Amidst a new global south debt crisis, the debt architecture reform agenda cannot wait any longer. The Fourth UN International Financing for Development Conference (FfD4) is a key milestone to open an intergovernmental process towards the debt architecture reform that global south countries need.

This paper presents 10 reforms that European civil society organisations believe are necessary within the financing for development agenda in order to prevent unsustainable and illegitimate debt accumulation and offer fair and sustainable solutions to sovereign debt crises when they occur. These reforms should be encompassed within a new binding legal framework that should be discussed and agreed under UN auspices. The UN, having the core mandate to address critical global issues and being neither a debtor nor a creditor itself, is the only inclusive and truly democratic space to advance such key reforms. In this sense, the paper presents arguments in favour of opening an intergovernmental process in which all Member States participate on an equal footing, in order to define a UN framework convention on sovereign debt that encompasses global consensus on the rules, principles, and structures needed throughout the different interdependent stages of the debt cycle.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute