What the CEI is, briefly
The Central European Initiative is a regional intergovernmental body of 17 member states running from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black Seas, founded in 1989, with its Executive Secretariat in Trieste since 1996. Romania holds the 2026 presidency, and this was its HLPF event. It is not a household name, and the session is worth reading anyway, because it produced the clearest statement of a measurement principle we have heard all Forum.
Outcomes, not outputs
UNOPS brought the number that frames the entire infrastructure conversation: infrastructure influences 92% of SDG targets, and is responsible for around 79% of global greenhouse gas emissions, figures from its research with the University of Oxford. If you take the 2030 Agenda and the climate agenda seriously, he argued, you have to prioritise infrastructure, because there is almost nothing else that touches everything.
Then he told a room full of governments to stop reporting the way governments report.
That is the discipline the SDG framework was supposed to impose and frequently does not. Ribbon-cuttings are countable, easy and politically useful. Access is the thing that was promised.
The binding constraint is not policy and it is not money
The session’s most useful diagnosis was also from UNOPS, and it should give pause to anyone whose theory of development is that the reforms and the finance are what is missing.
UNDP made the same point from the institutional side: pipes, grids and platforms do not deliver the goals. Institutions have to be able to plan, procure, regulate and maintain, and people have to have the skills to use what gets built. Money without absorptive capacity does not become infrastructure. It becomes an underspend.
Infrastructure as a relationship
Serbia’s Permanent Representative gave the session its rhetoric, and it was better than most rhetoric.
He extended it to the region’s shared river, in a passage that is the case for multilateralism in miniature: “No single country can manage a river alone. Flood protection requires cooperation. Environmental protection requires cooperation. Navigation requires cooperation. … In many ways, the Danube is not only a river; it is a living example of multilateralism.” And on what a railway is for: “A railway is not simply steel and concrete. It is a student reaching a university, a family travelling more safely, a young entrepreneur accessing new markets, a producer exporting more efficiently, a community becoming less isolated.” Which is Moreira da Silva’s outcomes point, told as a story.
Ukraine put the same logic in its harshest form. Infrastructure there is not a development agenda but a recovery agenda, tied to whether displaced people come home, and damage does not respect borders: a strike on a power plant near the Ukrainian border, its deputy permanent representative said, triggered an environmental alert in Moldova.
The counting angle
Beyond the outcomes-versus-outputs argument, the honest admission came from the person who runs Romania’s Agenda 2030 implementation. Asked what the region needs, László Borbély said, of transport, energy and digital infrastructure, that “maybe we need to have some more data and to focus also on what we are thinking about sustainable development.” The country chairing the organisation convening the session says it cannot yet see what its infrastructure is achieving. Romania is building a national sustainable development knowledge platform to close some of that gap, and reports having certified more than 2,000 sustainable development experts, 1,600 of them at local level.
Moldova noted its own VNR was being presented at this Forum two days later. UNDP raised plan alignment, the requirement that national development plans, nationally determined contributions and budgets actually refer to the same targets, which is a coherence problem that is almost never measured. Bosnia and Herzegovina was the only speaker to describe infrastructure itself as a data system, pointing to AI-supported monitoring and smart energy management.
Our read
Everyone agreed that infrastructure is the master key to the goals and that regional cooperation is how you turn it. But in this region SDG delivery has been effectively fused with the EU accession queue, which every national speaker treated as the same project. That fusion is politically powerful and analytically risky: it means the real driver of infrastructure investment is accession, not the 2030 Agenda, and the thing that gets measured is progress toward the acquis rather than the number of people who can now reach a hospital. UNOPS told the room to count outcomes. Romania admitted it does not have the data to. That gap is the story.
Why it matters for the SDGs
SDG 9 (infrastructure) and SDG 17 (partnerships) are the spine, with SDG 6, SDG 7 and SDG 11 named as the goals under review this year that infrastructure enables. Poland’s regional government was alone in invoking SDG 16, arguing that border regions now face an invisible threat in disinformation, and that institutions and public trust are infrastructure too.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the side event (13 July 2026).
- Infrastructure for Climate Action (UNOPS, UNEP and the University of Oxford), the source of the 92% and 79% figures.
- Central European Initiative, the convening organisation.
- Cities that work for people, the other infrastructure side event the same afternoon · The SDG 9 in-depth review · The SDG 17 review.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers the recording does not reliably name are cited by country and role. The greenhouse gas figure is the published UNOPS and Oxford figure of 79%; the speaker said 80%.