SDPI’s 21st Sustainable Development Conference (SDC 2018)

 The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) has announced its 21stSustainable Development Conference (SDC 2018) and the 11th South Asia Economic Summit (SAES XI).

SDPI’s 21st Sustainable Development Conference (SDC 2018)

This four-day long event under the theme ‘Corridors of Knowledge for Peace and Development’ will kick off from Tuesday (4th of December 2018) here in Hotel Margalla Islamabad. The concluding ceremony will be held on the 7th of December 2018.

The conference will discuss economic and other corridors of connectivity and knowledge that can steer us towards peace and development. The researchers, academicians, scientists, policy makers, legislators, and experts from different fields will come up with their evidence-based policy solutions. They will share the best practices and present workable solutions to the emerging challenges related to sustainable development in the region.  

The sessions at the conference largely include: economy, poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, environmental and social justice, SDGs with many more sub-themes relevant to Pakistan and other countries.

In the SDC plenary sessions, keynote speeches will be delivered by prominent scholars, policy makers and practitioners under the umbrella of the overarching theme. One plenary is dedicated to the Journalism Awards to acknowledge media professionals’ untiring efforts in highlighting the issues of sustainable development.

The Eleventh South Asia Economic Summit (SAES XI) will focus on the topics and issues important to the South Asia region’s current political economy. Apart from the plenary sessions aiming to discuss strengthening of broad-based dialogue across South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) member countries, concurrent sessions would aim to discuss business-to-business and people-to-people connectivity, creating and strengthening trade and investment value chains, regional trade in services, cooperation in energy and water sectors, and strengthening dialogue mechanisms to tackle the impact of climate change in the region.

Given the presence of the regional think tank community, this year’s SAES will also discuss how Track 2 and Track 1.5 efforts could support the formal SAARC process in areas such as trade, energy, transport, environment, climate change, disaster risk reduction and water.

The SDC will launch a peer reviewed anthology based on the conference papers presented during the 20th SDC held in 2017 titled ‘Seventy Years of Development: The Way Forward’, along with other publications.

SDPI will compile the policy recommendations from the 30 plus panels and plenary sessions which will be communicated to the respective Ministries and at regional level institutions. The compiled recommendations along with detailed reports of the sessions will be published in a special edition of SDPI’s Research and News Bulletin.  The Conference will provide an interactive forum to meet with experts and to find relevant ideas and solutions in an atmosphere of sharing and exploring.