[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This HR Reader is about how the SDGs left HR wanting. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–Not only congratulatory speeches, but repeated (stale) promises.
A bit of history
1. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015, combined social and environmental goals, including even a chapter on inequality. However, it has to be noted that this chapter in the global development phase repeated the goals already mentioned at the beginning of the 1970s, i.e., that the poorest 40% of the global population experienced(s) faster growth than the rest of society. The SDGs hinted inequality had to be reduced looking only downwards. The rich did not have to contribute. “Don’t look up!”* This is where we stand today, i.e., the world is not in good shape.
*: The SDGs simply do not ‘look up’: They advocate fighting inequality at the bottom, not at the top. (Francine Mestrum)
2. Social development did not significantly take off at all in the past decades. Without drastic action, for nearly half of the world, it will take decades to eradicate extreme poverty and more than a century to eliminate poverty. In other words, the SDGs are seriously off-track. (Add to all this the unbearable debt burden of countries rendered poor, diminishing aid budgets and slow growth and it is clear that, once again, world development is far behind schedule with declining chances to catch up).
3. Moreover, during the SDGs discussions back in 2015, the World Bank posited that reducing poverty in low- and middle-income countries would seriously harm the environmental agenda, because it would contribute to rising CO2 emissions (how cynical without denouncing the greater emitters…).
4. Note that since way before 2015, many UN and social movements conferences proposed and launched several good ideas and initiatives that, when finalizing the SDGs were, time and again, blocked by a powerful group of countries rendered rich. (F. Mestrum)
5. Bottom line here, we cannot afford high level meetings that only recognize and assess problems (the WB is good at it), but fall short on binding solutions. Global leaders simply must match their words with actions that enshrine justice, accountability and equity at the heart of global responses. Without bold revisions, the SDGs more than risk becoming a document of diluted ambition rather than a true roadmap for action. (Alison Cox et al)
Some more pointed critiques UNRISD made at the time (2015)
6. What is unlikely to make it into the SDGs is:
- Indicators used were the ones in fashion at the beginning of the SDGs era with human rights (HR) not getting their fair hearing when the good thing about HR is that they are here to stay whether the SDGs drafters believed in them as pivotal to the development process or not.
- The SDGs were a politically negotiated consensus that included no built-in significant enforcement mechanism.
- When talking about the SDGs, one should have talked about what must be done today to arrive where we wanted to be by 2030. This should have compelled the drafters to adopt and apply the HR framework.
- Given the strong resistance by states to any true accountability mechanisms in Agenda 2030, the SDGs will hardly lead to states aiming to achieve HR goals. The SDG indicators proposed do not include HR-meaningful indicators.
- What the SDGs were not doing is measuring the economic disparity reduction ratio from 2015 to 2030.
- In short, the SDGs did/do NOT really heed HR; they dehumanized processes and, instead, went for quantifiable results.
7. It is not that development policy-makers do not admit that the current global development agenda (Agenda 2030), and its 17 sustainable development goals, are off-track five years into the deadline. (IBON) But the SDG playbook (and the hyped and peddled Green Deal) inevitably bump–up against the limits of our planetary ecosystem and mostly the limits of the capitalist economy. These two will do too little to redress structural global injustices and will perpetuate post-colonial inequalities. (Ron Labonte)
Disclaimer: Forecasts are dangerous. Many ‘known unknowns’, particularly geopolitical ones, besides ‘unknown unknowns’ lurk on the horizon. (Jim O’Neill)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
— What does it really mean to ‘leave no one behind’, as the SDGs proclaim? Communities are not forgetfully left behind! It is the neoliberal policies that systematically exclude them. (Warda Rina) Is it leaving no one behind or pushing or keeping people behind? The question left unanswered in the SDGs is how we can reach those in the back first. (WEMOS)