Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Global Governance Challenges

Simon Dalby, Susan Horton, Rianne Mahon, Diana Thomaz, Simon Dalby, Susan Horton, Rianne Mahon, Diana Thomaz, Simon Dalby, Susan Horton, Rianne Mahon, Diana Thomaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book draws on the expertise of faculty and colleagues at the Balsillie School of International Affairs to both locate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a contribution to the development of global government and to examine the political-institutional and financial challenges posed by the SDGs.

The contributors are experts in global governance issues in a broad variety of fields ranging from health, food systems, social policy, migration and climate change. An introductory chapter sets out the broad context of the governance challenges involved, and how individual chapters contribute to the analysis. The book begins by focusing on individual SDGs, examining briefly the background to the particular goal and evaluating the opportunities and challenges (particularly governance challenges) in achieving the goal, as well as discussing how this goal relates to other SDGs. The book goes on to address the broader issues of achieving the set of goals overall, examining the novel financing mechanisms required for an enterprise of this nature, the trade-offs involved (particularly between the urgent climate agenda and the social/economic goals), the institutional arrangements designed to enable the achievement of the goals and offering a critical perspective on the enterprise as a whole.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals makes a distinctive contribution by covering a broad range of individual goals with contributions from experts on governance in the global climate, social and economic areas as well as providing assessments of the overall project – its financial feasibility, institutional requisites, and its failures to tackle certain problems at the core. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of international affairs, development studies and sustainable development, as well as those engaged in policymaking nationally, internationally and those working in NGOs.

1 Global governance challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Introduction

Simon Dalby, Susan Horton and Rianne Mahon

Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were officially adopted in September 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly. With 17 goals and 169 targets, they are, by any standard, an ambitious list of aspirational statements. This attempt at agenda setting for the globe is not one that sets out to maintain the status quo, to manage existing practices and procedures better, or to co-ordinate incremental changes. As the title of the official United Nations agenda document signals, it aims at nothing less than “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.

The theme of transformation is important in what follows because the agenda laid out by the goals clearly requires fundamental changes to numerous societal practices and rapid innovation across diverse societies. It is not, as much of the United Nations Security Council activity frequently is, simply responding to events to mitigate suffering or to attenuate conflict. It is about much more than traditional themes of international relations, the rivalries of great powers, the dangers of conflict, the co-ordination difficulties of international trade, or the protection of human rights. This is an altogether more ambitious set of aspirations and one that, because it tackles so many facets of human life, is more properly considered a matter of global governance rather than the more narrowly focused “high politics” of diplomacy, competition, and rivalry in traditional international relations. As such this volume addresses these questions explicitly in terms of governance broadly construed.

The Goals require co-ordination and administration across sectors and societies presenting those charged with its implementation unprecedented governance tasks over a 15-year period. It is heady stuff full of universal ambition, but its implementation will depend on states in very different contexts, tackling these issues in their own particular ways. As the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, finalized three months later, emphasized, universal aspirations are to be accomplished in particular ways in the specific situations that applied to particular states (Falkner 2016). As such, given the lack of overarching authority, enforcement mechanisms, or legal arrangements in the Goals program, governance is more about legitimacy, accountability, the mobilization of technical capabilities, and popular support than it is about traditional modes of state command and control.

While the role of states is obviously a key part of the process, the larger co-ordination, monitoring, reporting, and implementing functions will, the Goals’ authors hope, incorporate more actors into a revitalized “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development”. Led by activists and functionaries in numerous institutions – the modern missionaries (Freston, Chapter 10) – operating at multiple scales, such partnerships are to advocate and innovate to transform societies through sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Given the multitudinous technical processes and academic disciplines involved, the administrative tasks are enormously complex. Nor is there reason to believe that the Goals are necessarily compatible with one another. The governance challenges include continuing political contestation over priorities and identification of appropriate indicators. Moreover, funding new initiatives is, in light of the history of inadequate supply of foreign aid and investment from developed states (see Horton, Chapter 13), a problem for many of the Goals.

Nonetheless, for all the difficulties with the formulation and the implementation of the Goals, they represent a major milestone in the emergence of what is now properly called global governance (Zürn 2018). Putting them in this context requires first looking back over the last couple of decades and their emergence from the prior programs of development. Some of the difficulties in previous arrangements were the stimulus for the process which led to the SDGs. This introduction also offers a broad sketch of the difficulties of implementation of the SDGs to identify some of the dilemmas addressed in greater detail in later chapters. Given the huge agenda not all aspects of the SDGs can be investigated within the covers of one volume. What this book does offer is a series of chapters focused on important aspects of the SDGs. It does so, reflecting the inter-disciplinary ethos of the Balsillie School, with its emphasis on tackling global governance issues from a variety of intellectual viewpoints.

