Political Thriller Exposes the Underbelly of Global Goals
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12640 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
Political Thriller Exposes the Underbelly of
Global Goals
Sara Burke and Bettina Luise R€
urup
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, New York
Abstract
This commentary characterizes the SDG indicator framework as a ‘political thriller’in which the power struggles are hidden
behind the veil of technocratic expertise. Like a Trojan horse, each indicator conceals the theories of change and development
that lie within, exerting their interpretive influence. Where the politics will ultimately lead to by 2030 –in shaping policy prior-
ities, power structures, and knowledge about development –is for now unknown and unpredictable.
The special issue of Global Policy Journal –‘Knowledge and Poli-
tics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs’–will surely become the
political thriller of 2019, with links to its various articles shared
widely among stakeholders to the United Nations’2030 Agenda.
A worthy sequel to its predecessor, ‘The Power of Numbers’,
which looked at the politics behind the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals of 2000–2015, this special issue tells the story of
how the lofty aspirations motivating their successors, the Sus-
tainable Development Goals (SDGs), have also been consis-
tently watered down and even distorted in the power struggle
over who defines development. This ‘slippage’in the ambition
of global goals is taking place even though the SDGs have
been adopted by the consensus of all UN member states.
The roots of the power struggle over global goals lie in con-
flicting theories of economic and social change embraced by
different development actors: national governments, civil soci-
ety groups, multilateral agencies and the privatesector.
The weapons in the power struggle are numbers, or more
accurately, the translation of qualitative norms expressed as glo-
bal goals, into numbers. In the process, the aspirations behind
the goals –which express social and political priorities –become
weakened and distorted as the goals are distilled into time-bound
targets that can be quantified and measured by indicators.
‘Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs’
reveals how thepolitics of goal setting lies hidden behind a veil
of technocratic expertise that burnishes the whole operation
with the appearance of objectivity. Meanwhile, behind the veil,
indicators chosen to represent social realities instead reinter-
pret those realities. Like a Trojan horse, each indicator conceals
the theories of change and development that lie within, exert-
ing their interpretive influence. In the case of the SDGs, this is
producing multiple, negative unintended effects as the overall
impact of the power of numbers is brought to bear on the
goal-making process. The result has been a rushedcompetition
to create quantifiableindicators, regardless of the quality of the
available data.
Looking back, we see that the impact of politics on the his-
tory of the MDGs produced no less than a profound reframing
of development. Postcolonial concepts of development
forged in the latter part of the 20th century, which were
focused on the transformation of productive capacities to
improve standards of living, were replaced early in the 21st
century by the singular idea that development equals poverty
eradication. In this reductionist framework, the concept of
poverty itself shrunk to the notion of meeting only basic
needs, which cast aside multidimensional concepts such as
capabilities, paid lip service to human rights agendas and side-
lined discussions of root causes of poverty, all of which are
approaches consistent with the values of social democracy.
While we all enjoy a good mystery, we are not detectives
and cannot yet know the overall impact this power struggle
over indicators is having now on the SDGs. However, this spe-
cial ‘political thriller’issue of Global Policy Journal reveals the
dark underbelly of competing interests in the 2030 Agenda
and their sometimes mysterious unintended consequences.
Note
This text is produced in the context of the special issue project organized
by S. Fukuda-Parr and D. McNeill in collaboration with Friedrich-Ebert-Stif-
tung New York Office; UNDP; University of Oslo Centre for Environment
and Development and the Environment; Julien J. Studley Grant to the New
School Graduate Programs in International Affairs.
Author Information
Sara Burke is FES New York’s senior expert on global economic policy
issues. Her work focuses on emerging economic policy frameworks in
the global multilateral system, policy coherence among the interna-
tional financial institutions, and the role of trade unions and other
groups in civil society to hold corporations and governments account-
able to international standards.
Bettina Luise R€
urup is the Executive Director of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stif-
tung (FES) office at the United Nations in New York. For more than 25
years, she has been engaged with empirical, analytical and policy
oriented work of FES around topics of development, social justice and
democracy in the global North and South. She has served as head of
department at FES Headquarters in Berlin as well as at offices in Chile,
India, Turkey and Thuringia, Germany.
Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12640 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019 137
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