Good morning colleagues

Thank you to the National Planning Commission and the International Partnerships Task Team for convening this workshop. I want to begin with a simple proposition: South Africa does not suffer from a shortage of international commitments.  We suffer from a shortage of implementation: compliance capability, institutional coherence, democratic participation, and strategic prioritisation. This is a distinction that matters.

As Commissioner Zondi mentioned, we have signed, ratified, endorsed, or politically supported an extensive range of international agreements, conventions, treaties and declarations since the re-admission of South Africa into the international community 30 years ago.  But citizens do not experience international commitments as legal instruments or communiqués. They experience them through whether the state works.

They experience whether there is water in the tap, whether electricity is reliable, whether public transport functions, whether corruption has consequences, whether decent jobs are created, and whether democracy produces accountable institutions. This is the difference between international agreements that deliver jobs, industrialisation, and prosperity, and international agreements that constrain them. It is also the contradiction between growing xenophobia domestically and regional solidarity in our foreign policy. 

So the question that we need to look at should also be asking if we have a coherent system that:

1. Prioritises, implements, finances, monitors, and democratically accounts for those commitments?
2. Do those commitments constrain sustainable development or accelerate it?

My argument today is that we do not yet have such a system. But the National Planning Commission is uniquely placed to help build one. Especially, as the NDP draws toward its sunset.

I want to structure my remarks today around 

1. Aligning international economic agreements with the NDP
2. Offer two recommendations on the NPC’s role
3. Why implementation matters, and finally
4. Adapting commitments in a fragmented global order

1. Aligning international economic agreements with the NDP

As mentioned by Commissioner Pheko, the world in 2026 is very different from the world in which the NDP was adopted in 2012. The NDP predates the Paris Agreement, SDGs, and the African Continental Free Trade Area. It predates COVID-19. It predates the current debt crisis in Africa. The NDP predates the current intensity of trade wars, climate change, geopolitical conflict, AI and global industrial policy competition. In other words, South Africa’s international demands and commitments have evolved faster than our domestic planning architecture.

South Africa has already demonstrated, through Stats SA’s SDG framework and Integrated Indicator Framework, that it is possible to build coordinated national monitoring systems linked to international commitments. The challenge now is extending this logic beyond SDG reporting toward a broader implementation architecture that links treaties, declarations, climate commitments, trade agreements, financing obligations, and national development planning into one coherent public system.

We must ask: are our commitments, treaty obligations, departmental plans and budgets organised into one coherent implementation architecture? Are we able to present that in a publicly accessible, user-friendly database? An inability to do this weakens both negotiation and monitoring.

If the NDP and SDGs were more clearly linked through indicators, South Africa would have greater clarity in international negotiations. We would know which commitments advance domestic development objectives, which require financing, which require legislative reform, and which require coordination across departments or spheres of government.

This is especially important in economic agreements. Trade agreements must support industrial policy. Development finance agreements must reduce the cost of capital and expand public investment capacity. Regional integration must strengthen infrastructure, logistics, regional value chains and industrialisation. Climate agreements must support energy security, green industrialisation, worker protection and a just transition. 

International agreements’ impact on industrialisation is a good example of how these agreements can undermine industrialisation and thus sustainable development as envisioned by the SDGs and the NDP. 

This brings us to an important point about international agreements: 

While a lot of our discussion today is focused on how we can improve the implementation of agreements, we should also use this opportunity to ask if all of the agreements we have bound ourselves to are in the national interest of our development. There was an excellent report produced during the G20 last year called Removing International Obstacles to Sustainable Industrial Policy, some of the South African authors included Basani Baloyi, Ayabonga Cawe, Gilad Isaacs, and Fiona Tregenna. There were world-class economists like Ha-Joon Chang and Jayati Ghosh who were authors as well.

So, this report explained that sustainable industrial policies are constrained by international regimes … in particular: 1. trade and investment; 2. technology and intellectual property; and 3. Finance regimes.

