Older, not wiser

It may not have felt like it at the time – and there are obvious exceptions – but globally, on average, the first few years of the life cycle of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were the good times. Read through the 2020 SDGs report, and the progress from 2015 to 2019 is clear:

• a quarter of the world’s poor escaped poverty
• the number of people with the internet on their mobile phone increased from one in two to four in five
• while deforestation continued at an alarming rate, that rate went down by a fifth. 

Progress toward achieving the SDGs was slow – in many cases too slow – but it was steady.

That brings us to the moment when the “Decade of Action” was supposed to start. Instead, Coronavirus happened and Russia invaded Ukraine. The long-term consequences of the short-term decisions of politicians lucky enough to hold office in more straightforward times started to manifest. We began to feel the consequences of climate change. Supply chains strained and at times collapsed. The world was already a precarious place, and these events – not bolts from the blue but rather the results of that very precarity – sent us over a tipping point. This challenged us to survive as best we could through a series of interrelated crises. Governments – at best – scrambled to respond to what was urgent and had no time to consider what was merely important.

Progress toward the SDGs then slid backwards. Global poverty rose for the first time since 1998, wiping out four years of gains in a single year . Progress on most other indicators flatlined and in many cases reversed. The end result is that 83% of the targets contained within the SDGs are not on track to be met by 2030. Broadly speaking we are back to where we started in 2015. Only now, we are nearly ten years older and have burned through two-thirds of the time we had given ourselves to create a safer, fairer, more sustainable world.

Meanwhile the vulnerability created by the absence of such a world grows more obvious by the day. Significant numbers of people are rejecting not only the institutions that have let them down but also the idea of progress itself. If preventing climate catastrophe or increasing international cooperation cannot be guaranteed not to interfere with individual interests, then election-tipping numbers of people are voting instead to live on a more dangerous, more polluted planet.

I should tell you something you don’t already know.

The way ahead

This latest publication from SDG Action does just that, and reminds us of things it is too easy to forget. Namely, that comprehensive analysis of the problems exists, and in many cases the solutions are known and viable.

Thus, we have Li Junhua on how actualizing the Addis Ababa Action Agenda will fund the Goals. Paul Akiwumi explores how being a landlocked least developed country can be made into a blessing rather than a curse if borders can be transformed from barriers into points of connection. Meanwhile, by applying the framework of gender, we can uncover critical insights into the international financial system, the links between conflict and hunger, and acute crises such as Gaza.

But if the analysis is in place and the solutions are known, why is there no action?

In most instances, the solutions are not one-size-fits-all, but take different forms in different places. This does not fit comfortably with the prevailing forms of mass communication that favor simple ideas that are then branded as unequivocally good or evil by competing political tribes.

Nor are there any silver bullets, even the most promising proposals come with caveats, as we explore. Carlos Maria Correa explains the potential of the Global Digital Compact to reduce inequalities between countries, and to improve education, health, and agriculture in particular. Paul Jasper identifies ways that artificial intelligence can further accelerate SDG progress. However, these solutions bring risks and can potentially have the opposite impact. The rush to digital solutions needs to be tempered with measures to protect against digital colonialism, which raises the question of digital sovereignty. In turn, as Arindrajit Basu sets out, this sovereignty can be a powerful tool to either promote or suppress human rights. These technologies, which create trillions of dollars in value, are entirely reliant upon rare-earth metals from some of the world’s poorest states. Sara Nicoletti explores how rooting out corruption and the exploitation it enables can allow that value to unlock those countries’ potential.

In terms of understanding how action can be motivated, again, the gender lens is useful – as Lopa Banerjee explains, much of the world’s power is vested in “imperfect, shambolic democracies” where the many can, on occasion, pool their influence to overrule the mighty. This pressure is becoming ever more essential – as only when elites are compelled to will they look beyond their own self-interest (or indeed give any thought whatsoever to the legacy they leave to future generations.)

For all their flaws, international institutions enable that process. They provide a more level playing field upon which it is harder – though never impossible – for the world’s most powerful states to either shirk responsibility to their own citizens or ignore the express wishes of global majorities.

Beyond the talking shops

Recent years have seen a proliferation of processes to debate development in international institutions. We have the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, the SDGs Summit, and the Bridgetown Initiative. Increasingly, we have the G7 and G20. And we have the UN’s Summit of the Future – itself merely the latest iteration of the Secretary-General’s strategy of perpetuating repeated cycles of reports, consultations, and summits in the hope that this may eventually spark genuine action.

There has been some fretting that these processes are rivals to one another, and that the more pro forma ones may draw much needed attention and political capital away from those more likely to have an impact. I feel these worries are overstated. Each of the processes consists of more or less the same people (and always the same interests) having more or less the same conversations in slightly different rooms. It would be naïve therefore to expect any of the mechanisms themselves to be transformative. But what each of them does is provide a venue at which transformative change can be achieved if sufficient power can be concentrated with sufficient focus. That could happen at any of them, or in a rolling cascade through all of them – it scarcely maters which slogan is written on the roller banner at the entrance to the room.

The last few years have seen a sharp uptick in what the feminist scholar Sara Ahmad calls “nonperformative speech”: conversations convened because rehashing the conversation is an alternative to actually doing something about the issue. Any (and all) of the mechanisms we have discussed are at high risk of proving nonperformative, but none of them have to be. We already have our agenda: the SDGs. We also know how to achieve it, as you will read in this collection of articles. Now, it is time to perform.