The question is no longer whether
The fifth and final in-depth review of the Forum took SDG 17, the goal about partnerships and means of implementation, and framed it through stakeholder engagement. Guy Ryder of the Secretary-General’s office set the terms by conceding the argument for civil-society participation is over, and the hard part is what comes next.
He named the reflex that has to be overcome, which is the instinct to treat participation as a fixed quantity that governments and civil society compete for. The space assumed by one, in that framing, is space taken from the other. His argument was that it is not a zero-sum game, and that the harder measure is not how much space exists but whether it is meaningful.
Participation as a right, and its retreat
Claudia Fuentes Julio, newly appointed Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, made the case that participation is not a courtesy that can be withdrawn.
Her prescription was a shift from consultation to co-creation, feeding stakeholder input into the Voluntary National Reviews, national SDG strategies and public budgeting. But she was equally direct that the trend is the wrong way, and she has the grim statistic to prove it: as the official designated to track reprisals against those who cooperate with the UN, she reported that in 2025 a defender, journalist or trade unionist was killed or disappeared every ten hours.
Being asked, versus being able to check
The sharpest line of the session for a project about measurement came from the NGO Major Group, and it reframes what participation is for.
The worked example was a state budget in Odisha, India, mapped line by line to the goals, co-created with civil society and published so that an ordinary citizen could ask whether the money for a school actually arrived. That is accountability as a data practice, not a consultation. A civil-society speaker for communities discriminated on work and descent put the underlying claim plainly: that the barrier is not a shortage of evidence but a refusal to treat the evidence communities already hold as real.
The one note of caution
The room reached near-total agreement that participation must deepen and be funded, which is itself worth noting, because the interactive discussion also surfaced the objection that makes SDG 17 hard. Speaking in the debate, the Russian Federation stressed safeguarding the intergovernmental nature of the UN, a defence of member-state primacy against exactly the “shared power” and “structural inclusion” civil society was demanding. It was the quiet reminder that the partnerships goal is also a fight about who is allowed to hold governments to account.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This is SDG 17 (partnerships and means of implementation), the last of the five goals under in-depth review in 2026, and it completes the Forum’s core. The financing thread that runs through the whole fortnight was here too, in Brazil’s line that countries cannot deliver more while receiving less, and in repeated calls to reform the international financial architecture. But the durable point for this site was the redefinition of participation as verification. A partnership that cannot check on its own promises is a press release. The session argued, from many directions, that the thing worth measuring is whether the people a goal is meant to serve can see whether it is being kept.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the HLPF 2026 7th meeting (10 July 2026).
- We the Peoples: shaping the future of the UN, the companion special event on UN reform and civil society.
- Pact for the Future, the framework whose implementation the session tracked. Our brief.
- Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2026 · 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. Speaker names and titles were reconciled against the official HLPF annotated programme and public records. Several civil-society speakers’ names were garbled beyond reliable reconstruction and are cited by role or constituency; interventions delivered in other languages were not usable and are attributed to the country. The VNR presentations that followed this panel are a separate agenda item, covered in the Voluntary National Reviews session.