At the moment, consensus is lacking on how the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can succeed in environments of disparate governance, especially given the history of failure of almost all states to adopt a human rights-based approach, as well as to foster genuine participatory politics and ‘direct democracy’ alternatives. (Fortunate Machingura)
A quick look back
1. In the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) we did engage, yes …and, by so doing, we fell into a trap.* The burning question thus now is: What room is there left for us now and what spaces do we not want to miss that are opening for us for immediate, more effective action?
*: Take an example: Did the MDGs change trends in child mortality? In all truth, there has been little assessment of the role the MDGs have had in progressing this international development indicator. A 41% reduction in the under-five mortality rate worldwide from 1990 to 2011 has been reported, as well as an acceleration in the rate of reduction since 2000. But why did this occur? Results analyzed for all developing countries indicate that it is not due to more healthcare or public health interventions, but is driven by a concomitant burst of economic growth. Although the MDGs are considered to have played an important part in securing progress against poverty, hunger and disease, there is very little evidence to back up this viewpoint. A thorough human rights-based analysis of the successes and failures of the MDGs is therefore necessary (and sadly still missing and/or ignored) before embarking on a new round of global goals as those proposed in the SDGs. (Declan French)
2. To some, it would be more appropriate to refer to the MDGs as the Millennium Development Wishes. Why? Because, other than taking the human rights (HR) dimension for granted, the agreement left entirely unspecified who was to do what. So, if no clear division of labor is specified for achieving the SDGs, there is a real danger that any failures will be blamed on the poorest countries. This is exactly what happened during the MDGs era. (Thomas Pogge)
Cynics will say that international agreements are unenforceable; they are right
3. Agreements such as the SDGs or the Climate Agreement appeal to humanity’s better angels, but are subjected to national self-interested demons. The question is whether they strengthen resolve, clarify pathways, spur global responsibility, promote initiatives or end up more likely providing the free riding opportunities that so often characterize global cooperation which is big on lip service and short on binding commitments. (Jeffrey Sachs)
4. We know: Cheery declarations are made in pompous summits knowing that the same are just the beginning of a process, when future progress is actually what it is all about. (But we are told we must be ‘optimistic’…). This is primarily because those political/diplomatic actors ooze confidence that markets will play a forceful positive, correcting role. But as long as these mostly Northern leaders expect the market to do its job, citizen disaffection will (and does) grow and human rights violations will (do) continue unabated.** (Roberto Savio)
**: Be reminded that it is all about social justice, not about an artificially and maliciously thrusted-upon-us ‘market justice’. (Claudia Gonzalez)
5. The prestigious journal The Lancet went so far as to say: “The SDGs are fairy tales dressed in the bureaucratese of intergovernmental narcissism, adorned with the robes of multilateral paralysis and poisoned by the acid of nation state failure. Yet this is served up as our future”. (Richard Horton) Ultimately, the SDGs only reflect the consensus by193 nations in a way that ‘balances’ interests in an exercise of compromises that reflect the perennial uneven power imbalance reality in a world of haves and have-less (or have-nots).
6. The problem is that the SDGs are toothless, and are undermined by their devotion to growth along present models. The SDGs explicitly and unapologetically refuse to take the needed steps to address the fallacies of this model and are careful to (not unintentionally) shun needed deep, structural transformations. Public interest civil society and social movements are clear that the SDGs represent neither the people’s ambitions nor their HR concerns. They are not just inadequate, they are dangerous; they will lock in the global development agenda for the next fifteen years around a failing economic model that requires urgent and deep structural changes. (J. Hickel)
7. 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)
• The GDP may well have grown in many places, but inequality grew as well. Some member states agreed to the SDGs agenda reluctantly, and in subsequent negotiations there has been a lot of push-back and backtracking by them. For instance, financing negotiations seem to be going back to business as usual. Actually, if some of what is on the table right now goes through, it will create direct obstacles to achieving the SDGs. (Barbara Adams)
• Furthermore, quite a few UN panels are being steered by corporate interests and are not-a-bit inclusive. (Sandra Vermuyten)
• Laws of countries, from the U.S. to European countries, are giving more rights to corporations than to human beings. (Chee Yoke Ling)
• Justified apprehensions are coming back as a deja-vu: Some countries did not start implementing the MDGs in earnest until 10 years after the goals were adopted. If no action is taken in the first 1,000 days of the SDGs –in other words, in the first three years up to September 2018– then governments and all of us (more than) risk leaving people behind and failing to achieve certain goals altogether (mostly those related to HR!). The world simply cannot afford delays that threaten the chances of achieving the SDGs. (ODI)
***: If we are talking about slogans, this one must be linked with another slogan, namely ‘nothing about us without us’. Moreover, the strong and urgent commitment to ensure that ‘no one is left behind’ can only be realized if equally ‘no HR is left behind’. (Stefano Prato)
8. Let me share with you what I think are Thomas Pogge’s iron laws about the SDGs:
• The approved SDGs discourse really only invites an incremental approach to overcoming deprivations: “We have a certain distance to traverse, and so we set off toward our destination and approach it step-by-step”. The HR discourse, by contrast, suggests that the corresponding violations must be ended right away (or in an agreed, binding progressive realization plan).
