Whose argument this is
This was a side event on the official HLPF programme, convened by the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation, and everything reported below is a position advanced by the Russian government or by an institute that works with it. The chair opened by saying so himself: he represents the Stolypin Institute for the Economy of Growth, “a Russian analytical center,” and works “very tightly” with Boris Titov, who is a serving representative of the Russian President and led Russia’s delegation to this Forum. That is the frame for the page. These are claims about how the SDGs should be counted and managed after 2030, reported for what was said, not endorsed as analysis.
The session is worth a page anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with the host. The 2027 SDG Summit is the first place a post-2030 agenda gets decided, and almost nobody is arguing about it yet. Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative made the timing case in one line.
That is verifiable and it is the anchor for everything else here. The Pact for the Future invites the September 2027 Summit, the HLPF meeting under General Assembly auspices, to consider how to advance sustainable development by 2030 and beyond, with the third Global Sustainable Development Report landing just ahead of it. Whoever arrives at that Summit with a drafted framework will shape what the world counts for the following fifteen years. On the evidence of this room, the drafting has started and the counting community is not in it.
The concrete proposal, and it is a governance proposal
Titov’s case for a rethink was rhetorical rather than statistical. He called the 2030 Agenda “perhaps the most ambitious global idea in the history of humanity” and then said its ambition was the problem: the concept “was quite far away from the national interest, from the national tradition, national economical situations, and finally we see the result.” His verdict was that “today we are very far from achieving the concrete results.” The chair, summarising him, put it more sharply still: those were “noble illusions that we can turn the world to the better state with this program.”
No indicator, target or metric was named in support of any of that, and no number from the current framework was cited against it. What the session did produce, and this is its one concrete proposal, is a redesign of who runs the agenda and who reports to whom. It came from the chair, presented as the first output of an expert group convened in Astana.
Under it, the goals keep three functions: set the goals, agree on them, assess the progress. Everything else moves out. The chair argued “the process shall be less bureaucratic, because the management of such big programs on the UN level is ineffective,” and that programmes should instead be “managed by interested alliances, coalitions of countries, multilateral financial institutions, and probably major companies.” He also made a sovereignty argument for localisation: not only translating the agenda to national levels but “freedom to choose priorities on the ground in individual countries, implementing a sovereign approach to development that respects each nation’s own path.” Titov, a businessman before he was an envoy, gave the coalition model its project-finance version, and in doing so said the part that matters most for accountability.
Read as a measurement proposition, that is the whole session in one sentence. The 2030 Agenda’s reporting line runs to the UN, which is what makes a Voluntary National Review a public document and the global indicator framework a common yardstick. Redirect the reporting to whoever funds the project and the barometer still exists, but the thing it measures is no longer comparable across countries and no longer owned by anyone obliged to publish it. The proposal is measurable in the narrow sense that goals would still be assessed. It is not accountable in the sense the current architecture is, and nobody in the room worked through that trade.
The chair also conceded, in passing, the strongest thing anyone said in the current framework’s defence: “Many criticize, and we still suffer the lack of information and indicators. But anyway, there is a framework. You can measure any country and compare them.”
The only measurement proposal came from the floor
For a session about what replaces the world’s largest measurement framework, the podium named no indicator. The floor did. Singapore’s delegate used the open discussion to make the three most specific proposals of the hour, and all three were about counting.
- A tiered indicator framework. “Right now we have over 169 targets, many many indicators. Not all of them are framed in a way that lends to implementation-focused delivery. Some of the data that’s being collected is descriptive data, aspirational data.” The ask was to sort targets by whether they can actually drive delivery, and to tailor them to national baselines.
- Implementation-first design. Build the successor framework to measure delivery capacity rather than description, and integrate the indices developed since 2015, naming the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index and the move by financial institutions away from purely income-based measures.
- Interoperability by design. “Developing an international indicator framework is good for political optics, but then if it’s not integrated or interoperable with national level planning and statistics” it does not work, nor if it cannot cohere regionally. His conclusion: “investments in statistical offices are really, really important.”
Kazakhstan, which hosted the Astana meeting the hosts kept citing, was the only other speaker to put measurement in its own principles, arguing the post-2030 framework “should focus on realistic, pragmatic, and measurable priorities, supported by stronger financial mechanisms, enhanced national ownership, and effective monitoring.” Neither intervention was taken up from the podium. The chair’s response to Singapore was that it would go into “our data bank.”
