures, rather, of course, you know in democracies you have, you know, political, political cycles, you need to consult with citizen. You need also public opinion buy in and this is very complex for an agenda that requires long term directed change. And so I think the question is, is also, how do we actually make democracy even more fitted for achieving the SDGs how do we integrate better those feedback loop into public government processes. How do we integrate science pathways into governance mechanism and so on this is what we try to do as much as possible that the SDSN. And I'm always struck at this figure. And this is an OECD figure that one out of 10 students of 15 years old maybe it's a bit fire among adults can differentiate and this is an OECD countries between a fact and an opinion. Right. And in democracies if you want to make progress on an agenda like this you need public opinion to be with you to advance on those on towards sustainable development. So I think information without wisdom is also a big question in our society where we have all this information rich environment so there's a lot of challenges. I do think democracy is of course a strength for all of this but how do we make this even more compatible with the ability of long term continuous science based pathways and change I think is the key question. Thank you so much again and looking forward to the rest of the conversation. Thank you Guillaume many many interesting points that will resume at the end. Let me give now the floor to Mariana Neves from the Oslo Governance Center of the United Nations Development Program Mariana. Thank you so much. And it is a pleasure to be with all of you I hope you're seeing the sides very well. We are one of the custodians under SDG 16. We have rebranded we are the UNDP Global Policy Center for Governance, but we're still using the Oslo Governance Center name. I think this. So on the UNDP Oslo Governance Center. That is one of the big parts of our work. At this point, we have been working on the, on the governance system for a very long time now. Maybe we don't have a series with the 48 years may will reach that at some point. We were very active during the negotiation that's a matter of maximum general mano or the calling almost all colleagues on this call. And as everyone is saying the situation that we work mainly on supporting the official statistics. But there's one side there for the official statistics, we also recognize the strong contribution from the unofficial statistics, or the integration of alternative data sources in the national statistical systems. But on the indicator that we have for the monitor global indicator, it has to be the official statistics. This has this was the decision made by the status commission and by the General Assembly. And as everyone said on the representation, the situation has been very negative. We are deteriorating, or completely stagnant in almost all the three indicators that you see there. I would like to say that we only have three indicators because also as we said, we don't have much on the other indicators. So this is where we can compare for all the regions. But this is the limit that we have. So from the very few that we have, the situation is not positive. If we go through the regional snapshot, what we see is that for Africa, we have deteriorating scenario, particularly women trafficking violence against children, bribery out of states. The homicide is the way to have violence against children. One of the worst is worse than will average. We have bribery. We have a little bit positive scenario regarding bird registration for Asia and Pacific. We have access to justice corruption, inclusive decision making. All of them, they are not in the right track. We have regression in human trafficking and discriminatory laws. For Europe, they have a reverse trend. They are on track on the fight against corruption. But they are in reverse trend regarding human trafficking effective institution. They need acceleration on reduction of violence equal justice for the asset information capacity to prevent. And for the last one on the attack, we have also a reverse trend on violence, effective institutions for the asset information. We need acceleration or more or less the same. So for all five regions, we see more or less the scenario is not different, much, much different. And for all the region where we see, we continue to see is the data reports of the region itself, they say there's no data or there's insufficient data, or they have limited data for certain targets. So this was our situation in 2022. What's actually happening is that for the SDG indicator from official indicators from the official sources, we have now reached 40% of continue to have at least one data point. This is an average of average. So some indicators have a bigger coverage. But this is where we are. Although this is very negative. We should also recognize that we are starting point was close to zero. It is slow, but it is a considerable progress, considering what was our starting point. If we go through at the regional level, we see that some areas, the smaller development state we are 25%, which is quite concerning. Oceania as well, but we have some that are also quite improving the state. So this is the bad news. The good news that the the system development goals indicators, and that's the G16 gave us an opportunity that we had never had before. They're actually starting to incorporate this difficult indicators in the side of the national statistical systems and the national data production of the official statistics. We had a major all of us and all of us in the school as well. We had a major breakthrough this year, which was on the recognition of Gardner statistics as a new official domain of official statistics. So that means that the statistics commissioner has recognized that we have that production on this. We are not just a side product. When all the funds have been allocated to social statistics, the gender statistics, and there's a little bit and we do something or just we do something on participation. It is a domain and it is a domain at the same level demographic social statistics economic statistics environment statistics. And the commission also recognize that we should produce on the eight domains that you see on the screen. If we go through the Miguel's PowerPoint and one of the side that he mentioned the dimensional government. We need to map and you'll see that all of them end up can be able to be inserted in some way. So it's not a democracy that was not what passing the measure it is governance so they still have they decided access to and quite adjusted trust corruption participation responsiveness. So this is for us to be able to have a framework which is much broader than just the indicator because the indicators if we align them indicators would give us is the. I would I don't like to say the minimum that it is just essential the most essential part that we need to be able to measure the entire dimension. But inside official statistics, we don't have the dimensions that so yes, we'll just project several other agencies and institutions. They have created