• In fact, the reductions seen during the MDGs would have been much more substantive if the income gains had not been so heavily concentrated at the very top of the global income distribution. It is indisputable that, to put it mildly, governments have failed to ‘spare no effort’ to reduce severe deprivations during the MDGs period.
• In UN-speak, ending deprivations right now means (a) that we must aim for the full eradication of these deprivations, (b) that we ought to approach this objective in a continuous manner (without backsliding) and (c) that we may take as much time as we deem reasonable to complete the task progressively, but decisively, if needed.
• Neither the fact that hunger and poverty were even worse in earlier times, nor the anticipated fact that undernutrition and poverty will one day be eradicated, must be allowed to detract from the moral HR imperative so softly expressed in the SDGs. (The eradication of slavery and of severe poverty are a morally relevant comparison…The worldwide eradication of severe poverty is possible today, so we must eradicate it now, as fast and as thoroughly as we possibly can. The absolute same was true for the abolition of slavery: acting could not wait).
• The progressive realization of HR notwithstanding, once we recognize a HR not to be enslaved, we must not make a 15-year plan aiming to halve the number of slaves or aiming to reduce floggings by half. (Similarly, once we recognized a human right violation to be done away with, we must not make a 15-year plan “to halve the killing rate at Nazi concentration camps…”).
• Never in human history has severe poverty been so easily and completely eradicable as in the present period. (Reads like a cliché, but is’nt) That we continue to perpetuate it through national and supranational institutional arrangements that are massively skewed in favor of the rich shows the great moral and political failing of our (and past!) generation(s), of governments and citizens alike.
• The morally and politically required response is to recognize these deprivations as massive HR violations that we must stop, at once, by implementing institutional reforms at the national and especially the supranational level.
• At the very center of the SDGs is the Right to Development and the internationalization of responsibilities pertaining to HR.
• If the world’s most influential agents had been held sufficiently accountable for what they owe toward making sustainable development work, the concepts of plain level partnerships and universalism would have been more meaningful, rather than what they are now likely to become: a smokescreen for perpetuating global inequalities.
• All we have is a long list of Sustainable Development Wishes along with the pious hope that economic growth and charitable activities will move things far enough in the right direction.
• The full realization of HR requires a massive roll-back of international and intra-national inequalities, which the SDGs fail to call for, much less demand. There is no explicit reference to reducing inequality within and among countries outside of Goal 10 of the SDGs.
• Moral concerns are easily dismissed as naïve in the context of the jungle of international relations where each state prioritizes its own interests, power and often survival.
• As international rules and policies gain in influence and increasingly reflect the interests of global elites, economic inequalities mount and the HR, needs, interests and voices of those rendered poor are increasingly marginalized and easily disregarded.
• We tend to look at the trends, and invariably find that things have become better than they had been before. But such comparisons are wholly out of place when HR are the issue!
• In this regard, the SDGs fail by shielding the world’s most powerful agents from any concrete responsibilities for achieving the new goals, when, given their wealth and influence, they ought to be taking the lead in providing the needed resources for sustainable development and in implementing systemic institutional reforms that address the root causes of poverty.
