Outcome Document - 2026 Regional Civil Society Forum: Rethinking Sustainable Development amid Wars and Uncertainty in the Arab Region

In 2026, the global and regional landscape is increasingly shaped by wars, escalating armed conflicts, persistent instability and injustices, as well as deepening inequalities and accelerating climate crises. These trends are undermining prospects for sustainable and inclusive futures. In fact, with only a few years remaining until 2030, the Agenda for Sustainable Development appears increasingly out of reach. The gap between commitments taken universally under the Agenda and its 17 Goals and their actual implementation at national, regional and global levels is huge, driven by weak political will to advance the structural reforms needed to address the root causes of inequality, injustices and instability, as well as failures in global governance and accountability. At the same time, multilateralism as a framework for collective solutions is facing significant challenges. Its credibility, effectiveness and efficiency are commonly questioned, while ongoing reform efforts have yet to address entrenched global power imbalances.

The Arab region reflects these global crises more deeply and more acutely, shaped by protracted wars and occupation, longstanding structural inequalities, exclusionary economic and political models, climate change, and accumulated policy failures. Rather than isolated crises, these realities reflect interconnected and systemic failures that continue to reproduce inequality, poverty, exclusion, dependency, and vulnerability across the region. Many countries of the region are trapped in structural and systemic, multidimensional crises characterized by rentierism, mounting public debt, economic stagnation, high inflation, shrinking civic space, erosion of the social contract.

Organized online ahead of the 2026 Arab Forum on Sustainable Development, the Regional Civil Society Forum on Sustainable Development brought together around 100 civil society representatives from different Arab countries through four complementary panel discussions. These discussions centered on redefining development and reclaiming justice at all levels. Participants underscored the urgent need for a rights-based people-centered development paradigm grounded in social, economic, climate, and gender justice and emphasized the critical role of civil society in advancing it.

The forum emphasized that achieving justice and sustainable development cannot be separated from the imperative of ending wars and violent conflicts. It highlighted the need to elaborate a new development paradigm based on justice and fairness rather than growth alone, focused on opportunities, and wary of the risks of unequal distribution, and grounded in a rights-based, inclusive, and comprehensive approach that places human dignity, equality, and social participation at the center of development policies. It emphasized the importance of strengthening South–South and regional cooperation as a key step toward fostering solidarity, knowledge exchange, and collective regional responses capable of confronting shared structural and geopolitical challenges. The forum further underscored the vital role of a strong and coordinated Arab civil society movement in advancing development advocacy and problem solving. It called for proactive civil society engagement to leverage the current crises as an opportunity to challenge entrenched inequities, rethink dominant development models, and advocate for more inclusive, accountable, and just policies.

In contrast, defenders of these institutions contend that such criticisms overlook the importance of economic stability as a prerequisite for the realization of human rights. From this perspective, fiscal discipline and structural reforms are necessary to address economic crises, restore investor confidence, and create the conditions for long-term development. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, some argue that development should be understood as the expansion of capabilities and freedoms, which in turn requires a stable economic foundation. Furthermore, IFIs maintain that states enter into these agreements voluntarily and retain ultimate responsibility for implementing reforms. Accordingly, any negative social outcomes are attributed to domestic policy choices or weak implementation rather than to the institutions themselves.

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