World leaders have officially agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aka Global Goals. Are they useful and thus worthy of support? That’s a question without a straightforward answer.
In total there are 17 goals with 169 targets, all of which should be met by 2030. Some have suggested that this agenda is too broad and therefore unmanageable. Yet problems such as poverty, environmental degradation and violence are multidimensional, complex and often interrelated, and it is primarily a lack of political will that prevents transformational change when it comes to these problems.
It’s worth noting that a number of important issues in relation to the SDGs have yet to be decided. For example, indicators to measure progress on the targets have still not been developed (and even well-designed indicators require appropriate data to be collected). Similarly, the system for holding governments to account has not been fully agreed upon.
What one can say is that the SDGs are a lot more comprehensive than their weak predecessors the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It’s also true that the process for developing the SDGs has been considerably more participatory than the process for developing the MDGs, and the new goals apply to all countries, unlike the MDGs, which rather patronisingly largely focus on the poorest countries.
But I do possess real concerns about the SDGs. In many respects, the story of the struggle to get tackling economic inequality into the SDGs explains how and why the SDGs are problematic. As it happens, David Cameron is a central character in this story.
Back in July 2012, the UN Secretary General appointed a High Level Panel to produce the first major official report on what would eventually become the SDGs. This Panel was co-chaired by the leaders of Indonesia, Liberia and the UK. Just under a year later, it was reported that Cameron was using his position to argue that the SDGs shouldn’t commit to reducing economic inequality (i.e. disparities in income and wealth).
I believe that the level of economic inequality in the world is morally wrong. Moreover, an incredible amount of research points to the damage caused by high levels of economic inequality. Firstly, a range of social problems, including those that relate to education, health and crime, are worse in more unequal countries. Secondly, economic inequality severely undermines democracy, as acclaimed studies from both the UK and the US demonstrate. Thirdly, even the International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – hardly the most progressive institutions – assert that less economic inequality is beneficial for a country’s economic prospects.
So I’d argue that Cameron had neither ethics nor evidence on his side. And ultimately world leaders have agreed that the SDGs should include a goal to ‘reduce inequality within and among countries’. However, the goal is far from strong, and this is most likely due to the resistance of influential people such as the Prime Minister.
The first part of the goal on inequality says that by 2030 the poorest 40% of the population should grow their incomes at a rate higher than the national average. This is ok in itself but the danger is that the incomes of the richest, particularly the top 1% (and even the top 0.1%), will continue to surge ahead. As for the remainder of this goal, the wording is often pretty vague (some of the other SDGs are also unclear). In addition, the goal appears to ignore wealth inequality, and it isn’t clear on the need for redistribution. And here is the wider problem: many of the SDGs water down or simply disregard genuinely important issues. One can reasonably assume that, in many if not all cases, this was done to placate reactionary forces, just as it was in the case of economic inequality.
It’s worth noting that there are those who criticise the SDGs from a broader perspective. They lament the SDGs’ failure to challenge the deeper political and economic narratives at play. While I believe that there’s only so much a framework like the SDGs can do in this regard, I agree that the SDGs could’ve done a better job of engaging with power imbalances and confronting conventional thinking. The difficulty is that different people will have different views about what this would mean in practice. For example, although the SDGs that relate to economic growth are clearly unsatisfactory in my view, I also disagree with those who denounce all forms of economic growth.
At the end of the day, the SDGs are here to stay. I advocate supporting them and criticising them depending on the context. In a sense nothing has changed: overcoming injustice remains the real goal. I hope that we can have an inclusive conversation on what exactly that means and how to achieve it.
Sunit Bagree is ACTSA’s Senior Campaigns Officer