Governmental futures and the SDGs with Felix Dodds

Felix Dodds has been a leading thinker in the area of global governance for thirty years. Now an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina where he is the Principal Investigator for the Belmont Forum funded project Governance of Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience for Sustainable Development. At UNC he co-directed the 2014 and 2018 Nexus Conferences on Water-Food-Energy and Climate. He is secretary to the government Friends of Governance for Sustainable Development group in New York.  He is also an International Ambassador for the City of Bonn.  He was the UK government candidate to be the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (2019).  In 2019 after a three year campaign he succeeded in securing an annual UN General Assembly resolution on Sustainable Investment. In 2020 he was the Liberal Democrat candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Mid-Derbyshire.  For the development of the Sustainable Development Goals he chaired the first UN Conference to come out with a set of indicative SDGs in September 2011. The conference Sustainable Societies Responsible Citizens occurred two months after Colombia first proposed the idea of the SDGs at a government retreat in Solo Indonesia (July 2011). The UN had contracted Felix to write the background paper for that meeting on the options for reform of the UN in the area of sustainable development.  During the SDG negotiations 2013 to 2015 he was the advisor to the Ford Foundation grantees on the SDGs and the cofounder of the coalition Communitas that seceded in lobbying for SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities. He was also the advisor for a number of other non-profits during the SDG negotiations.  From 1992 to 2012 he was the Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future. Stakeholder Forum hosted the first workshop on Rio+20 in November 2008. It identified the themes that such a Summit should focus on the two central themes to Rio +20 - a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and the institutional framework for sustainable development. The outcome from the workshop ‘The Donostia Declaration’ guided government’s decision in December 2009. He set up and managed (with SIWI) the Water and Climate Coalition (2008-2012) at the UNFCCC which secured in three years water for the first time into UN climate text. For the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 he facilitated the setting up of the first global network on sustainable development for sub national governments.  He also hosted the first conference on Responsible Tourism. He has sat on a number of advisory boards most recently for the UN Secretary General the review of the UN Global Compact (2018/2019), for the President UN General Assembly (2016) on sustainable finance, the German government’s global conferences on the Nexus – Water-Food and Energy (2011), Renewable Energy (2005) and Water (2001). He has authored or edited over twenty books the last one was ‘Stakeholder Democracy: Represented Democracy in a Time of Fear’.  He also co-wrote ‘Negotiating the Sustainable Development Goals’ with Ambassador David Donoghue and Jimena Leiva Roesch and ‘Only One Earth’ with the father of sustainable development Maurice Strong. His new book ‘Tomorrow’s People: The impact of disruptive Industries on our lives by 2030 will be out in July 2021.