The room did not buy the premise
The most striking feature of the session is that the speakers the hosts invited largely declined the argument the hosts were making. Nobody objected in diplomatic terms, and nobody had to: they simply kept answering “rethink” with “implement.”
Jeffrey Sachs, appearing by pre-recorded video from Almaty and thanking the Russian Federation for the invitation, was the bluntest. He is one of the intellectual authors of the framework under discussion, and he defended it.
His concession to revision was one clause: “Maybe they can be tweaked a little bit,” with more emphasis on artificial intelligence. What the post-2030 agenda needs, he said, is “implementation, implementation, and implementation.” The rest of his message moved well away from measurement and into contested geopolitics: reform of the global financial architecture toward a multi-currency system, an end to unilateral sanctions, expansion of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank, global taxes on aviation or shipping to fund the UN, a criticism of NATO enlargement, and a proposal that Russia host a UN campus on the Arctic. Those are his positions, delivered into a room convened by a government that shares several of them. Titov’s audible reaction was three words, “Not everybody share those,” before the chair picked out the one point of agreement he wanted, regional coalitions.
UNDP’s Associate Administrator made the same move more diplomatically, defending the record before conceding the shortfall: progress “should not be overshadowed by the success it has achieved, because hundreds of millions of people have been lifted, poverty, child mortality rate has been halved, and so forth. So progress is there, just not sufficient.” His diagnosis was that the 2015 assumptions, convergence and ever-freer trade, have frayed, and his contribution was procedural and useful: UNDP and DESA are discussing a stocktake report ahead of the 2027 Summit examining what has worked, who planned and financed it, and where the money came from.
Indonesia’s Vice Minister of National Development Planning rejected the framing outright, and gave the session its best line.
He then proposed a measurement idea the hosts did not pick up: “The defining development gap after 2030 may no longer be measured only by income. It may increasingly be measured by the trust gap.” Qatar’s Fund for Development representative insisted the successor stay “firmly anchored” in the UN Charter, the 2030 Agenda and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, that UN reform “should also reinforce not to diminish its development pillars,” and that “our immediate priority must remain accelerating implementation.” China’s delegate was the most direct of all: the permanent task now “is still to implement the SDGs, which are a set of transformative, universal, and comprehensive goals,” and “every day matters, and every action counts before 2030.” Ethiopia’s delegate reduced it to a sentence: “The dominant challenge is not reinventing the wheel, but accelerating implementation through better financing, coordination, partnership, and accountability.” Belarus and Iran were closer to the host, both naming sanctions and unilateral coercive measures among the obstacles to delivery. India’s delegate came to ask what the initiative actually is: “We would welcome more information and the way forward as you see it and how we can contribute.”
The question nobody answered
The sharpest intervention was the only one from civil society. A participant said she had read a media report of the Astana meeting describing a framework of people, planet, infrastructure and security, and asked directly whether that had been discussed and whether it should be understood as an alternative to the 5P framework of the 2030 Agenda: people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership. It is exactly the right question, because the 5Ps are the architecture the seventeen goals hang from, and swapping prosperity and partnership for infrastructure would be a structural change to what the world counts.
She did not get a yes or a no. Titov’s answer described what Astana had covered, including international conflicts and cyber security as problems that “didn’t exist in 2015,” and affirmed that “we call it SDGs, and we want to still call it SDGs,” but never confirmed or denied the framework she named. A session convened to discuss the shape of the post-2030 agenda could not say, when asked, what shape it is proposing.
What Titov did say in that answer was the most honest admission of the session, and it applies to his own proposal as much as to the agenda he was criticising.
Where this converges with Beyond GDP, and where it does not
Parts of the critique here are not distinctively Russian, and it is worth being straight about that. The complaint that the framework has not moved real decisions is the same one UNDP’s chief economist made two days earlier at Beyond GDP, where he said metrics will not move capital markets and that the causation runs the other way. The complaint that the goals are too many and too diffuse is close to Singapore’s tiering argument and to the long-running case for headline indicators. The complaint that the financial architecture is the binding constraint was made from every chair in this room and from most chairs at the general debate. And Singapore’s reach for the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index is the same precedent Mexico used at Beyond GDP, for the same reason: it is the UN’s clearest case of an index that was built, adopted, and binds nobody.
