Millennium Development Goals – P2P Foundation

My one problem with the Sustainable Development Goals that drives me crazy

Tegan Tallullah — Sun, 21 May 2017 08:00:00 +0000

No more poverty, no more hunger. Protect the forests and oceans, clean renewable energy for all. World peace. This isn’t a John Lennon song, it’s UN policy.

All these and much much more make up the Sustainable Development Goals – the globally agreed wish list for saving the world and building a better future. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not alone. Their public outreach leaves a bit to be desired. In any case, they make up the UN’s development agenda up until 2030.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to what the SDGs are, what’s good about them, and my one problem with the SDGs that actually drives me crazy every time I think about it.

What are the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (aka SDGs or Global Goals) follow on from where the Millennium Development Goals left off, in 2015. They will guide the development priorities for the UN and its agencies, the aid budgets of most wealthy nations and major development charities up until 2030, when it’ll be all change all over again. Here’s the full list:

Goal 1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2 End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3 Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4 Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7 Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8 Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9 Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
Goal 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

As you can see, they’re… Let’s call them ‘stretch targets’.

The SDGs. Image credit: Reedz Malik

Others more cynical than I have called them a utopian wishlist more suited to a letter to your fairy godmother than a serious policy statement, or words to that effect. But you know what they say about ambitious goals: even when you don’t hit them you still end up doing pretty well. And to be honest, aren’t these exactly the things we should be aspiring to?

What is amazing about the SDGs

Before I get on to my one glaring problem with the SDGs, I want to take a moment to consider what’s so good about them, particularly in comparison to the old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

They apply to the whole world

.No country has locked down 100% of this stuff. The UK certainly hasn’t. These goals are for every country to work towards, and kisses goodbye to the patronising old development model of ‘developed’ countries that have apparently got it all worked out (yeah, right) and ‘developing’ ones who need help.

They’re holistic

.They cover a lot of ground because they understand that poverty and wellbeing are complex, multi-faceted and relate to a lot of different things at once. I like the way the goals are not split up into environmental, social, economic, but instead many of the goals cover all three aspects of sustainability. Goodbye silos.

They’re inclusive and collaborative

When the goals were being drafted, diplomats from each country got to contribute and they also engaged with charities, scientists and academics for their contributions. You may not have been consulted or even told about them until now, but compared to other high-level global policy, this was very inclusive.

My one problem with the SDGs

So the SDGs sound wonderful, right? They do. Really, they do, and overall I think they are a fantastic thing that will do a lot of good in the world. But there’s one problem that I think people should be aware of (and I want to get it off my chest).

One of the goals is liable to contradict the others. Yes there will always be trade-offs and that’s understandable, but in my opinion, one of these goals sticks out like a sore thumb because it just doesn’t fit.

Goal 8 calls for ‘decent work and economic growth’ and I take issue with it for several reasons.

What’s wrong with Goal 8?

Problem 1: it’s a means not an end

This may just be me, but I can’t stand it when you have a list of things and one doesn’t fit with the others. Like if you had a whole list of your favourite books and one of the list items is ‘Waterstones book token’. What the hell is this?! A book token isn’t a book, it’s just a way to get more books! Goal 8 is kind of like the book token here. It isn’t a goal in itself, it’s at best a means to reach other goals. As this article on postgrowth.org puts it: “Growth that is at best a means to reach certain welfare goals is redundant as a development goal in itself.”

Problem 2: Growth doesn’t necessarily benefit the poor

Problem 1 on its own would just be a grammatical pet peeve. What makes it problematic is that it isn’t even a very effective means to achieve the other goals. In fact sometimes it can do the opposite. The most important goal of all the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty. The thinking is obviously that economic growth helps with this – but that isn’t actually necessarily true. Of all the wealth produced by growth since 1990, the poorer 60% of the world population only received a pitiful 5% of it. And that’s not even the poorest, that’s over half of all humanity. The very poorest people who need it most got such a tiny sliver it’s almost nothing. Growth is a very inefficient way of helping the poor out of poverty because the vast majority of the wealth goes to the rich, a slice goes to the middle class and the poor just get some crumbs. So, Goal 8 could easily conflict with goals 10 (reduced inequality) and Goal 1 (no poverty).

Problem 3: Growth probably isn’t compatible with a safe climate

There’s no hard evidence that economic growth is compatible with the kind of emissions cuts we need to keep climate change to below 2 degrees. The only time global emissions went down is when we had the 2008 global crash and recession. People get all excited about decoupling when they see that the UK’s economy grew while our direct emissions went down, but that figure for direct emissions doesn’t include ‘embedded emissions’ in consumer goods, and it doesn’t include aeroplane flights or international shipping. We have seen that emissions can hold steady while growth rises, but we need emissions to go down, and fast, and we just don’t know that that can happen with growth. If not, then we need to prioritise climate action (Goal 13) rather than growth (Goal 8).