The report argues that international economic rules can constrain the policy space available to developing countries pursuing sustainable industrialisation strategies. In particular, it highlights tensions between some trade and investment rules and the ability of states to use industrial policy tools such as local content requirements, subsidies, technology transfer arrangements, and strategic public procurement in support of industrial transformation.

The report makes an important point: these constraints affect all countries to some degree, but they are especially damaging for countries at earlier stages of industrialisation, where proactive industrial policy is most necessary for diversification, employment creation and technological upgrading.

It further argues that WTO rules, free trade agreements, and investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms can restrict the policy flexibility needed by developing economies.

On technology and intellectual property, the report argues that TRIPS and TRIPS-plus rules constrain access to technologies, manufacturing know-how and innovation space.

On finance, the report highlights how global financial systems systematically disadvantage developing economies through higher borrowing costs, flawed sovereign risk models, biased credit ratings, volatile capital flows and flawed restructuring rules for insolvent, debt-distressed, countries. 

The broader argument is not that South Africa should retreat from multilateralism. Rather, the report argues for what it calls a “transformational multilateralism”, an international system that enables sustainable industrialisation, technological upgrading, climate resilience and developmental policy space, rather than constraining them.

For South Africa, this means that international commitments must always be assessed against a developmental test. They must be assessed against our local fragilities. South Africa’s unemployment crisis makes this urgent. Stats SA reported that the official unemployment rate rose to 32.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026. That is not just a labour market statistic. It is a warning that international economic commitments must be assessed against their impact on structural transformation, employment and industrial capability.

2. The NPC’s role: from monitoring the NDP to monitoring coherence

The NPC’s role could be strengthened in two practical ways. First, the NPC should create an international commitments framework. This would map legally binding treaties, conventions, financing commitments, political declarations, G20 and BRICS commitments, regional obligations, climate commitments, human rights conventions and trade agreements – all in one place.

For each commitment, the framework should identify a number of variables, including:

• its legal status;
• the responsible department;
• implementing agents;
• required legislation or regulation;
• financing implications;
• timelines;
• indicators;
• reporting obligations;
• and links to the NDP, SDGs and Agenda 2063.

Our second recommendation is that the NPC should support an online public database and dashboard to track South Africa’s commitments and progress. It should show what has been signed, what has been ratified, what has been implemented, what is delayed, what requires financing, and what requires legislative or administrative action. This needs to be publicly available and in a format that is accessible to civil society, academics, and businesses alike.

This would strengthen democracy because citizens should be able to see what commitments have been made in their name. It would also improve implementation, because a number of agreements are implemented by non-governmental actors.

3. Why implementation matters

Locally, implementation matters because it is central to credibility, trust, accountability and democracy. Internationally, implementation matters because it gives credibility to South Africa’s role in the world. It allows us to leverage diplomatic influence through soft power.  It strengthens our voice in bilateral and multilateral negotiations.

It also matters because peace, development, environmental sustainability and regional stability are not abstract diplomatic goals – they are directly in South Africa’s national interest.

Internationalism is also a core value of South Africa’s constitutional democracy. The anti-apartheid struggle was international and our democratic Constitution locates South Africa in a wider community of nations, committed to dignity, equality, freedom and human rights. The NDP itself speaks of South Africa taking its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.

Our credibility cannot be sustained through rhetoric alone. A state gains legitimacy when commitments are implemented with intention and with integrity. A state loses legitimacy when commitments are repeatedly made but not followed through on. The evidence on this is sobering.

The NPC’s December 2024 report on monitoring NDP indicators notes that, in 2023, less than 40 percent of South Africans reported having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in any major institution, with only two exceptions: the SABC at 57 percent and SARS at 46 percent. South Africa faces a serious public trust deficit.

We have seen this movie before in other parts of the world. The outcome along the current trajectory is likely to lead us towards fascist and predatory regimes. So rebuilding trust in state institutions is not a secondary governance issue. It is an implementation issue.  On this point, it is worth noting that it is impossible to have ‘good’ policy if it is not implementable. If we have a policy that we are not able to implement, then it is a bad policy.

