Public services need sustainable public funding and should be at the heart of national budgets by Global Campaign Against Poverty, agencies 2:53pm 6th Oct, 2025   Nov. 2025    Public services need sustainable public funding and should be at the heart of national budgets. (Global Campaign Against Poverty, agencies)    Public services are the foundation of equitable, inclusive, and sustainable development. Universal access to quality education, health, social protection, energy, water, and sanitation builds human capabilities, reduces inequality, and strengthens the social contract between governments and citizens.    Conversely, underinvestment or privatization often leads to exclusion, inequality, and erosion of rights.    Strong, publicly financed and accountable services are both a moral imperative and a strategic investment - central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), fulfilling human rights, advancing gender and racial equality, and building resilient economies capable of withstanding future shocks.    Yet national and global policies often fail to do justice to the criticality of public services. The wave of youth-led protests sweeping several countries today reflects widespread frustration as citizens challenge austerity-driven under-funding of education, health, utilities and social protection, demanding governments restore and expand publicly financed, quality public service provision.    If we want to make progress on ensuring that our future is public, we need to make this case vigorously in the series of global policy processes happening in November 2025 - at the World Social Summit for Development (WSSD2) in Qatar, the UN Tax Convention negotiations in Kenya, the COP30 Climate conference in Brazil and the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa.    We need to build on the Seville Commitment - the outcome from the fourth UN Financing for Development Summit in July 2025. This acknowledges the important role of ‘public resources, policies and plans’ but fails to articulate a clear vision of financing universal, gender-responsive, and high quality public services that can respond to the climate challenge.    The Doha Political Declaration from WSSD2 offers some strong language, including acknowledging the crucial role of public services provision in ‘recognising, reducing and redistributing women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work’.    However, much more attention and investment is needed to address the real challenges facing public services and the public sector workforce - and to put public services at the centre of building a just and sustainable future.    Privatisation presents clear risks to public services and it is concerning that the Declaration looks uncritically at Public Private partnerships as an instrument of healthcare reform.    The G20 could and should bring a renewed focus on inequality reduction, push back against the threats posed by financialization of healthcare and help to address some of the finance constraints (through bolder action on tax and debt). Finally, COP30 in Belem, Brazil, could embed public services at the heart of agreements around a ‘just transition’.    The recent IMF and World Bank annual meetings (in October 2025) reveal continuing contradictions. Despite 54 countries being in debt crisis, the IMF refuses to recognise this reality as they will only declare a crisis if creditors do not get paid.    People dying for lack of health care or children being denied education owing to underfunded schools do not appear to pose a crisis for the IMF. We need to change this mindset. Doing so is particularly important at this time when the IMF is reviewing its program design and conditionality.    We must expose the absurdity of the IMF suggesting that governments must cut public sector wage bills in order to increase social spending on health and education - when the reality is that nothing is more important than spending on the frontline workforce of teachers, nurses, midwives, community care workers and doctors, the majority of whom are women.    Public services champions need to make some key common demands across these diverse international forums in November 2025, whether in formal or informal negotiation processes, conference panels, side-meetings, blogs or social media communications:    Transforming public services must be central to building a new social contract and ensuring sustainable development, especially in light of the climate crisis. States and international actors must recognise that comprehensive support for public services is central to economic and social justice and the ‘justice’ involved in a ‘just transition.’    Public services need sustainable public funding and should be at the heart of national budgets. In light of declines in aid and the scale of the debt crisis, every government needs to prioritise public funding from its own tax revenues, boldly increasing tax-to-GDP ratios through progressive and gender responsive tax reforms that address inequalities in income, wealth and time use.    Governments should reject the problematic ‘private finance first’ policies for development finance. Grants and concessional loans should reinforce public systems and public services rather than fund parallel, private, projectised or fragmented provision.    