Why this session matters to us
The word in the title is stocktake. And a stocktake is a measurement exercise: you cannot take stock of anything without a baseline, a metric, and an honest count against it. So a meeting called to take stock of the Pact for the Future one year after its adoption is, whether it meant to be or not, a test of whether the Pact can be counted at all.
Here is the problem that ran under the whole morning. The Pact has 56 actions. It does not have 56 indicators. It has no target dates of its own, no baseline year, and no follow-up framework that reports against it. The 2030 Agenda has all of those things. So when member states were asked to show what a year of implementation had produced, almost every one of them reached for the SDGs’ measurement machinery, voluntary national reviews, the goals under HLPF review, the Beyond GDP process, and reported those numbers as Pact progress. The instrument that was sold as an accelerator for the SDGs turns out, one year in, to be measured by the very thing it was meant to speed up.
The Pact has no yardstick of its own, so it borrows the SDGs’
The President set the frame in the opening statement, and she set it on measurement.
The tool she named for delivering that measurable action was the voluntary national review, the SDGs’ own reporting instrument. The evidence she could offer for Pact uptake was, tellingly, an alignment statistic rather than a delivery one.
Alignment is not implementation, and the gap between the two is exactly where a measurement problem lives. “Aligning” a national review with the Pact’s priorities tells you a country has mapped its plans onto the language of the Pact. It does not tell you a single action moved. The honest read of the morning is that “taking stock” of the Pact currently means counting how many countries reference it, not counting what it changed.
The Deputy Secretary-General’s scene-setting was the clearest inventory of where the Pact’s commitments actually stand, and the one genuinely new measurement instrument she pointed to belongs to a different process: the Secretary-General’s work on how progress itself is defined.
That is the same Beyond GDP process we covered from the HLPF side event, mandated by Action 53(a) of the Pact and now running as an intergovernmental negotiation. It is the one place where the Pact is genuinely building a new way to measure, and even there, as that session showed, the metrics exist while the decisions they are supposed to move have not moved. Spain’s delegate used the floor to flag the Global Alliance for Beyond GDP it co-leads with UNCTAD, the OECD and the Ibero-American secretariat, work on getting complementary indicators into national budgets rather than reports. Botswana, Armenia and the Maldives all reached for “measures of progress that go beyond GDP” as well. It was the single most-cited measurement idea in the room, which is worth noting: the Pact’s most concrete contribution to counting is a project to change the denominator, not to count the Pact.
What “taking stock” actually counted
The first round table, on delivering for people and planet, produced a run of national progress reports. They were, almost without exception, SDG numbers presented as Pact implementation: Germany noted renewables reached 55% of gross electricity consumption in 2025, up from about 10% two decades ago; Ethiopia put 95% of its electricity generation on renewable sources; Brazil reported safely managed drinking water reaching more than 98% of its population and nearly 90% of electricity from renewables; Nepal placed its overall SDG progress just above 41%. (Figures are as each country reported them and were not independently verified.) These are real achievements. None of them is a measure of the Pact’s 56 actions, because no such measure exists.
The most interesting intervention on the measurement question came from the Dominican Republic, which described treating the Pact not as a declaration but as an internal management system: ten measurable national outcomes, a delivery unit, and a quarterly review chaired by the president. Its representative’s framing, that the Pact will succeed only if it becomes a management tool inside governments rather than a text adopted in conference rooms, was the closest anyone came to describing a scorecard, and it was a national one, built by the country for itself. That is the pattern: where the Pact is being measured, it is being measured locally, on instruments each government invented, with no common denominator across them.
David Passarelli, reporting back from the civil-society dialogue held earlier that morning, noted that the people doing the most concrete counting are outside the room.
In other words, the most developed effort to track the Pact’s 56 actions is being built by civil society, not by the intergovernmental system that adopted them. That is a striking thing to hear at an official stocktake.
The dissent: the tools were never built
The sharpest challenge of the morning was also the most useful, because it named the missing scorecard directly. The Russian Federation argued that the Pact’s development commitments have gone unimplemented precisely because none of the machinery to implement or measure them was ever established: no agreed set of tools, no institutional mechanisms, no concrete means of implementation attached to the goals under review. Whatever one makes of the messenger, the structural point is hard to refute and it is the same point that runs under this whole page. A commitment with no mechanism and no metric is difficult to distinguish from a commitment abandoned.
The Maldives made the constructive version of the same argument. If only about 18% of SDG targets are on track, it asked, the honest question is whether the institutions meant to deliver them are equal to the task, institutions shape incentives, incentives shape decisions, decisions shape outcomes, so a run of disappointing outcomes should send you to examine the institutions before the ambitions. Its delegation offered the morning’s best reframing: the Pact is less a roadmap than a mirror, reflecting back whether today’s institutions can carry tomorrow’s ambitions. And it grounded the point in the one number that determines whether any of this gets measured or delivered, debt service. It cited UNCTAD’s finding that developing countries paid a record $921 billion in net interest on public debt in 2024, with 61 of them spending more than a tenth of government revenue on interest alone. When that much fiscal space is gone, the desalination plant, the grid, the statistical system that would let a country measure its own progress, none of it gets built.
Our read
The uncomfortable implication is the same one we keep meeting at this Forum. What is not measured is not managed, and the Pact currently has no measurement of its own. The most credible tracking of its actions is being done by civil society; the most concrete national scorecard was one the Dominican Republic built for itself; and the Pact’s single real contribution to the science of counting, Beyond GDP, is about fixing the SDGs’ denominator, not counting the Pact. Between now and 2028, the question worth watching is whether the intergovernmental system builds any common way to tell whether the Pact worked, or whether “taking stock” stays a synonym for taking attendance.
Why it matters for the SDGs
The Pact was designed as an accelerator for the 2030 Agenda, so its measurement gap lands hardest on SDG 17, the means of implementation and, specifically, follow-up and review. If the Pact is tracked only through VNR alignment, it adds narrative to SDG 17 without adding accountability. The national reports leaned on this year’s goals under review, SDG 6 (water), SDG 7 (energy), SDG 9 (infrastructure) and SDG 11 (cities), which is why so much of the “Pact progress” on offer was water, grid and urban-resilience data. And the one forward-looking measurement thread, the Beyond GDP work under Action 53(a), sits under SDG 17 too: change what a country counts as progress and you change what it is rewarded for reporting. The through-line is that the Pact’s value to the SDGs will be decided by whether it acquires a way to be measured, not by how often it is invoked.
Watch & read
- The Pact for the Future, the official UN page, and About the Pact (the 56 actions and its two annexes).
- Beyond GDP: the metrics exist, the decisions have not moved, our HLPF side-event summary, plus the UN Beyond GDP hub and Action 53(a), the mandate behind it.
- A World of Debt 2025, UNCTAD, the source of the $921 billion net-interest figure the Maldives cited.
- Related HLPF-week coverage: the ministerial segment opens · the HLPF general debate · full HLPF 2026 coverage.
This is an informal General Assembly meeting held during HLPF week, not an HLPF session. Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase; the three opening speakers are quoted directly, while member-state interventions, many delivered over interpretation, are summarised rather than quoted. Speakers other than the President, the Deputy Secretary-General and the UNU-CPR Director are cited by country or role. National figures are as each country reported them and were not independently verified.