Beyond the MDGs

The SDGs follow the original Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the choice of governance technique – agenda-setting through selection of a set of common goals and targets, supplemented by indicators to monitor progress. Yet the SDGs go well beyond the MDGs in important respects. While the MDGs focused on the Global South, the SDGs are universal. As Razavi (2016, 28) notes,

The 2030 Agenda’s universal application means that it is not merely “our agenda” for “them”.… Rather it is a global template for a world that is increasingly integrated through flows of finance and people, in which poverty, deprivation, inequality … and unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, are as much a concern in the rich advanced economies as they are in the developing world.

More specifically, the MDGs aimed to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty, defined as a daily income less than US$1.25 a day. This absolute measure offered a narrow definition that fails to take into account other important aspects of well-being (Deacon 2014, 27), while also ignoring the very real, if “relative”, poverty experienced in wealthier parts of the world. Although SDG 1 retains this absolute definition of poverty, its second target introduces a relative definition (“to reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children … living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions” [UNGA 2015, 15, emphasis added]). SDG 1 also reiterates the commitment to implementing the global social protection floor undertaken by UN agencies, member states, the development banks, and key international NGOs in 2013.¹ More importantly, the SDGs go beyond a focus on poverty to include a stand-alone goal on the reduction of inequality within and among countries: in other words, the SDGs promise to tackle the unequal distribution of resources globally and at the national scale. Whereas the MDGs effectively sidelined the Education for All (EFA) agenda that focused on education quality, early childhood education, secondary education, adult literacy, and attention to marginalised and vulnerable populations (Fukuda-Parr, Yamin, and Greenstein 2014, 110), SDG 4 embraced the EFA coalition’s position (Unterhalter 2019). More broadly, whereas the MDGs focused on a limited set of social priorities, the SDGs aim to encompass a richer definition of social goals and to simultaneously address economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development on a global scale.

The adoption of such a potentially transformative global agenda was not, however, a foregone conclusion. The initial vision for post-2015 was more along the lines of an MDG + 1 (Fukuda-Parr and Hegstad 2018). The 2010 High-Level Plenary of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on the MDGs had requested the Secretary General to initiate thinking on a post-2015 development agenda. This launched a process involving 90 national consultations, 11 thematic consultations, an online platform (The World We Want 2015) and MYWorld, a survey that included people from over 190 countries (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018, 82–83). The Secretary General also established a UN System Task Team and a High-Level Panel on Post-2015, co-chaired by the then-prime minster of the UK, and the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia. While the Task Team’s report, “Realizing the Future We Want for All” (UNDESA 2012), highlighted a number of the MDG’s lacunae,² the High-Level Panel’s report, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies Through Sustainable Development (2013), favoured an approach that built on the MDGs (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2019).

While the post-2015 process was unfolding, preparations were being made for the UN Conference on the Environment (Rio + 20). In light of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Colombian Paula Caballero Gómez³ persuaded the organizers to opt for “an open, inclusive and transparent” process (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018, 40). The Open Working Group (OWG),⁴ established by the UNGA in 2013, was charged with developing a sustainable development agenda through discussions with member states and representatives of the nine major groups.⁵ It was only at the UNGA Special Event, September 2013, that the two processes were merged and the OWG’s approach for negotiating the goals was adopted. This meant that the SDGs would be developed through dialogue that included a range of non-state actors, in marked contrast to the MDGs, which emerged from a narrow technocratic process that reflected donor country priorities (Fukuda-Parr and Hulme 2011). The choice of this channel also favoured the adoption of the principle of universality.⁶

Forces favouring an MDG + 1 agenda continued to try to influence the outcome. For instance, the African Group expressed concern that the SDGs would divert resources from the MDGs, which had still to be met especially in the least developed countries. The UN Secretary-General and the president of the General Assembly also feared that the MDGs could be submerged in the SDGs (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018, 98). Among others, the Australia, Dutch, and UK troika favoured continuing the MDGs’ focus on the eradication of extreme poverty. In addition,

some developed countries were concerned about the SDGs being a “universal” agenda. They were not comfortable with the United Nations prescribing what they had to accomplish, and they much preferred the existing system, where they engaged in development activities in developing countries and were not held accountable by the United Nations for sustainable development at home.

(Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018, 111)

Throughout the discussions, one of the important issues of contention was whether and how to incorporate inequality. In Latin America, the “pink tide” of leftist governments had made tackling inequality a key objective, while the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, including the protests of groups like Occupy Wall Street, helped shed light on deepening inequality in the North. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) two reports – Growing Unequal: Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries (2008) and Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (2011) – provided documentary evidence supporting the protesters’ claims as did Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014). Addressing the root causes of inequality was also seen as a central task coming out of the Rio + 20 meetings. What drove the point home for the OWG, however, was Joseph Stiglitz’s keynote address at the 2014 round table, which highlighted the fact that in the US 95 per cent of the income gains since 2009 had accrued to the richest 1 per cent (Kamau, Chasek, and O’Connor 2018, 94).

A standalone goal on inequality within and between countries remained contentious until the end, with China and the G77 in favour and many OECD countries opposed (Fukuda-Parr 2018).⁷ While the post-2015 consultations had underlined the importance of tackling vertical (the concentration of wealth at the top) and horizontal (exclusion of the poor and vulnerable from developing their capabilities) inequality, the High-Level Panel’s final report focused on the latter by embracing the concept “leave no one behind”.⁸ In addition, the World Bank succeeded in making its definition of inequality – focused on the absolute income growth of the bottom 40 per cent while ignoring the increased concentration of wealth in the top 1 per cent – the target for SDG 10.1. This bias is reproduced in the choice of indicators for Goal 10, none of which capture trends in the distribution of income within and between countries (Fukuda-Parr 2019).

Inequality may have been the Achilles’ heel of the MDGs. Few can argue against a goal of reducing poverty, and reducing poverty is a key aim of some international organizations, for example “(t)he overarching mission of the World Bank Group is a world free of poverty” (World Bank 2013, 9). Despite criticism, and the rather arcane way that the $1.25-a-day poverty yardstick was developed, the MDGs were accompanied by other dimensions of poverty reduction, exemplified by the improvements in primary school enrolment, and reductions in child and maternal mortality rates as well as stunting (United Nations 2015). At the same time, it proved extremely difficult to reach the “Bottom Billion” (Collier 2007) who are in conflict situations, fragile states, or highly marginalized in more stable countries.

Reducing inequality is tricky enough within countries due to opposing interests, and international governance aimed at doing so internationally is extremely weak. Overall, global inequality among individuals decreased slightly (or at least did not increase) over the early period of the MDGs according to Lakner and Milanovic’s (2013) painstaking analysis of data for 1988 to 2008. This was largely due to substantial growth in both India and China which were categorized as low-income countries at the start of this period. However, this growth was accompanied by (possibly even at the expense of) virtual stagnation of incomes of those at the 85th percentile in the global distribution of income, largely blue-collar workers in the high-income countries.

A growing body of research (particularly by the World Inequality Lab participants, see, for example, Alvaredo et al. [2018]) suggests that income distribution within the high-income countries has worsened over the past two decades, particularly at the very top. Some of this is affected by a lack of political will domestically, by permitting devices such as trusts and by not utilizing instruments such as inheritance taxes (Piketty 2014). Global competition has also led to a “race to the bottom” in terms of declining taxes on corporations and reduction in income tax rates on high earners. This is also exacerbated by technological developments which have allowed international corporations to utilize loopholes in international policy co-ordination on taxation and financial regulations. The FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) and other similar beneficiaries of a globalized, tech-intensive system utilize perfectly legal disjoints between national policies to, for example, headquarter their global international property rights in Ireland, and by means of devices such as the “double Irish” and “Dutch sandwich” to move profits to Bermuda and similar jurisdictions (Kahn 2018). Initiatives are underway such as BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Sharing) by the European Union (OECD 2018), and tig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Global governance challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: introduction
• 2 Food system lessons from the SDGs
• 3 From MDGs to SDGs: health slips in global priorities
• 4 Gender equality from the MDGs to the SDGs: the struggle continues
• 5 Gender, labour migration governance, and the SDGs: lessons from the case of Nepal
• 6 The problem with international migration and sustainable development
• 7 SDGs and climate change adaptation in Asian megacities: synergies and opportunities for transformation
• 8 Climate change, security, and sustainability
• 9 Development as a determinant of climate risk and policy challenge
• 10 Religion and the Sustainable Development Goals
• 11 The ecological limits of the Sustainable Development Goals
• 12 Development as usual: ethical reflections on the SDGs
• 13 Financing the Sustainable Development Goals: beyond official development assistance
• 14 Sustainable finance and the SDGs: the role of the banking sector
• 15 Global governance and the Sustainable Development Goals
• Index