Public services are the foundation of equitable, inclusive, and sustainable development. Universal access to quality education, health, social protection, energy, water, and sanitation builds human capabilities, reduces inequality, and strengthens the social contract between governments and citizens. Conversely, underinvestment or privatization often leads to exclusion, inequality, and erosion of rights. Strong, publicly financed and accountable services are both a moral imperative and a strategic investment - central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), fulfilling human rights, advancing gender and racial equality, and building resilient economies capable of withstanding future shocks.
Yet national and global policies often fail to do justice to the criticality of public services. The wave of youth-led protests sweeping several countries today reflects widespread frustration as citizens challenge austerity-driven under-funding of education, health, utilities and social protection, demanding governments restore and expand publicly financed, quality public service provision. If we want to make progress on ensuring that our future is public, we need to make this case vigorously in the series of global policy processes happening in November 2025 - at the World Social Summit for Development (WSSD2) in Qatar, the UN Tax Convention negotiations in Kenya, the COP30 Climate conference in Brazil and the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa.
We need to build on the Seville Commitment - the outcome from the fourth UN Financing for Development Summit in July 2025. This acknowledges the important role of ‘public resources, policies and plans’ but fails to articulate a clear vision of financing universal, gender-responsive, and high quality public services that can respond to the climate challenge.
The Doha Political Declaration from WSSD2 offers some strong language, including acknowledging the crucial role of public services provision in ‘recognising, reducing and redistributing women’s disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work’. However, much more attention and investment is needed to address the real challenges facing public services and the public sector workforce - and to put public services at the centre of building a just and sustainable future. Privatisation presents clear risks to public services and it is concerning that the Declaration looks uncritically at Public Private partnerships as an instrument of healthcare reform.
The G20 could and should bring a renewed focus on inequality reduction, push back against the threats posed by financialization of healthcare and help to address some of the finance constraints (through bolder action on tax and debt). Finally, COP30 in Belem, Brazil, could embed public services at the heart of agreements around a ‘just transition’.
The recent IMF and World Bank annual meetings (in October 2025) reveal continuing contradictions. Despite 54 countries being in debt crisis, the IMF refuses to recognise this reality as they will only declare a crisis if creditors do not get paid. People dying for lack of health care or children being denied education owing to underfunded schools do not appear to pose a crisis for the IMF. We need to change this mindset. Doing so is particularly important at this time when the IMF is reviewing its program design and conditionality. We must expose the absurdity of the IMF suggesting that governments must cut public sector wage bills in order to increase social spending on health and education - when the reality is that nothing is more important than spending on the frontline workforce of teachers, nurses, midwives, community care workers and doctors, the majority of whom are women.
Public services champions need to make some key common demands across these diverse international forums in November 2025, whether in formal or informal negotiation processes, conference panels, side-meetings, blogs or social media communications:
- Transforming public services must be central to building a new social contract and ensuring sustainable development, especially in light of the climate crisis. States and international actors must recognise that comprehensive support for public services is central to economic and social justice and the ‘justice’ involved in a ‘just transition.’
- Public services need sustainable public funding and should be at the heart of national budgets. In light of declines in aid and the scale of the debt crisis, every government needs to prioritise public funding from its own tax revenues, boldly increasing tax-to-GDP ratios through progressive and gender responsive tax reforms that address inequalities in income, wealth and time use.
- Governments should reject the problematic ‘private finance first’ policies for development finance. Grants and concessional loans should reinforce public systems and public services rather than fund parallel, private, projectized or fragmented provision.
- Governments must stop privatization, commercialization and financialization of essential public services, like health including sexual and reproductive health, education, water, care and social protection, energy and transport, particularly pending human rights impact assessments and evidence of public benefit.
- Governments should invest in public service workers as a critical investment in citizens’ rights. Sustainable financing of the public sector workforce should be a priority - resisting pressures from the IMF to cut or freeze total wage bills and actively planning to increase the percentage of GDP spent on the public sector wage bill after years of unnecessary and damaging austerity.
