Why the sustainable development goals are failing
We've got more Internet: hardly a sparkling endorsement of the world’s 15-year grand plan to solve the world’s injustices.
I’ve got nothing against the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). End poverty, hunger and inequality? Of course. Educate more people, especially girls. Act on climate and energy. Grow poor economies and promote peace. Work together out of a sense of common responsibility? Laudable, all of it.
Also pie-in-the sky without a strategy. Most of the goals were always unrealistic, leading William Easterly in 2015 to say the SDGs should stand for “Senseless, Dreamy, Garbled”.
Extreme poverty, hunger, ill-health and education have worsened since the goals launched nearly a decade ago. Many others are lagging, like targets on decent work and economic growth. Increased vaccine coverage? Don’t even start.
Of the 169 targets under the 17 goals, the only ones on track are those on mobile and internet access. No country will meet the SDGs by 2030, still less the world.
It’s not that the aims were bad — who wouldn’t want an end to Malaria? The problem was that the list was concocted as part of a top-down, arbitrary and haphazard process that lacked strategic thinking and accountability, conceived in a bureaucracy far away from the places where it was supposed to work. Whisper it loudly, but the SDGs weren’t designed at all.
The SDGs were the result of years of wrangling at the UN in the mid-2000s by a horde of well-meaning interest groups, UN agencies, non-government organisations and states each campaigning for their own cause.
The powerful ones got heard; the smaller ones didn’t. All this donkey-trading ended with a General Assembly decision adopted in 2015 that reflects a huge range of aspirations but no coherence and few thoughts on how to achieve those aspirations.
Several of the objectives reflect this lop-sided process. Separate goals exist for “life below water” and “life on land” because each had a strong, well-intentioned lobby that demanded its own target. The the two should have been combined into a single goal on life above and below water.
Another target is to play more sport. I love doing sport but I don’t think it merits an official global objective on a par with child poverty.
Why weren’t some deeper goals given cross-cutting priority — like the need for stronger growth in poor economies? Better education, for example, needs higher government revenues, which come from a growing economy. Faster economic growth helps poor countries deal with their own problems with less outside support.
Many of the critical problems afflicting developing countries were left unaddressed, like the seemingly perpetual debt crisis, most recently seen in the defaults of Suriname, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Ghana and Ethiopia. Without tackling the root causes of economic malaise, social targets are much harder to achieve.
Aid, too, was mentioned in only one target, despite its critical importance for economic transformation. Official development assistance has stagnated at $287 billion, or about 0.287% of the world economy.
(For reference Elon’s recent US$56 billion pay packet is the size of Uganda’s GDP and higher than that of 103 other countries, bringing Musk’s net worth to US$180 billion. Long live the Republic of Musk).
Why don’t substainabilty and climate run across all the goals instead of mostly being confined to goals 11-15? Was it because some lobbyists or governments didn’t want “their” own goals diluted, or, worse, were in hock to the polluters and carbon-emitters?
Cobbling together a longlist of 17 targets simply isn’t how change happens. It’s no good asking the 100 companies that commit three-quarters of all carbon emmissions to stop it because a UN resolution says so. Their multi-billionaire owners will ignore you.
Most corporations didn’t want to be held accountable, despite what they said. The crafty ones knew that they could carry on business as usual as there was no mechanism to hold them to account; the goals had no legal bearing so no international court could enforce them.
Few states, either, are likely to bend to the pleadings of an international bureaucrat. They’ll rightly pursue their own targets, sometimes even responding to what their people want. If you’re going to tackle a priority, don’t stick a load of foreign lobbyists in a room and ask them what to do. Design the goal and solution yourself.
Throwing water on a fire to make it burn brighter
Defenders of the goals say things like:
This lag stems in part from the slowing of the global economy by shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and international conflicts, which weren’t anticipated in 2015 when the goals were agreed.
International conflicts. Not anticipated. Which planet were the SDGs designed for? Saturn? This was in the wake of the Iraq war. 2014-15 featured conflicts in Gaza, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and Yemen.
As for the surprising idea that the global economy could be slowed by shocks, the SDGs were finalised at a time when the world was still reeling from the global economic crisis, arguably the biggest financial calamity the world has ever known.
As we are finding out, and should have known then, the world economy is more crisis-prone than Joe Biden at a lectern. Decades of globalisation threw us all into the same basket. Conflicts and crisis produce unknowable outcomes that throw rigid goals off track.
Yet despite all this evidence the same defenders of the goals double down on the approach:
we call on member states of the United Nations, in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future in September, to adapt and extend the SDG framework to 2050
That’s like throwing water on a fire to get it to burn brighter.
Compiling a multi-decade wishlist fails to acknowledge that the world is part of a complex, adaptive system in which unknown events can prove decisive. More of the same won’t work.
In this unstable environment, strategy, not fixed principles and goals, is the way to get things done. Respond to events rather than pre-establish tight targets and try to work toward them come what may.
The French football manager doesn’t say to Kylian Mbappé ahead of every game: always make a diagonal run in the 18-yard box in the 20th minute and head the ball into the goal, aiming for a final score of 3-0.
The manager forms a team strategy for each game and relies on the skill and judgement of players to act according to the situation, aiming to win however he can.
Adaptability and responsiveness would mean a smaller set of goals that countries deemed useful, prioritising those suffering more from climate breakdown and poverty, and perhaps divided into those appropriate for global north and south.
Governments should be responsible for genuine strategy — meaning “if this, then that” — not a blanket of unattainable ideals.
Ambition is helpful, but unrealistic targets mean that focus wanes when progress starts flagging. Targets must be hard to achieve but doable.
As a keen runner I once ran a 2-hour 36 minute marathon. I then failed to hit my next target of 2 hours 30 but enjoyed the pain of trying. It would have been ridiculous to imagine myself rivalling, say, Eliud Kipchoge, the greatest of all time and the only man to break two hours.
Similarly it’s bonkers to pretend we’re going to “eradicate poverty” — especially in the global economic system that we currently have. Maybe try and half it, or empower governments to do so.
I’m not against high ambition, but if there’s to be a set of world targets it needs to be narrowed down, made realistic and defined much more tightly, prioritising the deeper and cross-cutting themes like climate breakdown and global economic inequality that have potential to address other ills.
Governments and regions need to be freed — or even encouraged — to design adabtable strategies that can react quickly to events, prioritising a small set of levers that catalyse wider aims.
We need to empower civil society and governments to tackle the causes that they see fit. This takes better management of the international economy and the environment, as well as proper funding.
Annual development assistance worth a third of one percent of the world’s economic ouptut is a pittance. It’s not much more than the wealth of the world’s richest family. A small tax on the wealth of these new mega-titans could give people in poor countries the resources they need to design their own development strategies.
Many of the things the rich world could do don’t even cost money. It is in the hands of the rich world to tackle the climate devastation caused by the world’s biggest polluters and carbon-emitters. A just climate transition and a less volatile world economy would similarly empower the majority world.
More decades of unrealistic goal-setting would only spread discouragement, ushering in an epoch of isolationism and insularity which leaves the world’s disadvantaged to their own fate just when a redoubled effort to tackle the horrors of poverty, ecological breakdown and exclusion is growing critical.
Instead of looking back in five years and murmering “Sorry, Defeated. Gone,” it would be better to be Strategic, Disciplined and Generous.