Jane Silloway Smith –
Since the UN announced their new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 broad goals with 169 specific sub-targets for the world to chase after for the next 15 years at the end of September, I have seen many critiques pop up.
The Economist called them ‘worse than useless,’ while Bill Easterly, a pre-eminent development expert in the US and one whose work I pulled upon frequently in my own research, has quipped that SDG should stand for “senseless, dreamy, garbled.”
And yet, I cannot help but be inspired by the SDGs.
Pursuing predecessor
The SDGs were conceptualised a couple of years ago as the follow-up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – those eight goals for tackling extreme poverty signed on to at the turn of the millennium by most of the countries of the world.
The signatory nations were given 15 years to achieve the MDGs; a timeframe expiring in December.
Thankfully, the UN did not just reset the clock and give the world another 15 years of the MDGs. Instead, they pulled together the largest cross-section of public, private, and civil-society officials, experts, and organisations to draft a document that is more inclusive, more comprehensive, and more sensitive to national and cultural nuance and priorities than its MDG predecessor.
Global relevance
Unlike the MDGs, which were targeted at solving problems in developing countries with the aid of developed countries, the SDGs see development as something that all countries could do with. The very first goal is to “End poverty in all its forms everywhere.” That is, eradicate extreme poverty (those who live on less than US$1.25/day), as well as “reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.”
Shining the light not only on extreme poverty, which, for the most part, is confined to developing countries, but also on national poverty in countries like New Zealand demonstrates a great leap forward in high-level thinking on international development. Developing countries aren’t the only ones with ongoing problems.
Setting agenda
Finally, and perhaps most encouragingly, the SDGs acknowledge that countries need to be in charge of setting the agenda for their own development. The SDGs are not meant to be a universal plan for one set way of developing, but rather an internationally agreed upon list of characteristics and goals for what sustainable development should look like: it should ensure access and opportunity to its population; it should respect its environment; and it should have a special care and concern for the vulnerable, the marginalised, and the poor.
How countries get there and what they prioritise is up to them, and that is as it should be.
Sure, as a practical plan for real, concerted action, the SDGs fail.
But as a set of aspirations that describe what we’d like to become, agreed to by all the countries in the world, they would do.
Jane Silloway-Smith is Research Manager at Maxim Institute, Auckland
