The Club de Madrid, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, and Center of Concern´s Rethinking Bretton Woods Project jointly organised a Conference on “A Global Shared Societies Agenda: A Strategy to promote social cohesion for sustainable development and growth” at the IMF-WBG Spring Meetings in April, 22nd, 2012 co-chaired by Club de Madrid Members John Bruton and Petre Roman and IMF’s Deputy Director of Strategy, Policy and Review Department, Hugh Bredenkamp. The meeting’s goal was to promote discussion among influential current and former policymakers and key thinkers in the context of the 2012 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The Club de Madrid and its partners believe that the linkages between reform of the international financial and monetary system and the prioritization of policies that promote equitable and shared societies must be pursued together in order to achieve sustainable development and growth.

The morning session was a public meeting to raise awareness of “A Shared Societies Agenda” for the financial and monetary institutions. The two Members of the Club de Madrid, Bruton and Roman, IMF’s Hugh Bredenkamp, Jack Boorman and Francois Bourguignon –who jointly guided the discussion- held an interesting debate on the importance of the initiative and how it can be taken forward.

The afternoon session took the form of a private working session at which senior policy makers from different international organizations (see programme of the Conference) considered the ideas proposed in the morning session with a view to reaching a consensus on the contents of such an Agenda. A number or representatives of key global and regional organisations were asked to introduce the second session by giving a first response to the idea, indicating the attitude of their agencies to such an initiative. The objective was to create agreement on the social dimension being part of macroeconomic policy making and what form the policies should take at the national, regional and global levels. The participants of this session came up with a number of recommendations in support of a Shared Societies agenda in different policy areas at the national, regional and global level during a lively and thorough discussion.

The conveners of the meeting circulated the first draft of the Global Shared Societies Agenda among the participants and was formally presented for the first time at the Rio +20 Conference in June.  It has also been presented to the Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde.

The initiatives’s background:

• In 2011 the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Club de Madrid and Center of Concern co-organized two high-level conferences at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Headquarters on “Democratic Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System: The objective of equitable development and shared societies” and “From rising inequalities to shared societies: The need to create a sustainable International Monetary and Financial System”, that took place during the IMF-WBG Spring and Annual Meetings last year.
• The primary audience and institutional focus is on the IMF and its members because of its critical role in the international financial and monetary system. However, policy coherence between the IMF and the other international organizations that have a role in the global economy is a necessary precondition for the Agenda to be meaningful. The focus of the seminar was therefore on what is required to forge a new, international consensus to directly incorporate social as well as hard economic considerations into the framework of the international monetary and financial system and to bring indicators of impacts on social conditions into the policy performance goals that Member States are required to meet by the international financial institutions.

Please, read here an article on the role of the IMF in the Shared Societies Global Agenda by Jack Boorman.

Read here the program of the session:

• A Global Shared Societies Agenda: A strategy to promote social cohesion for sustainable development and growth

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