Mainstreaming, Acceleration and Policy Support (MAPS) Workshop

On behalf of the United Nations in Montenegro, I am delighted to welcome you today at this important event. It is encouraging to see such broad participation from both the Government and the UN family and I would like to thank you for joining us.

The EU accession and the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development are two international commitments transformed into national priorities by the Government of Montenegro. The fulfillment of the accession criteria and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals will unleash series of transformative changes to the country, and as such, the supreme goal of improved lives of people in Montenegro will be achieved.

With noble intentions, and concrete targets set ahead of us, I would like to reinforce the importance of our combined knowledge and resources in addressing these key national priorities. The workshop that we are all attending here today, is a proof of that, and comes at a fortunate moment to advance our actions on the identified synergies and complementarities between EU accession and Agenda 2030.

Back into 2017, United Nations in Montenegro has embarked into the Sustainable Development Goals Mainstreaming, Acceleration and Policy Support, or SDGs MAPS process. The conclusions of extensive consultations, analysis and validations, are in details reflected into the recently published “Unravelling Connections Report”. The document outlines the key linkages between the two processes and highlights the areas with the greatest impact on achieving the 2030 Agenda. Sixty- five percent of the SDGs targets, or 109 out of 169 global targets, have been assessed to have strong linkages to the Acquis Chapters and national benchmarks.

The areas of environment, justice, rule of law and fundamental rights, social policy and employment are identified as accelerators for the SDGs achievement. The fulfillment of all the EU requirements under Chapter 27 on environment, for instance, will trigger the achievement of as many as 40 SDGs targets; Chapters 23 and 24 on justice, rule of law and human rights - 28 targets; Chapter 19 on social policy and employment- 12 targets. These illustrate in a very pragmatic way the correlation of the two central processes of Montenegro’s political and development agenda and in a visible way projects our future actions. 

Considerable efforts have been put to identify the synergies and now we aim to advance from analysis and academic work to the de facto implementation. Our purpose is to materialize and give life to the report conclusions through designing high-quality interventions that will benefit the people of Montenegro and bring them closer to the EU and Sustainable Development Goals achievement.

In the room with us, we have high level experts coming from both processes, or, shall we just name it one process- for better living standard of people in Montenegro. I am sure that through envisioning a country that we want and through thinking outside the box, we have considerable strength to accelerate the progress. Together we will spare no effort in building a future of prosperity, peace and justice for all citizens.

I would like to conclude by expressing my thanks to the Chief Negotiator and his team for support and leadership in this process, but also for the clear vision of complementarity of EU Accession and Agenda 2030.

I am very happy to welcome you all, once again, and hope the discussions over the next two days will be interesting, successful and will result with a tangible plan for actions.

Thank you very much.