The divergence is the direction of travel, and it is total. Beyond GDP, running as an intergovernmental process under Pact for the Future Action 53(a) and co-facilitated by Guyana and Spain, wants more measurement: a 31-indicator dashboard sitting alongside GDP, and an argument about whether those indicators can be made to bind lenders. The proposal in this room wants less: fewer goals, a lighter UN, delivery handed to coalitions of the willing, and project teams reporting to their financiers. One asks how to make the numbers count for more. The other asks how to make the institution that collects them matter less. Both start from “the current system is not working.” They are not the same argument and should not be filed as one.
The same day, the same Forum
Context the record supplies, and which belongs on a page about Russia’s vision for what comes next. Hours after this session, at the closing of the same Forum, the Russian Federation joined consensus on the 2026 Ministerial Declaration but dissociated itself from paragraph 13, on peace and security, calling the language unbalanced and beyond the Forum’s mandate, and stated that the text “unduly emphasizes human rights and gender issues.” That is Russia’s own stated position on the negotiated outcome of the Forum at which it argued the agenda should be rethought. Readers can weigh the two together. The UN’s own record of the meeting is ECOSOC/7234.
Our read
The host asked for a rethink and the room answered with implementation. Sachs, UNDP, Indonesia, Qatar, China and Ethiopia all said in their own registers that the goals are broadly right and the delivery is the problem, which is the position the session was convened to challenge. That is a real finding and it was not manufactured by the hosts’ critics: it came from their own invitation list.
The measurement finding is starker. A seventy-five minute session on the future of the world’s measurement framework produced no indicator, no metric and no mechanism from the podium, dropped the one statistic it offered without a source anyone could check, and could not answer a direct question about which organising framework it is proposing. The only counting proposals in the room came from a delegate in the audience. What the hosts did produce is coherent and consequential, and it is not a measurement reform: keep the goals as a barometer, move the management to coalitions, and have the teams report to the people who pay for them. Whether or not one shares the politics behind it, that proposal has a measurable consequence, and it is the one thing on this page an accountability outfit should watch. The current agenda’s weakness is that reporting to the UN binds nobody. Its strength, as the chair conceded, is that you can measure any country and compare them. A framework whose reporting runs to financiers rather than to the UN keeps the weakness and loses the strength.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This lands on SDG 17, and specifically on the follow-up and review machinery (17.18 and 17.19) that makes any of the other sixteen checkable. The question underneath the session is who a country reports its numbers to, and that question is now live because the 2027 SDG Summit has a Pact for the Future mandate to consider what comes after 2030. The first drafts of a successor framework are being written in expert groups more than a year ahead of any intergovernmental process, and this one is proposing to relocate the reporting line. Anyone who cares whether the world can still compare country to country in 2031 should be reading those drafts now, and should notice who is not yet in the room.
Watch & read
- Our coverage of the closing of the Forum and the adoption of the Ministerial Declaration, hours after this session, where Russia joined consensus and dissociated from paragraph 13. The UN’s own record is High-Level Political Forum Concludes 2026 Session, Adopts Ministerial Declaration (ECOSOC/7234, 15 July 2026).
- Pact for the Future, Chapter I, the mandate to consider sustainable development beyond 2030, and DESA’s Advancing sustainable development by 2030 and beyond · the third Global Sustainable Development Report, due September 2027 ahead of the Summit · the SDG Summit.
- Sustainable Development in Eurasia, the official site of the Second High-Level International Conference (Astana, 29 May 2026) whose expert group produced the proposal presented here, organised by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education with L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University and MGIMO · the Stolypin Institute for the Economy of Growth, the Moscow think tank the chair represents.
- Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, who appeared by video.
- The other measurement arguments this Forum: Beyond GDP, on whether better metrics ever change a financing decision · the Pact for the Future stocktake · the SDG 17 review · the general debate.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
This was a side event convened by a member state, not a formal meeting of the Forum, and the views reported here are the speakers’ own, attributed and not independently verified. Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers are named only where their names and titles were confirmed against official sources, and are otherwise cited by role or mission; a short passage in Russian is summarised rather than quoted.