Sustainable Development Goals: time for a rethink

A political reconceptualisation is critical if humanity’s hope for a sustainable global future is to be rescued.

Our future is being decided today. And that future is in jeopardy if countries—rich and poor—continue to fail to make progress towards ending unsustainable approaches to development and economic growth.

A plan was agreed in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda almost a decade ago, identifying 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Having met their 169 targets, UN member states would have made the transition to sustainability. But turning aspiration into reality has been an entirely different matter. With the expected outcomes a receding horizon, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, used the latest SDGs summit last September to pitch to world leaders a yearly $500 billion rescue plan for the goals.

They responded in typical diplomatic fashion. Wealthier countries, such as Germany, offered laundry lists of commitments, ambitions and individual actions while poorer member states, such as Ethiopia, lamented the low ‘flow of development finance to developing countries’ needed to implement the goals. Yet they all agreed to a political declaration in which they simultaneously ‘reaffirmed’ commitments and chided themselves—’the achievement of the SDGs is in peril’. And went away.

The participants in New York were ‘deeply concerned’ about the gap between the finance available and what is needed to implement the SDG, recognising ‘the urgency of providing predictable, sustainable and sufficient development finance to developing countries’. But Guterres’ plan to pay for ‘humanity’s most urgent undertaking‘, as Zambia puts it, must now await the UN Summit of the Future this September.

Putting aside the absurdity of setting global goals that have impacts on national economies without agreeing on limits to economic growth, there is a dire need to overcome this paralysis, with less than seven years left to implement the SDGs. And the first antidote to inertia is a critical rethink of the socio-political problems the goals attempt to solve.

Entrenched approaches

The overall thrust of the SDGs is to change development approaches, improve general wellbeing and reduce, at least, environmental degradation. While this represents a collective-action dilemma, the benefits for rich and poor countries alike favour their coalescing behind that purpose.

But, particularly in wealthier countries, existing approaches are so entrenched in consciousness that it is hard to imagine anything other than unsustainable consumption driving rates of production made possible by unsustainable natural-resource extraction. Politicians orchestrate governing around this cycle of production and consumption and are anxious about the impacts of substantive measures that would effect meaningful changes—indeed disruptions—to familiar lifestyles and standards of living, which might dismay national electorates given their expectations.

This refusal to face the obvious also constrains how politicians understand the specific problems the SDGs aim to address. Take SDG 7: ‘Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.’ Attainment of this goal will contribute to reducing global fossil-fuel emissions linked to environmental degradation. It is a ‘public good’—unlike a private commodity, non-rival and non-exclusive—much like healthcare, to which access is a right in most civilised countries.

Persistent failure by politicians to understand the distinction between a commodity, bought and sold, and what is—or should be treated as—a public good means they are unable to reconcile private economic interests with those of the general public. Thus although Africa has an ‘almost unlimited potential of solar capacity’, up to 10 terawatts, the continent has also historically included the largest number of people worldwide without access to electricity. Moreover, as long as politicians correspondingly insist that private money—rather than public investment—must play a major role in solving pressing public challenges, such as that represented by SDG 7, failure is guaranteed.

Unfortunately, concessionary loans from publicly supported, rich-country export-credit agencies (ECA) similarly follow a market rationale. Although ECA finance is critical for the energy transition in Africa, between 2015 and 2021 only $20 billion of $354 billion for renewable power generation was lent to African countries, not one of which was among its top 15 destinations. Yet there is of course no net global gain if Europe reduces greenhouse-gas emissions while they continue to increase elsewhere.

Hardly conducive

Politicians’ failure to think outside the ‘national container’ in this way turns a required concerted global push into efforts by each UN member state in isolation, which the most vulnerable are least well-placed to execute. Since 2015 a team of Dutch scientists have been studying how the SDGs are being implemented worldwide, pointing to inequities in social gains between countries.

Take SDG 2, on ‘zero hunger’. in Germany, the ‘prevalence of undernourishment’—an indicator of progress towards this goal—has been at the acceptable global value of 2.5 since 2000, whereas in Mali it was last measured at 9.8. This makes a nonsense of the UN cliché on the goals’ aim to ‘leave no one behind’; declaring zero hunger an inalienable human right would make more sense.

Peace and stability are obvious preconditions for any development. Peace has prevailed in mainland western Europe for almost 80 years but since the formal decolonisation of African countries the continent has remained plagued by conflicts. The socio-political realities in Sudan (where the UN refers to ‘a crisis of epic proportions’), Ethiopia (where ‘mass killings continue’) and drought-stricken Somalia (where famine was ‘narrowly averted’ last year), are hardly conducive for a transition to sustainability. At least 15 armed conflicts across the continent currently disrupt development.

Setting a single, universal goal to attain global peace and stability would have been better for the world than 17 failing SDGs. The political scientist Frank Biermann and his team at the GlobalGoals project, funded by the European Union, who will provide scientific contributions to the Summit of the Future, argue that ‘the current framework needs to be strengthened in a way that commits high-income countries to stronger and more concrete action’. That requires a recognition by politicians in industrialised countries that private capital often stubbornly flows to conflict-free regions—so their ‘commitment’ must be of public monies.

Grave and universal

The implications of continuing, unsustainable development are grave and universal, as evident in the increasing social blights linked to climate-change impacts in Africa and Europe. Politics must be the unequivocal force behind the need to live sustainably. Yet politicians assume private money will fill holes in public budgets, though most of the SGDs, such as ‘good health and wellbeing’ (3) and ‘no poverty’ (1), are not aligned with the pursuit of private interests.

The mid-way point results for implementation of the SDGs warn of a world in danger. Politicians, particularly from industrialised countries, attending the Summit of the Future must overcome their inertia. Assuming greater responsibility, and recognising that the SDGs imply fundamental social changes, requires public solutions outside a market logic. The future of humanity ought not to be determined by investment returns but premised on our collective will and courage to uphold the dignity and sanctity of life worldwide.