Improving the Sustainable Development Goals

Strategies and the Governance Challenge

Lars Niklasson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429631672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Improving the Sustainable Development Goals evaluates the Global Goals (Agenda 2030) by looking at their design and how they relate to theories of economic development. Adopted unanimously by the member states of the United Nations (UN) in 2015, the goals are remarkable for the global commitment on a set of targets to reach by 2030, but also for the lack of a strategy of implementation. The choice of appropriate action is handed over to individual governments, some of which are limited by their lack of resources.

This book explores how implementation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) can be developed, especially in developing countries. The content, strengths and weaknesses of the SDGs are critically examined, alongside their relationship to ongoing academic research. The authors also investigate the actions of governments over the past three years by looking at the national strategies they have presented at annual meetings of the UN High-Level Political Forum.

Improving the Sustainable Development Goals takes a critical but constructive approach, pointing out risks as well as possible remedies. The SDGs are seen as an opportunity for a global conversation on what works in solving some fundamental problems relating to poverty and environmental degradation. With the inclusion of a chapter by Tobias Ogweno, former member of the Kenya's UN mission, this book will appeal to all those who are interested in policy analysis with a focus on development issues.

1
Global goals in search of strategies

We live in a time of increasing global commitments to deal with common challenges. In 2015, the nations of the world made two major agreements. In September 2015, they agreed to a set of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), also referred to as Global Goals or Agenda 2030 (UN 2015a). In December of the same year, they signed the Paris Agreement for action against climate change (UN 2015b). The two agreements are linked to each other, and they were both made within frameworks provided by the United Nations (UN). The SDGs came about as a replacement of the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), while the Paris Agreement was made within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Both processes trace their history to the global meetings in Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992 and other global meetings organized by the UN.

It is remarkable that the agreements were made but, at the same time, they are surprisingly weak. Agreement came at the price of very unspecific commitments for the individual signatories. There are no ways to sanction individual governments, except for “naming and shaming”. How strong this will turn out to be depends on the level of popular support for the agreements and the demands on national governments by their citizens, in democracies as well as under authoritarian regimes.

The agreements are examples of a more general situation in international politics. One aspect is the question of finding out what to do: How can broad agreements be implemented by national governments? Another aspect is the problem of compliance: Will national governments comply with the agreements, or will they look for ways to avoid doing what they have committed to? This book will treat the SDGs as a case of policy implementation, where the basic question is what governments can and should do to implement such a grand but vague concept as sustainable development.

A global agreement

On September 25, 2015, 193 heads of state and government agreed to a set of 17 SDGs as part of a UN declaration with the impressive title “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (UN 2015a). The declaration is a global commitment to deal with very fundamental problems related to poverty, health, education and the environment. It is a commitment which almost everyone around the world can agree with, even though it may require changes in our lifestyles.

On the one hand, the global goals are a remarkable success, in the sense that there is actually a global agreement on a challenging ambition. On the other hand, the goals don’t say very much about what must be done, by whom and when. Some see this lack of an explicit strategy as a strength, leaving room for national adaptation, but there is also a risk that compliance will be weak and that difficult issues will be avoided. There is now a need to produce national strategies, which means there is also a need to elaborate on the barriers and drivers, which the national strategies need to take into account. The purpose of this book is to contribute to this elaboration.

The complexity of the goals makes them interesting to study. There are big challenges in the design of strategies as well as in their implementation. Some of the challenges have to do with tensions within and among the goals themselves, while other challenges have to do with weak instruments to bring about the desired state of affairs.

A global policy for sustainable development raises hopes about such diverse ambitions as avoiding global warming, maintaining biodiversity and ensuring good living conditions for all. There are tensions and risks in these goals – for example, the conflict between raising the living standard of the poor and reducing the impact of humans on the environment. It seems that economic growth is a necessity in the first case and a fundamental problem in the second case. How can they be reconciled?

A further risk is that important trade-offs are made by distant elites, which could trigger opposition and resistance among populations across the globe. The global agenda might lead to a downgrading of democracy and a loss of legitimacy. At the same time, there is some hope that the need for joint action across the globe may lead to a greater appreciation of democracy as a way to work out acceptable compromises, taking into account the interests of all nations and their citizens. The SDGs touch upon the complex issue of what global governance should be, in terms of content as well as form of making collective decisions (Harman & Williams 2013).

Underneath the SDGs are important questions about the way we understand the global challenges and the way we think about their solutions. We live in times of remarkable economic development and a drastic reduction of poverty in countries like India and China. We also live with environmental degradation and the threat of escalating climate change. The contradictory images can be scrutinized with the help of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences to show what we have to choose between.

This chapter will give an introduction to what the goals are and what some of their problems are. The following chapters will elaborate on the need for research and what the research contribution is.

The global agreement at the UN was the latest in a long series of global summits and policy statements to deal with two of the largest challenges facing humanity, poverty and environmental degradation. The first high-level conference was held in Stockholm in 1972, followed by conferences held in Rio (1992), Johannesburg (2002) and Rio again (2012).

The SDGs are to a large extent an elaboration of the previous MDGs, which were in place for the years 2000–15. Some of the differences are that there are now more goals, that they apply to more countries and that the national governments have been more involved in the design of the new goals. I will come back to the differences between the SDGs and the MDGs, and why the goals were adopted in the first case.

Eradication of poverty in reach

Two circumstances contributed to the agreement on the SDGs in 2015. One was that the eradication of poverty seems to be within reach. This is based on the remarkable reduction of poverty over the past 25 years. Since 1990, the number of people in extreme poverty has been halved, from around two billion to less than one billion, counting poverty as living below $1.90 (originally $1.00) a day (UN 2015c). There is hope that this trend can continue and that all people will have better personal living conditions if good policies are pursued.