Good policy and its implementation require professionalising the public service, strengthening procurement integrity, expanding public resources, and improving transparency.. That is the local democratic case for implementation. But there is also an international case.

South Africa’s influence in the world has historically rested not only on economic weight, but on moral authority, diplomatic credibility, and the ability to build coalitions. That soft power is weakened when South Africa is seen to sign agreements but fails to implement them.

The NDP made this point sharply in Chapter 7. It observed that South African diplomats “have great skill in drafting memoranda of understanding, policy statements and agreements, but lose momentum when it comes to implementing agreement terms or following up on promises of benefits”.  That diagnosis remains highly relevant.

4. Adapting commitments in a fragmented global order

South Africa is operating in a world where many international commitments are not being met by the very global powers that shaped them. The rules-based order is under strain, to say the least. The World Trade Organisation system is defunct, climate finance commitments are unmet, the Bretton Woods institutions are institutionally providing little to the 4 trillion financing gap of developing countries, and the UN Charter is being completely forgotten by hegemonic powers.

This is the world in which South Africa is being asked to implement ambitious commitments. That does not mean South Africa should retreat from internationalism. But it does mean that South Africa must move from passive compliance to a more strategic approach. We must participate in international agreements with intention and integrity. But we must also be honest that international agreements involve sovereignty trade-offs.

Unless an international agreement already reflects existing national policy, it will affect domestic policy space in some way. That is not automatically bad. Sometimes, pooling sovereignty through international cooperation is necessary and desirable. The issue is whether these trade-offs are made transparently, democratically and strategically.

An important example of this is the loans that South Africa is taking from IFIs, including the World Bank, which have policy conditionality attached to them. Why – we must ask – is South Africa relinquishing policy space to World Bank loans when the trade-off in sovereignty and impact on development is not approved in parliament first? This is a huge gap in the legitimacy, democracy and transparency of our international commitments.

South Africa’s approach should therefore be guided by four principles.

1. First, protect policy space for development.
2. Second, implement human rights and constitutional commitments with integrity.
3. Third, distinguish clearly between legally binding obligations and political declarations or voluntary commitments.
4. And fourth, adapt implementation pathways to our local context, on the basis of progressive realisation where appropriate, while of course maintaining the goal of full compliance.

WTO reform – what do we do in the meantime? This distinction between legally binding commitments and political commitments is important. Legally binding commitments, for example, in trade, human rights or national legislation , are often easier to track because courts, companies, individuals, civil society organisations and other states will generally invoke them when they are breached. But many commitments are made through declarations, summits and forums without strong secretariats or enforcement mechanisms, including some BRICS and G20 commitments.

Those commitments still matter. But they require domestic systems of tracking, transparency and follow-up. While we look to the complexities of the international context, we need to keep an eye on the domestic political context. South Africa’s national policy is now increasingly shaped by coalition politics. 

The 2025 budget process made this visible. The budget was postponed twice because of coalition disagreement, then reworked after political opposition, and Parliament only passed the revised fiscal framework in June 2025. That experience matters for foreign policy and international commitments.

If coalition politics affects the budget, it can also affect international agreements. South Africa, therefore, needs stronger mechanisms to ensure that international commitments are democratically debated, fiscally realistic and institutionally owned across government. 

We need the foresight to start integrating our foreign policy planning and implementation at the state level through engagements with political parties in the lead-up to elections, so that a change in government can be implemented quickly by departments. 

Colleagues,

South Africa’s challenge is not that we are unable to make commitments. The challenge before us is that commitments need to be prioritised, costed, monitored, democratically debated, and integrated into national development planning. Our global context is changing rapidly. Major powers are increasingly selective in which rules they follow and which rules they expect the world to follow. 

Climate finance remains inadequate relative to need.  Developing countries face a deep financing gap of $4 trillion.  Trade is becoming more strategic and more fragmented.  Domestic coalition politics will make implementation more complex.

In that context, South Africa needs a strategic approach to internationalism. Implementation should be measured by whether international commitments reduce poverty, inequality and unemployment;  Implementation MUST be measured by its ability to rebuild public trust and improve people’s lives.

Thank you.