What Remains of the Sustainable Development Goals?

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015 was the result of a diplomatic process begun at the beginning of the century — the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and defined as targets to be achieved by 2015. These were specifically focused on poverty reduction and human development in developing countries.

It was at the so-called Rio+20 conference in 2012 that the SDG process was launched as a way of overcoming the twofold failure of the MDGs, whose deadline was fast approaching (even though extreme poverty had indeed been reduced), and of the conference itself, which, like Copenhagen in 2009, failed to make any significant commitments to combat global warming. Compared with the diplomatic process launched in Rio in 1992, when the Brundtland Report introduced the notion of sustainable development, the SDGs reflected a twofold paradigm shift:

• A break with the concept of development aid, which was still that of the SDGs, based on the idea of development in the South catching up with development in the North. The climate crisis implied breaking away from the dominant industrial development model and looking for a new development model on a global scale that would give equal weight to the economy, human and social development, and institutions.
• A break with the fiction of international treaties as decisions to be implemented by the governments of the signatory states. In both their development process and their implementation trajectory, the SDGs adopt the principle of the ‘collective impact strategy’: all the stakeholders (governments, economic players, civil society represented by non-governmental organisations) are brought to the table, common objectives are defined and then each stakeholder is left to pursue these objectives according to its own field of competence, governance and methods of action, by filling in a battery of 169 indicators designed to measure the results of collective action on an annual basis.

As the operational deadline for the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 approaches, it seems clear that the famous goals will not be achieved, not by a long shot. There are three main reasons for this, relating to the consistency of the objectives themselves, geopolitical circumstances and the leadership of the approach.

As Dominique Bourg has been hammering home since 2012, and on several occasions in the columns of Futuribles, the concept of sustainable development is not… sustainable, for reasons that are neither economic nor political, but ecological, i.e. physical. What we call development in the industrial world implies a consumption of resources, a destruction of natural environments and biodiversity, and a level of greenhouse gas emissions that are quite simply incompatible with the regeneration and habitability of the planet. The trajectory of human life on a planetary scale can no longer be thought in terms of development, but must be considered in terms of resilience, sobriety and therefore, strictly speaking, ‘sustainability’. It should be remembered, however, that from the outset, sustainable development has not been an oxymoron, but rather the search for an equitable compromise between the inherent limits on the availability of resources and the right to development of poverty-stricken populations. The dynamic of sustainable development is based on the premise that this compromise can result from the convergence of a multitude of initiatives informed by the strategic framework of the SDGs.

Perhaps this is reason enough not to give up on the benchmark, despite its acknowledged weaknesses. In many parts of the world, there is a multitude of players who have already made it the beginning of a common language; why not re-articulate these 17 words to make them the banner of a common cause?

N.B.: this article has been translated from French by DeepL, and revised by the author and Futuribles.