Accelerating the United Nation's 2030 Global Agenda: Why Prioritization of the Gender Goal is Essential
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Claire Somerville,Paula Hepp,Bettina Borisch |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12721 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
Accelerating the United Nation’s 2030 Global
Agenda: Why Prioritization of the Gender Goal
is Essential
Paula Hepp
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit€
at Munich
Claire Somerville
Gender Centre, The Graduate Institute Geneva
Bettina Borisch
Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva
Abstract
In September 2015, Member States of the United Nations (UN) committed to work towards a transformative policy agenda
consisting of 17 ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. However, implementation progress
has been slow and at the current rate the SDG agenda will fall far short on delivery of its 169 targets. In order to accelerate
progress at global, national and local levels it is necessary to prioritize goals and targets. One standalone SDG that is also
cross-cutting and universal is Goal 5: Gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls. In this article we assemble
evidence to make the case that decisively (and politically) placing the gender equality goal (SDG5 and its 9 targets) together
with 54 gender indicators across all goals as the priority focus of the 2030 agenda is the most impactful way to ensure mea-
surable achievements are made across the agenda to deliver on all 5 pillars of the global commitment: namely People, Planet,
Peace, Prosperity and Partnerships.
Prioritization is essential for the SDG agenda
The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) is an ambitious strategy to transform our world into
a more equitable, peaceful and healthy planet. It is the
world’sfirst truly global policy, complete with targets, indi-
cators, implementation plans; monitoring and evaluation
mechanisms. Ratified by 193 Member States of the United
Nations, the 2030 agenda commits nations to working
together towards a shared vision based on a human rights
approach to sustainable development. The 17 goals are
articulated as indivisible, universal and integrated (UN,
2015a): a positive step towards a holistic approach to tack-
ling global challenges. All goals are presented as equally
important and therefore no goal is prioritized. However, we
argue that without some form of prioritization it is already
quite clear that this global agenda of 17 goals, 169 targets
and the 230 individual indicators is unachievable.
By the close of 2018, 111 Voluntary National Reviews of
SDG progress at country level have been completed and
reviewed by the High Level Political Forum. The available
data are clear and calls for more discussion on strategies for
implementation are being made at the highest UN levels
(UN DESA CDP, 2018): In short; at this current rate the
world’sfirst global strategy is set to fail. Ant
onio Guterres,
Secretary General of the United Nations, already acknowl-
edges that the challenge is great and implementation too
slow (UN, 2018).
The modus operandi of the SDGs and current evaluation
frameworks examine the agenda goal by goal, target by tar-
get, indicator by indicator with cross cutting values such as
‘leave no one behind’and an overarching imperative to
stimulate action along the 5Ps: People, Planet, Prosperity,
Peace and Partnership. Critics, even early on, raised concerns
that target-by-target approaches to implementation would
result in duplication, resource wastage, unintended and
even perverse effects (Nilsson et al., 2016). Feminist critiques
include concerns that targets which contain most transfor-
mative potential will be neglected through selectivity, sim-
plification and national adaptation resulting in a dilution of
the ambitions of the agenda (Fukuda-Parr, 2016).
Even if such a target-by-target approach were theoreti-
cally possible, the evidence from annual progress reports
(UN, 2018; World Bank, 2018a) is clear: there is an urgent
need to change the way we have been proceeding so far in
order to utilize limited resources more effectively and effi-
ciently. It is therefore clear that the complimentary and mul-
tiplying interrelations between each of the goals have to be
Global Policy (2019) 10:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12721 ©2019 The Authors. Global Policy published by Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 4 . November 2019 677
Policy Insights
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