The SDGs: Changing How Development is Understood
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12629 |
| Author | Paula Caballero |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
The SDGs: Changing How Development is
Understood
Paula Caballero
Climate and Water at Rare
Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute a truly transformative agenda which provides a framework to help us
effectively confront the fundamental challenges of development in a way that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) did
not. This commentary briefly describes the very demanding, at times antagonistic, process that produced the SDGs, including
the crucial role of the Open Working Group (OWG). It points out the strengths of the SDGs by comparison with the MDGs,
with respect to both process and product. The SDGs, proposed and championed by a country from the Global South, for the
first time defined development as a universal agenda, and upended the traditional division of countries into those who need
to act and those called primarily to provide development assistance. Many countries across the development spectrum
rejected this proposal, which was finally agreed thanks to persistence, lengthy negotiations and consensus building. In the
end, the adoption of the SDGs also broke down the divide between environment and development, offering an integrated
and inclusive framework for structuring solutions. Yet an agenda of such deep transformative potential faces implementation
challenges, and this commentary emphasizes the need for the sort of analysis contained in the papers in this Special Issue in
order to ensure that the SDGs are strengthened and continue to evolve.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were an attempt
to revolutionize how we understand development, to create
a framework that was more fit-for-purpose to tackle the
daunting challenges we face as a global society that is
rapidly breaching the capacity of earth systems to support
life and facing growing inequalities at all levels. Yet several
of the papers highlight the fact that Agenda 2030 and the
SDGs did not embed transformative concepts such as plane-
tary boundaries or ‘beyond GDP’. In fact, the contestations
that the papers analyse, surrounding core components of
the SDGs, evidence just how difficult the journey was, and
how challenging the road ahead. Arguably, however, the
central question is whether the SDGs will have made a dif-
ference in getting us to effectively resolve issues that are
ultimately existential and that address fundamental human
rights; and in how we do so. The stakes are high so it is
essential that rigorous and unflinching analysis lay bare
areas where the SDGs need to be strengthened and further
evolved, but one needs to also ask whether the appetite
and commitment to addressing these challenges would
have been the same if we had only had an ‘MDG plus’archi-
tecture to guide our efforts during the next decisive decade.
Today, many see the SDGs as a natural and possibly inevi-
table evolution of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). The outcome could have been radically different.
The bitter rejection of the SDGs throughout much of the
Rio+20 process (even during the last night of negotiations it
was not certain that the text would be approved) speak to
the fact that getting agreement on this concept was in itself
transformative. The difficulties during the subsequent nego-
tiations in the Open Working Group (OWG) and in the
definition of the indicators that the papers in this series
allude to, reflect the efforts that were made to maintain a
semblance of the status quo or, as many have noted, to
water down the reach of this new framework. This is true
whether it be from a political or a technical perspective.
With regard to the former, the proposition that a truly
universal agenda was needed brought to the surface
assumptions that were implicit in development assistance –
that development was only actionable by so-called develop-
ing countries and that the responsibilities of the more
developed countries’were only to provide limited finance
and-often patriarchic-assistance. Global leadership, more-
over, was the purview of developed countries. When the
Colombian proposal for the SDGs first started to gain a mini-
mum of traction in mid-2011, one of the most frequently
asked questions was ‘Why Colombia?’As Fukuda-Parr and
McNeill note, ‘framing is used by powerful states and orga-
nizations to exert power to influence policy agendas of
other stakeholders’. And certainly, the minimalist under-
standing of development at the core of the MDGs was well
received by developed countries. There is a parallel to this
in the initial approaches to ‘adaptation’within the UNFCCC
that sought to frame it as a development side-show that
affected only the least developed countries and could be
addressed through short-term actions consigned to the
NAPAs.
1
On the side of the G77, the resistance by many to
the notion of a universal agenda was fierce as it under-
mined what they perceived as a foundational concept: the
principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.Itis
telling that for many months one of the leading developing
countries in the negotiations advocated agreeing to two
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12629
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019
138
Practitioner Commentary
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