Governments must stop privatization, commercialization and financialization of essential public services, like health including sexual and reproductive health, education, water, care and social protection, energy and transport, particularly pending human rights impact assessments and evidence of public benefit.    Governments should invest in public service workers as a critical investment in citizens’ rights. Sustainable financing of the public sector workforce should be a priority - resisting pressures from the IMF to cut or freeze total wage bills and actively planning to increase the percentage of GDP spent on the public sector wage bill after years of unnecessary and damaging austerity.    National and global action is required to address the debt crisis, which is undermining spending on public services, given that 75% of lower-income countries spend more on debt servicing than on health, and 50% spend more on debt than on education.    We need to recognise that the existing debt architecture (including the G20 Common Framework) is unfair and ineffective, serving the interests of wealthy creditors and ignoring the devastating public service impacts on countries that are in debt crisis, often through no fault of their own.    All countries should set measurable targets for inequality reduction and commit to converting the rhetoric of ‘leaving no-one behind’ for those living in poverty, facing exclusion and inter-sectional discrimination, into reality.    This involves ensuring that public services and social protection are truly universally available. We need to push back on the financialisation of health and other services and challenge targeted rather than universal social protection which continues to be pushed by the G20 and IMF.    Governments should affirm that climate justice depends on strong, publicly funded services and commit to ensuring that climate finance supports the expansion and resilience of publicly delivered essential services, recognizing that universal access to health, education, social protection, energy and water systems is indispensable to achieving a just transition and sustainable development.    Making a breakthrough on public services requires both national and international action. Nationally, those working on education, health, water, energy, care, transport, social protection, housing and agriculture need to come together to demand that governments commit to a comprehensive vision of the role of public services.    In the light of global uncertainties, trade tariffs, cuts in aid and unfair interest rates triggering debt crises, and in the face of popular demand to recommit to the idea of welfare state in many countries across the world, now is the moment for uniting struggles to demand that governments are proactive, reclaiming sovereignty over economic decision making and advancing inclusive, democratic processes to rebuild a social contract based on public goods and public services.    Internationally, reforms to the global financial architecture are crucial to unleash sustainable financing for public services. One of the most important breakthroughs lies in the work being done to build a UN Framework Convention on Tax, with negotiations continuing in Nairobi in November 2025 and hopes for a strong final convention to be in place by 2027.    This will shift power over the making and enforcing of global rules on tax away from the OECD club of rich nations to a representative and inclusive UN space. Fairer global rules and strengthened international tax coordination are critical for countries to generate higher and predictable domestic tax revenues - which are central prerequisites for sustainable financing of universal public services.    In the meanwhile, the G20 in South Africa can help by delivering progress on effective taxation of High Net Wealth Individuals, initiated last year under a historic deal in G20 Brazil, to tackle extreme wealth inequality, including gendered and racialised inequality.    We also have an urgent need to change the global architecture on debt, moving power away from the IMF and ad hoc, creditor-led processes that drive the imposition of austerity. We need a more representative and inclusive architecture for addressing debt crises, one that systematically safeguards the fiscal space, equity, and policy autonomy that governments need to deliver universal, high-quality public services.    The central call of African nations at the UN Financing for Development conference was for a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt. This was blocked by European nations as the FFD4 outcome had to be a consensus document. But there is now momentum to take the case for a UN Debt Convention to a vote at the UN General Assembly in 2026.    Those who care about the future of public services must vigorously support such changes to the international architecture, to break the colonial and patriarchal stranglehold that has undermined public services for a generation or more.    In this year, when we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, we need to reassert the centrality of public services to the achievement of human rights and gender equality.    It is time to celebrate the inclusive space presented by the UN General Assembly and human rights treaty bodies - whilst challenging the continuing colonial tendencies of global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.    We need representative and inclusive processes nationally and internationally - and we need to build a fairer multilateralism. When people’s voices are properly heard, universal public services are valued and supported.    