this but we don't have it harmonized at the global level. And when I say to memorize and mean also being incorporated as a methodology for by the status commission so be integrating it in what we produce the countries are requested to produce. At this exact moment we have there's two task force working one on participation and representation, another in discrimination created this much broader framework. It is around 100 NSO is working with a lot of civil society this is under the prior group. And these two are active at this moment. They're already the design phase, and we have the other they will have to come one by one as we progress. That's one thing. Another good news is that despite what we have on the indicators is that, as you all know, no country has to implement it. It's a voluntary, it's a voluntary process. And what we saw on the vnRs if you compare the vnRs present in 2016 and the vnRs presented 2021 the target itself that means that with the country is trying to do something on that target is trying to do something is trying any action. It was not a priority in 2016 for instance legal identity only 23% of vnRs even mentioned that the increase to 63% we're still far from the our ideal point. In some accounts of transparent institutions, all vnRs presented that's 100%, but we still have to recognize that the fact that it's being incorporated on the vnRs and it being incorporated a national agenda that means that all that they're not measuring, but at least we are in the right direction of being able to report. And for the as the UNDP as a custodian what we saw is that between the 24 indicators that you have on SG16, UNDP, UNODC, OSHR, we cover 18 of the 24 indicators so all that you can read at this point. And because of that we joined forces in several initiatives to be able to support the member states in creating the standards and be able to measure and be able to monitor. Since 2015, when we started to the point that we are now, we had 63 indicators at this point we have methodology for all the indicators. So it is not almost I have to agree here, we have the methodology for all of the indicators. The latest development was the SG16 survey that now measured the provides methodology for almost all survey based indicators under SG16. And this is a joint effort between UNODC, OSHR, because we cannot just ask the member states to coordinate, we also have to coordinate better as the agency is supporting. And also this process gave us a lot of the impulsions to create other standards so we had more on corruption than by UNODC on human rights based approach to data than the by OSHR, the prior group had the handbook governance statistics. There's OACD on the league and so there's a lot, this is a very small sample that I would not be able to fill. I could feel that if I put everything that this SG16 enable us to continue to produce. We also had regional trainings done by the three agencies plus all the other custodians. And in two years we covered 143 countries. So yes, we are very, very far. But we have a considerable progress now moving forward and the maximum request one minute and I promise I'll finish. Moving forward what we the three agencies and we think that we still need to invest to be able to accelerate because we still know are not on the right track one. The historical development needs to continue with this is not concluded. It's something that we have started we have to it's not static. The issues change the reality change we do you told we had an arrestment we need online arrestment we need. There's a lot more than we need to continue to invest the capacity development training we need to invest more although it reached 143 we need more in depth knowledge to support the national statistical system. But also the entire framework inside the country's the integration of the indicators on the plans so we the SG16 is not a side product. We need to analyze more important reports I had one presented by idea the one will be presented by tab and we need to continue to invest and need to write in the stand on the inter linkages. And of course what we're doing what part of what you're doing today the global advocacy awareness continues to be a priority both the global regional and the national level. So these for us is the five priorities and we are now speaking as you MP very eager to collaborate in any of the five axes. So thank you so much. Thank you so much Mariana very comprehensive presentation. We have a few minutes now for John Romano director of the transparency accountability and participation the top network. So John please you have the floor. Great. Thanks to thanks Masimo and thanks to thanks everyone I think it's been a pretty rich discussion full of full of data discussion and as a fellow data nerd, like all of us here. I think these interest these are really interesting discussions that we need to have as it relates to, you know, the second half of implementation for the 23rd agenda, you're taking stock of where we are. Where do we need to go from here and I think what's really clear is that progress isn't very good. And there are many obstacles and challenges for us ahead. But one thing that I just wanted to highlight from from our side on behalf of the top network and the SDG 16 now campaign. We just launched today. Actually, the first that we're actually presenting it in event is what we call the halfway to 2030 report on SDG 16 plus. So this is a joint civil society kind of collaborative reporting process and assessment of SDG 16 plus. This has taken several months of work with over 30 partners from civil society, including many SDG 16 data initiative partners as well. So thanks big thanks to partners for helping to pull this together over the past several months. But this is essentially an assessment. You know, of the SDG 16 targets. What does it actually mean in terms of what needs to happen going forward. So as Mariana just mentioned, the focus really from here once we do this assessment figure out where we are is that advocacy and follow up in the implementation side of things. So it has a very forward looking focus on where do we need to go from here. So it includes some also some detailed recommendations based on the assessment that we make through this report. I won't go into any detail here. I'll kind of tease our events that will be hosting to launch the report on Monday. But as you heard from from Toby at the beginning of the event as well is that the report basically concludes that none of the SDG 16 targets are on pace to be met by 2030. There's only a handful of indicators that are actually showing any kind of positive progress. But again, this progress despite somewhat positive is still inadequate. Only two of these targets have seen any progress. Five have experienced either slight or severe backsliding of progress and the other five have been little to no progress at all. So again, I won't detail all of that. There's quite a bit to unpack in the report. It's very simple to find it's on our website. SDG 16 now dot org slash report. So again, I won't go into the challenges that we've identified or the recommendations, but I think just wanted to mention that