- National and global action is required to address the debt crisis, which is undermining spending on public services, given that 75% of lower-income countries spend more on debt servicing than on health, and 50% spend more on debt than on education. We need to recognise that the existing debt architecture (including the G20 Common Framework) is unfair and ineffective, serving the interests of wealthy creditors and ignoring the devastating public service impacts on countries that are in debt crisis, often through no fault of their own.
- All countries should set measurable targets for inequality reduction and commit to converting the rhetoric of ‘leaving no-one behind’ for those living in poverty, facing exclusion and inter-sectional discrimination, into reality. This involves ensuring that public services and social protection are truly universally available. We need to push back on the financialization of health and other services and challenge targeted rather than universal social protection which continues to be pushed by the G20 and IMF.
- Governments should affirm that climate justice depends on strong, publicly funded services and commit to ensuring that climate finance supports the expansion and resilience of publicly delivered essential services, recognizing that universal access to health, education, social protection, energy and water systems is indispensable to achieving a just transition and sustainable development.
Making a breakthrough on public services requires both national and international action. Nationally, those working on education, health, water, energy, care, transport, social protection, housing and agriculture need to come together to demand that governments commit to a comprehensive vision of the role of public services. In the light of global uncertainties, trade tariffs, cuts in aid and unfair interest rates triggering debt crises, and in the face of popular demand to recommit to the idea of welfare state in many countries across the world, now is the moment for uniting struggles to demand that governments are proactive, reclaiming sovereignty over economic decision making and advancing inclusive, democratic processes to rebuild a social contract based on public goods and public services.
Internationally, reforms to the global financial architecture are crucial to unleash sustainable financing for public services. One of the most important breakthroughs lies in the work being done to build a UN Framework Convention on Tax, with negotiations continuing in Nairobi in November 2025 and hopes for a strong final convention to be in place by 2027. This will shift power over the making and enforcing of global rules on tax away from the OECD club of rich nations to a representative and inclusive UN space. Fairer global rules and strengthened international tax coordination are critical for countries to generate higher and predictable domestic tax revenues - which are central prerequisites for sustainable financing of universal public services. In the meanwhile, the G20 in South Africa can help by delivering progress on effective taxation of High Net Wealth Individuals, initiated last year under a historic deal in G20 Brazil, to tackle extreme wealth inequality, including gendered and racialised inequality.
We also have an urgent need to change the global architecture on debt, moving power away from the IMF and ad hoc, creditor-led processes that drive the imposition of austerity. We need a more representative and inclusive architecture for addressing debt crises, one that systematically safeguards the fiscal space, equity, and policy autonomy that governments need to deliver universal, high-quality public services. The central call of African nations at the UN Financing for Development conference was for a UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt. This was blocked by European nations as the FFD4 outcome had to be a consensus document. But there is now momentum to take the case for a UN Debt Convention to a vote at the UN General Assembly in 2026. Those who care about the future of public services must vigorously support such changes to the international architecture, to break the colonial and patriarchal stranglehold that has undermined public services for a generation or more.
In this year, when we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, we need to reassert the centrality of public services to the achievement of human rights and gender equality. It is time to celebrate the inclusive space presented by the UN General Assembly and human rights treaty bodies - whilst challenging the continuing colonial tendencies of global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. We need representative and inclusive processes nationally and internationally - and we need to build a fairer multilateralism. When people’s voices are properly heard, universal public services are valued and supported.
SIGN ONS:
- ActionAid International
- Amnesty International
- Public Services International
- Education International
- Oxfam
- Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR)
- Global Campaign for Education (GCE)
- Global Social Justice
- Partners in Health
- Global Student Forum
- The People’s Fund for Global Health and Development
- World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP)
- Wemos, Netherlands
- Bretton Woods Project
- Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP)
- Right to Education Initiative
- End Austerity Campaign
- Financial Transparency Coalition
- European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad)
- Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)
- Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy (RIPESS)
- WEED - World Economy, Ecology & Development
- Malala Fund
- Federación Internacional Fe y Alegría
- International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse
- Global Surgery Umbrella (GSU)
- VIVAT International
- Treatment Action Group (TAG)
- Campaña Latinoamericana por el Derecho a la Educación- CLADE
- Arab Campaign for Education
- RTE Forum, India
- PeaceCast TV
- Polifa
- INESC - Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos, Brazil
- Grupo de Mujeres de la Argentina
- Portuguese Platform of Development NGOs
- Biozid Climate Institute, Bangladesh, www.biozid-climate.com
- Free Trade Union Development Centre, Sri Lanka -ftudc2@gmail.com
- Sri Lanka Pre School Teachers’ Association -slpstassocation@gmail.com
- Organisation d’Appui aux Jeunes Opérateurs Economiques pour la Gouvernance Locale (OJEG) , Sénégal
- Fundación Chiapaneca para Mujeres Migrantes (CHIMUMI) from México.