• The assembled governments in Geneva and New York wished that the HR of those rendered poor would be realized, but they put forth no plan for contributing to this realization, thus effectively entrusting this task to the vagaries of charity and economic growth.
Just consider
9. To be fair, the SDGs would need to commit to setting and measuring poverty at closer to U$7.40/cap/day (the ethical poverty line, adjusted to 2011 Purchasing Power Parity), and hunger at closer to the normal physical activity threshold by gender and age (or, alternatively, using a survey-based methodology). Anything less than this will result in a misleading assessment of the problem and in inaccurate reports about progress. The SDGs will thus need to include monitoring mechanisms to prevent the kind of statistical manipulation that has compromised the MDGs. Basically, the SDGs want to reduce inequality by ratcheting the poor up, but while leaving the wealth and power of the ‘global 1%’ of the richest intact; they cynically want the best of both worlds. They irresponsibly fail to accept that mass impoverishment is the product of extreme wealth accumulation and overconsumption by a few that, along the way, bring with them processes of marginalization, extraction, and exploitation. You cannot solve the problem of poverty without challenging the pathologies of accumulation. (J. Hickel)
10. Some states, foreign aid and private philanthropy actors are already ‘cherry-picking’ goals and targets in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and are totally overlooking the HR perspective. Rather than treating all 17 Goals in the 2030 Agenda on equal footing to protect the most marginalized and vulnerable populations and to improve their situation, we are already witnessing some goals getting more support than others. Addressing individual SDG goals (17 of them) and targets (169 of them) is not intended to replace international HR obligations. (Stefano Prato)
11. In the same vein, the private sector’s contribution to the SDGs agenda must take place with due regard to its responsibility to do no harm and to respect HR, i.e., their agenda must, in no way, become the-perfect-excuse to give less priority to their binding human rights obligations.**** (UNHCR)
****: For instance, as regards the right to food, the SDGs unavoidably will give priority to the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Initiative…. (http://scalingupnutrition.org/) This can realistically be foreseen and little we can do about it despite the many-times-pointed-out conflicts of interest the role of the private sector plays in it and in the forthcoming Decade of Action for Nutrition. The question is: Do we really, politically, want this? Will it open space for HR? Funds will go to Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and multistakeholder platforms and we can guess that this will not necessarily open spaces for HR.
Only participation and accountability from below (bottom-centered) will make the SDGs relevant for all.
12. The effective implementation of the SDGs depends on it being consistent with the overarching commitment to HR. This includes accountability, non-discrimination and equality, notably gender equality –and clear consideration of the primacy of claim holders demanding States’ uphold their HR obligations. (Stefano Prato)
13. What we further need is to tackle head-on the irrationality of endless growth, pointing out that capitalist growth –as measured by GDP– is not the solution to poverty and the ecological crisis, but rather the primary cause. And we need a saner measure of human progress –one that gears us not towards more extraction and consumption by the world’s elite, but towards more fairness, more equality, more fulfilled HR, more wellbeing, more sharing –to the benefit of the vast majority of humanity. The SDGs fail us on this. They offer to tinker with the global economic system in a well-meaning bid to make it all seem a bit less violent. But this is not a time for tinkering. (J. Hickel)
14. The 2030 Agenda –as the SDGs are also, in my view, distortingly addressed as– is already experiencing significant attempts to coopt and ‘domesticate’ civil society’s engagement by fully aligning its agenda to that of the SDGs and undermining any attempts to promote (valid) dissent. This calls for a more sophisticated strategy of resistance and proactivity, one that engages with the process without accepting its limitations and pushes for a level of ambition that is far beyond the currently framed objectives and targets. The current means of SDGs implementation will simply not provide the necessary instruments and resources to advance the aspirations and the depth of transformation that progressive public interest civil society and social movements need to foster. This fundamentally means that these groups cannot limit themselves to the monitoring of the currently framed SDG targets and financial commitments made (or not made) so far, as these are largely inadequate (even if achieved) to support the extent of economic, social and political changes that we collectively aspire to. Hence the need to establish a far more ambitious progressive agenda that raises the bar with respect to the existing level of commitment. (Stefano Prato)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com