this is also again part of the SDG team now campaign. This is another joint civil society effort to really highlight the need at this halfway point to 2030 for additional commitment from member states and the international community also around financing and also to promote and recognize the role of civil society when it comes to SDG 16 plus. So if it is that the international community is lagging behind when it comes to SDG 16 plus, does this mean that we need, can we benefit from, you know, the inspiration, the action, the commitments from civil society? How do we elevate the voices and actions from partners that work on at the local and national level? How do we elevate those and showcase positive and inspiring examples of progress? Because I think it is very easy when we take a look at all this negative progress, especially in looking at the data. I think it's very easy to be fatalistic about the state of progress and thinking a lot of ways that can help to blunt progress in the future. And what we also want to do is provide examples of where there are inspiring stories that we want to do a bit of storytelling through this campaign as well. And that brings me to kind of my final point here is that I think assessments like this, the qualitative assessments, I think are also really important for us as well. I mean, we've heard a lot about the quantitative data. And that's obviously incredibly important. But I think the qualitative assessments, expert analysis, reflections from people that are experiencing progress or lack of progress. I think it's hugely important as well. I think the specific monitor is a really great example of this in a really thorough way to take advantage of all of those different aspects of what they include. And how people experience this and tell that story because we've said this before a lot is that data is really only as useful as the narrative that you craft around it. You know, for the data nerds on our side, we may understand the data and what it means. But how do we tell that story to a broader audience and make it real for people that may not be as invested in the data side of it. So that's part of the objective of the campaign and the report itself. Again, I'll be on Monday. We'll have a launch event for the report Monday at 8am New York time. We can share more information with colleagues after this as well. And again, I hope this report is useful. You can find it again. Very easy to find. And for the colleagues that are interested in working with us around the campaign, the campaign going forward as well. Please do reach out again. We're looking for colleagues that are interested in the monitoring evaluation side of things, but more importantly, the storytelling, the action, the commitments side of things. Whether you're from civil society or, you know, member states or other institutional partners. So really look forward to unpacking this a bit further on in our event on Monday and hopefully working with as many of you on the campaign as well. Thanks. Thank you very much, John. We were supposed to have some questions and answers at this point and we did collect a few of them, but I feel that some of them have actually been answered while we were hearing the panelists. For example, there were questions on commitments, government commitments, and we heard Guillaume talking about that, especially on the inputs side. Some questions were about the more granular and specific in depth analysis of progress or lack of progress on individual indicators or targets. And I think we had a very good example from the presentation by Daniela on the World Justice Project analysis and survey. There were a couple of questions about whether we should be optimistic in the end, despite all these backsliding, and we heard about democratic backsliding or even backsliding. Now John referred to it on some of the targets. Well, I'm an optimist by nature, so I would say yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel, but actually we are fighting with a lot of evidence that points in the opposite direction. So we really need a shock. We need to use the opportunity of the summit, the SDG summit to make this very important wake up call to member states, to all stakeholders. John referred to the role of civil society, the role of think tanks and scientific institutions. There are several statistical offices. Mariana referred to that, but also before there was a reference to the role of the prior city group on governance indicators. We need the engagement of the media through all their articulations as uncomfortable their reporting on the situation can be. To protect these actors and this is something that also Toby referred to in his presentation. So I think that there were a couple of other elements or key takeaways. Some of the panelists reported on countries and the number of countries that are progressing or regressing on certain targets. Then there was an analysis by target at the global level, and the few also made reference to the number of people actually affected the data on the population percentage of the population. I think that we need to have all of those different dimensions in mind when measuring progress because they are all very, very important. The last reference to the importance of qualitative as integrating qualitative analysis. I think very key, the need for assessments that capture also the qualitative dimensions of these are these SDGs. I would say that we don't have unfortunately time for any replies to the questions posed, but this is a not going conversation. So we will have, first of all, as indicated by a few of you, the opportunities through the launches of the different knowledge products that each and every one of these organizations and partners are producing on their own. Second, the possibility of commenting on the global report on the SDG 16 data initiative, which is a joint effort of all these partners. And third, I think that we will have opportunities, including during these days with the launch of the halfway report. Thank you, John, for the opportunity you gave to SDG 16 data initiative to engage also in that conversation. And on a more personal note, international idea is also a champion of the SDG 16 now campaign. So we really want to convey this sense of urgency. We need to change the approach. We don't aim at getting back to the pre pandemic levels. We need really to reach the 2030 sustainable development goals if we are serious about these agenda. And we need to have a conversation also among the different policy processes that are taking place, including the one on the summit of the future, which shouldn't be parallel or divergent with respect to this one. Actually, we believe in the convergence and in the consistency of government, regional and global multilateral action. So it is a few words on takeaways from today's meeting. I thank all the panelists. I thank my colleagues who also organized these initiative online. And I think this is to be continued in the various platform that we are all involved in. Thank you. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you Massimo. Thank you everyone. It's good to see you. Thank you so much.