http://gcap.global/news/civil-society-collective-statement-on-public-services/    Countless people are struggling to make ends meet while wealth and power is concentrated at the top - World Social Report 2025    Millions of people around the world are living in fear of job loss or struggling to find work, as economic instability, conflict, and climate shocks combine to erode global security, a new UN report has warned.    According to the World Social Report 2025, the sobering sentiment indicates a widespread lack of confidence in the future. Despite people living longer, being better educated and more connected than ever before, many believe that life today is worse than it was 50 years ago.    Close to 60 per cent of people surveyed on life satisfaction reported that they were “struggling” with a further 12 per cent describing themselves as “suffering”, the report notes.    According to the report, economic instability is no longer limited to the world’s poorest regions. Even in high-income countries, rising job uncertainty, gig work and the digital transition are contributing to this trend.    These jobs may offer flexibility but often come at the cost of security and rights – reducing workers to mere service providers in a commodified labour market.    The insecurities are further compounded by an alarming rise in informal employment. In many low and middle-income countries, jobs with no safety net remains the norm, locking workers into cycles of low pay, instability, and zero benefits.    Even those who manage to enter formal employment face significant risks of being pushed back into the informal sector, especially during downturns.    For over 2.8 billion people living on less than $6.85 a day – the threshold for extreme poverty – “even a small shock can send people into extreme poverty and any escapes from poverty are often temporary,” the report warns.    The situation is further complicated by rising climate change impacts and worsening conflicts, further undermining local economies and deepening inequality, especially in the developing world.    As financial pressures mount and stability erodes, public confidence in institutions – and in one another – has also taken a severe hit, particularly among young people.    Over half the world’s population (57 per cent) now expresses low levels of confidence in government. Among those born in the 21st century, trust levels are even lower – raising concerns about long-term civic disengagement and political instability.    People’s trust in one another is also eroding. Fewer than 30 per cent of people in countries with available data believe that most others can be trusted, undermining social cohesion and complicating efforts for collective action.    “The spread of misinformation and disinformation, facilitated by digital technologies, is reinforcing divisions and fuelling distrust,” the report says, warning of abuse and misuse of digital platforms and social media to spread deceit and hate speech, and stoke conflicts.    “Often, users find themselves immersed in virtual and siloed ‘echo chambers’ where they are exposed to news and opinions that align with and may even radicalize their views.”    Platform algorithms facilitate the creation of such echo chambers and reward more extreme content and engagement with higher visibility, the report adds.    To reverse these damaging trends, the report calls for a bold shift in policymaking – one grounded in equity, economic security and solidarity.    It urges governments to invest more in people through expanding access to quality public services – such as education, healthcare, housing and robust social protection systems.    These investments are not discretionary, the report stresses, but essential to promote resilience and inclusive growth.    It also highlights the need to rebuild trust through inclusive and accountable institutions. At the same time, power and wealth needs to become less concentrated at the very top of society.    As momentum builds toward the Second World Summit for Social Development, which will be held in Doha in November, global leadership will be key to driving transformative change.    UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed the need for unity and decisive action in a foreword to the report.    “The global challenges we face demand collective solutions,” he wrote. “Now more than ever, we must strengthen our resolve to come together and build a world that is more just, secure, resilient and united for each and every one of us.”    http://www.wider.unu.edu/news/world-social-report-2025-sounds-alarm-global-social-crisis http://desapublications.un.org/publications/world-social-report-2025-new-policy-consensus-accelerate-social-progress http://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/young-europeans-are-losing-faith-democracy http://unu.edu/merit/article/does-austerity-influence-political-participation-and-opinions-redistribution http://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/safeguarding-tomorrow-social-protection-focus http://www.socialprotectionfloorscoalition.org/    * Paving the Road to the Second World Summit for Social Development. (UNRISD)    The UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has launched a global consultation process to offer perspectives from different regions, sectors, and demographic groups on shaping more equitable and impactful social development policies.    