The reduction of extreme poverty was achieved while the global population grew, especially in poor countries, which makes it even more remarkable. However, it is mainly due to the development of China and India, not the result of a general improvement in all countries. This shows, on the one hand, that it is possible to transform very poor countries and bring better living conditions to a large part of the population. On the other hand, it implies questions about what other countries could do to deal with poverty and other social issues, as well as what China and India could do to reach the remaining poor and – more fundamentally – what the global community can and should do to assist.

Eliminating poverty would, of course, entail a major transformation of the world. Poverty is shorthand for a number of serious problems. It is closely related to hunger and disease, as well as to a lack of water, sanitation and basic services, such as education and health care (UN 2015c). Poverty is related to bad living conditions in the countryside as well as in city slums and refugee camps. Poor areas often lack the means for economic upgrading by farmers, such as electricity and organized transport (UN Millennium Project 2005). In the worst cases, there are also elements of discrimination on religious and other grounds, making it even more difficult for the poorest people to break out of their situation.

Environmental urgency

The other circumstance which contributed to the agreement is a sense of urgency in the environmental area, especially to deal with climate change and with environmental degradation in general. Rapidly growing countries like China and India are now being hurt by pollution, which calls for national as well as global action. Some of these issues are truly global in the sense that every polluter must take action if the goals are to be reached – for example, to avoid global warming.

The environmental area covers several specific problems (Speth & Haas 2006). One has to do with energy consumption, where fossil fuels are the major cause of climate change. There is a need to find alternatives to oil and coal before developing countries become dependent on these resources. Another major concern is biological diversity, which is a problem on land as well as in the oceans, where certain species are reduced as an effect of pollution. Ecosystems are changing in ways that create further problems.

We are reminded of these problems, for example, through so-called eco-labels, which have become commonplace as a way to inform consumers that products like clothing, flowers, fish and paper have been produced in acceptable ways, not contributing to the environmental problems. Environmentalism is becoming a major lifestyle, especially in developed countries.

Ambitious and flexible goals

Unlike previous policies, the SDGs apply to all countries equally, developed countries as well as developing countries. This underlines the message that we are all affected by the problems, while most of the specific issues vary across countries. More importantly, the resources to deal with the problems vary across countries, as well as the experiences from past policies. National governments have pursued a multitude of policies, which provide a large set of experiences to learn from.

The global agreement means that differences of opinion have been put to the side. Some of these differences will surface in the years to follow when governments design policies and prioritize action. Creativity will be needed to renew national policies and to make important trade-offs.

Important for the agreement was also the limited content of the global policy, i.e. that it is an agreement about goals and measurements but not about plans or strategies. The SDGs are on the one hand very ambitious, but on the other hand, they are leaving major issues open. They make up a flexible policy, which means that there is also a risk that the goals won’t be reached. The flexibility provides an opportunity for a national variety of policies as well as for global learning about ways to approach the issues. More emphasis needs to be put on learning from experience to find out what works under various circumstances.

To achieve sustainable development

The two issues of poverty reduction and limiting environmental degradation are core elements of the concept of sustainable development, which has given a name to the SDGs (Sachs 2015). Sustainable development is one of the most commonly used terms in our times and has become a darling of the political debate, especially in developed countries, where it is often used as a synonym for environmentalism. The complexities of the concept are not always taken into account.

A political compromise

There is a long academic discussion about the problems with the concept of sustainable development, which is basically that it mixes several ambitions and even hides the need for a trade-off. One of the most critical versions of this critique describes the concept as a way to handle conflicts within the UN. Steven Bernstein (2001) argues that it was adopted to deal with the conflict between the north and the south after the Stockholm conference in 1972. To put it briefly, the north wanted to focus on environmental problems while the south wanted to focus on the problem of poverty. It was desirable for both to reach a consensus on a common goal, rather than clashing over contradictory ambitions.

The concept of sustainable development was developed in the 1980s – for example, by the World Commission on Environment and Development, the so-called Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987), named after its chair, the Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The concept was developed to provide the two sides with a shared goal (Bernstein 2001). This common goal was adopted at the UN conference in Rio 1992 and subsequently elaborated at later conferences.

Critics like Bernstein argue that this is a compromise which hides the need for debate on the fundamental issues. The key terms indicate that sustainable development has to do with the development of something in a sustainable way, but it doesn’t say what should be developed or how it can be sustainable (Kates, Parris & Leiserowitz 2005). It is reasonable to expect the conflict to surface in the implementation of the SDGs.

“Sustainability”, i.e. that something can be sustained, implies a long-term view, where such things as side effects are taken into consideration. “Development” is more difficult. It is easy to think of economic and social development, while environmental concerns are often seen more as restrictions on development, rather than a separate kind of development.

An early interpretation was that sustainability has to do with “intergenerational justice”, preserving something for future generations (WCED 1987: 8). This can apply to natural resources (the environment), but not to poverty, which is rather a lack of something. The concept of intergenerational justice also opens up a complicated discussion about what resources may be used, transformed, wasted, created or improved over time.

A later interpretation, adopted by the Johannesburg conference in 2002, is that sustainable development is shorthand for a mix of economic, social and environmental concerns (Sachs 201: 5). In this interpretation, sustainable development is to take all three aspects into account in a balanced way. However, the three concerns are different. The three dimensions can be interpreted as implying contra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Global goals in search of strategies
• 2 A research gap on strategies and implementation
• 3 Refocus from the goals to learning over time
• 4 An inherent strategy in the goals
• 5 Alternative strategies for sustainable development
• 6 The governance challenge
• 7 National strategies of implementation
• 8 Conclusions of the study
• Index