The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development frames a vision of economic, social and environmental sustainability and serves as the reference guide for United Nations System work through the next 15 years.

Within this context, the governance of natural resources and of infrastructure emerges as a fundamental challenge for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean. The countries in the region have had difficulties converting periods of export boom of natural resources into long term economic and social development processes. Meanwhile, the absence of adequate infrastructure and the inefficient provision of services related to it present significant obstacles to the efficient implementation of policies centered on equality, the full attainment of economic and social development goals, as well as the realization of regional integration objectives, all of which are elements that can be found in the work carried out by ECLAC’s Natural Resources and Infrastructure Division (NRID).

The crosscutting issues addressed by the Division demonstrate the urgent need to move toward a new governance of natural resources in order to ensure that the benefits of their exploitation are transformed into concrete contributions to sustainable development with equality, such as ECLAC’s "Horizons 2030" document promotes.

The Governance Week for Natural Resources and Infrastructure will be held between November 7th and 11th 2016 with the aim of incorporating these dimensions into sectoral discussions. The week’s events are being financed in conjunction with the United Nations Development Account, the German Corporation for International Cooperation (BMZ / GIZ) and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI).

The Week’s program includes a series of events, among those a handful of ministerial dialogues, that will provide an intersectoral platform for the analysis of proposals and multiple ECLAC lines of action in the fields of natural resources and infrastructure in an effort to foster synergies and linkages between natural resource sectors, infrastructure services and regional integration.

In addition, a series of technical meetings will take place on topics such as infrastructure investment, responsible mining, public-private partnerships (PPPs), energy efficiency, and logistics and regional integration in order to promote best practices as well as systems of measurement and monitoring of the advancement toward the goals set forth by the 2030 Agenda.