In November 2025, the United Nations will convene the Second World Summit for Social Development (WSSD) to address ongoing social challenges and renew commitments made in the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and Programme of Action. The second World Social Summit will also catalyze progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by reinvigorating its social pillar grounded in values of social justice, equality and inclusion.    http://www.unrisd.org/en/research/projects/second-world-summit-for-social-development http://www.unrisd.org/en/library/publications/rethinking-social-development-for-a-new-eco-social-contract-an-unrisd-contribution-to-the-second-wor http://www.unrisd.org/en/library/blog-posts/still-reaching-for-the-band-aid-vulnerability-risk-and-the-world-social-summit http://www.unrisd.org/en/library/publications/inclusive-peace-for-social-development-priority-areas-for-the-second-world-summit-for-social-develop http://www.srpoverty.org/2025/04/04/joint-statement-all-states-must-prioritise-adoption-of-a-living-wage-ahead-of-the-second-world-summit-for-social-development/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a80173-financing-peace-and-financing-war-report-independent-expert    http://gcap.global/news/global-peoples-assembly-adopts-peoples-declaration-for-social-justice-calling-for-a-new-global-social-contract-at-the-world-social-summit-2025 http://www.socialprotectionfloorscoalition.org/2025/06/second-world-summit-for-social-development-resources/ http://www.socialprotectionfloorscoalition.org/ http://www.internationaldisabilityalliance.org/blog/ida-welcomes-finalization-doha-political-declaration-and-its-commitments-disability-inclusion http://social.desa.un.org/world-summit-2025/blog http://www.ipsnews.net/2025/05/2025-world-social-summit-must-not-missed-opportunity/    Social protection is our most effective tool for eradicating poverty - Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter.    The rolling back of protections for people living in poverty has created fertile ground for far-right movements across the world, warned the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, in a new report presented to the United Nations General Assembly today.    “Welfare reform in the name of austerity and efficiency has alienated millions of people living in poverty and played into the hands of a far right looking to exploit discontent,” De Schutter said.    “Government restructuring of welfare systems has led to increasingly harsh conditions linked to receiving benefits and the ramping up of digital surveillance. Programmes once designed to provide basic security to all in times of need now shame and punish the very people they are meant to support.”    The report details how, rather than reducing poverty or cutting public expenditure, modern welfare systems stigmatise claimants, forcing them into unsuitable jobs under the threat of sanctions, subjecting them to algorithms that falsely flag fraud, and even penalising families by removing children when poverty is misclassified as ‘neglect’.    “These punitive welfare systems increase economic insecurity, erode trust in public institutions and leave millions feeling humiliated and abandoned by mainstream politics,” the expert said, citing a study that found that a one-point increase in income inequality corresponded almost exactly to a one-point increase in support for populist parties.    “It is in this void that far-right populists thrive, presenting themselves as champions of those left behind by the ‘elite’,” he said. “But their agenda is not to empower people in poverty – it is to further dismantle protections for their own gain. Once in power, they work to maintain the privileges of the very economic elite they denounce in their speeches, slashing food assistance, healthcare and other life-saving services, and further deepening poverty and exclusion.”    The report highlights deep cuts to social spending in countries ranging from Argentina to the United States, depriving millions of basic healthcare or income support, even as tax cuts shift wealth from the poorest households to the richest.    “These are the politics of exclusion: a deliberate decision to cut off lifelines to the poor while rewarding the richest echelons of society, often in the name of protecting public budgets from ‘outsiders’ or the so-called ‘undeserving poor’,” De Schutter said.    The Special Rapporteur called on governments to shift away from narrowly targeted benefit schemes and towards investing in universal, rights-based social protection to counter the rise of the far right. He urged governments to reframe the welfare state not as a cost to be reduced, but as part of a strategy that has been proven to deliver security and wellbeing for all.    “Social protection is our most effective tool for eradicating poverty. It is not charity, nor is it a favour granted under strict conditions; it is a human right that should be provided to all willingly and with respect,” the expert said.    http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a80138-far-right-populism-and-future-social-protection-report-special http://www.srpoverty.org/2025/10/01/far-right-populism-and-the-future-of-social-protection/ http://docs.un.org/en/A/80/138 http://thewire.in/communalism/global-rise-of-right-wing-populism-olivier-de-schutter-un-special-rapporteur Visit the related web page
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