Problem 4: it shouldn’t be 2 in 1, it’s already an important goal

Unlike the others, goal 8 is a double whammy: decent work and economic growth. They obviously thought those were a natural pair, but they could easily be in conflict, as a company that abuses its workers could make more profit and so contribute more to economic growth. Well-paid workers contribute more to growth than poor ones, because they have more spending power, but healthy workers could contribute less to growth than sick and stressed ones because they won’t be paying for medicines and therapies. All this is because of what a strange and unhelpful metric GDP growth is. Decent work – good jobs that are useful and fulfilling with fair wages and rights – is already a very important goal. Why stick something else in there as well? The way it stands, Goal 8 could even come into conflict with… Goal 8.

Problem 5: it gives companies/governments a loophole to keep doing the same

As well as being unnecessary and counterproductive, the growth part of goal 8 also gives regressive companies and countries a loophole where they can say ‘we’re working on the SDGs!’ when they’re doing anything that will boost growth, even if it goes against the other goals. A study by Ethical Corp found that Goal 8 was in the top 3 of the SDGs that corporates are most keen to engage with. I recently saw a major brand boasting on their website that they were making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 8. Like… Every other company out there.

The SDGs also sidestep deep systemic issues (but that’s understandable)

The Sustainable Development Goals were never going to be perfect. They have flaws because they are trying to make progress from within the capitalist system we have. They sidestep fundamental causes of poverty like structural readjustments, unfair debts, unfair trade deals, and of course the history of colonialism. They seek to bring the poor and ordinary up, but don’t dare to mention the elephant in the room: that the elite have too much. None of this is surprising and I don’t think the drafters of the SDGs or the UN can be blamed for that. They weren’t going for a radical political statement that would be divisive. They wanted to get everyone on board. Like sustainable development itself, it’s very hard for anyone to disagree with the SDGs as a whole. That means that as well as the UN, charities and governments, they have also had excellent buy-in from corporates, with the likes of Unilever, Coca Cola and H&M using them to inform their ‘corporate responsibility’ and sustainability work. 46% of corporate reps said their business would engage with the SDGs, according to a survey by Ethical Corp. Their engagement is worth a little watering down, given their immense scale.

Conclusion

The SDGs represent real progress. They give everyone across sectors a common language for sustainable development and gets everyone on the same page. They represent a clear roadmap on where we collectively want to go from here. The progress they aspire to can be best realised if we ignore growth and work on the things that matter – which are summed up perfectly with all the other goals.

Photo by Davezilla was taken

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The Sustainable Development Goals: A Siren and Lullaby for Our Times

Stacco Troncoso — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 07:45:42 +0000

Continuing our critical coverage of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, we are happy to share this article authored by P2P Foundation partners Thomas Pogge and Alnoor Ladha which was originally published at Occupy.com

Most people haven’t heard about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And if you have, there’s probably a rosy halo emanating from the deep recesses of your subconscious. If so, the UN, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, ONE.org, Save the Children and other counterparts of the charitable-industrial complex have done their job well.

On the eve of the Sept. 25 UN summit – when the new SDGs, a set of 17 goals and 169 targets, will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – there is a battle for mindshare over the merits of this plan. The SDGs are important because they are a once-in-a-generation declaration of what the world’s power elites are willing to publicly commit. In fact, they are the only shared international agreement to address global poverty. As such, they capture many of the central assumptions and norms that underpin the global political economy.

Keep Calm and Carry on Shopping

At first glance, the rhetoric of the SDGs seems irresistible. They talk about eliminating poverty “in all its forms, everywhere” by 2030, through “sustainable development” and even addressing extreme inequality. None of which we would argue with of course. But as with all half-truths, one just has to dig beneath the surface for motivations to unravel.

Recent research by economist David Woodward shows that to lift the number of people living under $1.25 a day (in “international dollars”) above the official SDG poverty line, we would have to increase global GDP by 15 times – assuming the best-case-scenario in growth rates and inequality trends from the last 30 years. That means the average global GDP per capita would have to rise to nearly $100,000 in 15 years, triple the average U.S. income right now. In a global economy that is so inefficient at distributing wealth, where 93 cents of every dollar of wealth created ends up in the hands of the richest 1%, more growth is only going to enrich the rich while destroying the planet in its wake.

Of course, it is completely possible to achieve the necessary goal of reducing poverty, but not through the UN’s growth-based, business-as-usual strategy. Poverty can only be eradicated by 2030 if we address two critical issues head on: income inequality and endless material growth.