- We, The World Botswana
- Olabode Youth and Women Initiatives (OYAWIN) info@oyawin.org
- “All for Education!” National Civil Society Coalition, Mongolia
- Bearing in mind Action to save Life initiative (BAL)
- Association for Promotion of Sustainable Development, IndiaInstitute for Economic Justice, South Africa
- Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Loreto Generalate
- Rezaul K Chowdhury, COAST Foundation Bangladesh
- JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France (JMBF), info@jmbf.org
- Confederation of Indonesia People Movement (KPRI)
- Lutte Nationale Contre la Pauvreté “LUNACOP” lunacopasbl@gmail.com
- Actions des Femmes Marginalisées pour le développement “AFMD “ afmdactions@gmail.com
- medicusmundi spain
- Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education
- eduCoop
- Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD)
- Red de Justicia Fiscal de América Latina y El Caribe
- East African Centre for Human Rights (EACH-Rights)
- Youth and Women for Peace and Sustainable Development (YOWPSUD)
- Coalición Panameña por el Derecho a la Educación.
- Association For Promotion Sustainable Development. India apsdhisar@gmail.com
- Centro de Estudios Sociales y Publicaciones - CESIP, Perú
- Marcha Global contra el Trabajo Infantil Sudamérica
- The Alternatives Project (TAP)
- CADE campaña Argentina por el Derecho a la Educación
- ICentre for Environment, Human Rights & Development Forum - CEHRDF
- Ilias Center
- BFJP
- Nari O Jibon Foundation
- Cox's Bazar Democracy Forum
- Civil Society Network for Education Reforms (E-Net Philippines)
- Global Policy Forum Europe e.V.
- Barwaqa Relief Organization
- Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary NGO
- Adéquations
- Caritas Philippines
- CBCP Episcopal Commission on Indigenous Peoples National Secretariat
- Laudato Si Convergence - Philippines
- Philippine Misereor Partnership Inc. (PMPI)
- Social Action Center - Caritas Tabuk (Philippines)
- Archdiocese of Cotabato (Philippines)
- Alyansa Tigil Mina or ATM (Philippines)
- Global United Nations Association of the Philippines
- Diocese of Borongan - Caritas Borongan (Philippines)
- Fellowship for the Care of Creation Association Inc. (FCCAI)
- Archdiocese of Manila Integral Ecology Ministry (Philippines)
- Philippine Advocates for the Care of Our Planet,Inc.
- Diocese of Novaliches - Caritas Novaliches Ecology Ministry (Philippines)
- Aniban ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (AMA) (Association of Agricultural Workers) - Philippines
- Future By Design Pilipinas
- WeGeneration Initiative (Philippines)
- 2KK Tulong Sa Kapwa Kapatid (Philippines)
- Marinduque Council for Environmental Concerns (MACEC - Philippines)
- Magyar Természetvédők Szövetsége - Friends of the Earth Hungary (Hungary)
- Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC - Philippines)
- ESCR-Net
- Living Laudato Si Philippines
- Laudato Si Movement Pilipinas
- Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (PKMP)
- Friends of the Disabled Association (FDA Lebanon)
- Africa Network Campaign on Education For All (ANCEFA)
- Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education (ASPBAE).
- Asian School of Wisdom
- Equal Education Law Centre (South Africa)
- Nigeria Network of NGOs
- Medical IMPACT (IMPACT OUTREACH, A.C.)
- MenaFem Movement for Economic, Development And Ecological Justice
- Pax Romana International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS/MIEC)
- Debt Justice UK
- International Federation of Social Workers
- Plan International