First, we must address the enormous inequality that has accumulated in the last 200 years. The richest 1% of humanity will very soon own over half of private wealth. And indeed, large increases in the socioeconomic position of the poorer half can be achieved through very modest inequality reductions. For example, a hypothetical doubling of their share of global income, from 4% to 8%, even if it came entirely at the expense of the richest 5%, would only reduce the incomes of these top earners by less than 10%.

The SDGs inequality goal (target 10.1) allows current trends of income concentration to continually increase until 2029 before they start to decline. This totally ignores the structure of our economic system which creates inequality in the very rules that enforce and articulate the current distribution of wealth.

The other essential task is for the world’s nations to adopt a saner measure of human progress; one that gears us not towards endless GDP growth based on extraction and consumption, but towards the wellbeing of humanity and our planet as a whole. There are plenty of options to choose from, all of which have been ignored in the SDGs. Instead, Target 17.19 says only that they will, “by 2030, build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that complement GDP.” In effect, the SDGs perpetuate severe poverty and leave this fundamental problem to future generations.

Magical Accounting

Much of the credibility of the Sustainable Development Goals rests on the story that their predecessors – the Millennium Development Goals – have, on the whole, been a success. They have, so we are told, halved poverty since 1990.

The clear implication is that the basic model of GDP growth is working so well that we should trust it to finish the job. And whereas it’s certainly true that progress has been made on some problems in some places, many researchers, including the authors of this article, have shown that this does not add up to overall success. In fact, the progress has been so uneven, and the core data has been so massaged over the years, that it’s more accurate to say that the claim to have halved poverty is more magical accounting than verifiable fact.

For example, shortly after the MDGs were agreed, the UN moved from an aim of halving absolute numbers to halving the proportion of people in poverty. Then, they went from halving the proportion of impoverished people globally to just focusing on the developing world. They even went back in time to change the baseline year of recording, from 2000 back to 1990, which conveniently allowed them to co-opt all of China’s gains in lifting people out of poverty in the 1990s, despite the fact that China’s policies bear little resemblance to the UN’s prescriptions. And probably the most brazen of chimeric acts: they even changed the definition of poverty, moving their international poverty line (IPL) multiple times.

It seems the MDGs are a virtual Potemkin Village, stage managed to keep the true poverty trends from being exposed. For the successor goals to have any credibility, they must adopt a more realistic measure of poverty, actually address the root causes, and guard against the kind of statistical manipulation that so blighted the MDGs.

The Siren’s Call

The obvious question is why the UN and others in the development industry would want to deceive the public, and arguably themselves.

At one level, the objective of the UN, big foundations and other non-governmental organizations is to convince us of their competence, thereby creating enough support and interest to justify their existence and make them seen as worthy guardians of global issues – but not create so much political buoyancy and public attention that they would have to address the rules of the global operating system that has so benefited them. All the structural incentives are there to manipulate the figures and market themselves as a success.

Then, of course, there is the influence of the corporate-political elites who both fund most of these organizations and require the “good news” trend lines to defend and maintain the status quo. Add to that the personal and professional ambition of individuals within some of these institutions and you have the perfect conditions for lies and half-truths to win the day. In this way, the SDGs serve as both our siren and our lullaby.

We must understand that the development sector has two contradictory roles: they tell us that there are critical global issues to which we must pay heed, but then ensure us that they have the issues under control. This is why the UN, the World Bank and others have been so determined to convince us that they are competent and have the right plan. In fact, the UN has reached out to Madison Avenue in the hopes of marketing the SDGs, which they have positioned as the “world’s biggest advertising campaign.” They have even created a child-friendly propaganda kit for schoolteachers. If they can’t actually solve global problems, they can at least make us, and our children, think they’re solving them.

As the fig leaves are being ornately decorated, it would serve civil society well to remember that we cannot fix deeply entrenched social problems with the same logic that created them in the first place. Poverty, inequality and climate change are natural outcomes of our current set of economic rules. More growth in the absence of structural change is only going to worsen the lives of the world’s majority. But in the topsy-turvy world of Western development, facts are malleable, history is irrelevant, public perception is the playing field, self-interest is the foundation of benevolence, and GDP growth will lift all boats. It’s time to separate the siren and the lullaby.

Thomas Pogge is the founding Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. @ThomasPogge

Alnoor Ladha is the Executive Director of The Rules and a board member of Greenpeace International USA. @AlnoorLadha

You can stand with Naomi Klen, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Medha Patkar, Thomas Pogge, Alnoor Ladha and others by signing their shared Open Letter to the United Nations.

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