193 nations committed to saving the world. Was it just lip-service?
In counties in the Mandera region of northeast Kenya lie villages rife with food insecurity and severe malnutrition. The realities of continued droughts affect millions of lives to their core. Viable crops are perishing due to a lack of rainfall and deficient irrigation infrastructure.
In some counties, the growing tragedy of withered livestock carcasses represents more than a lost meal opportunity.
Last year a massive swarm, writes Betty Kiptum of Kenya Broadcasting Corp., “ravaged farmlands just before the harvest period, destroying crops and pasture.” A recent locus invasion threatens more devastation.
Climate change means more than a snowless winter in Aspen.
Yet, despite pledges by every nation on Earth to solve the world’s most pressing problems, measurable progress is elusive. Governments have failed to make a dent.
What’s the holdup? Why aren’t we making more significant headway after initial global alignment?
Six years ago, all 193 U.N. member nations committed to a noble 15-year mandate for sustainable development. The 17 ambitious Global Goals, also known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Agenda 2030, were heralded at the time as an organized grand vision — a roadmap that would unite the world to fix what ails the planet and its billions of inhabitants (and not only humans).
The SDGs aimed to solve ills such as poverty, inequality, and global warming with expectations of ushering in quality education, healthcare, and food for all by 2030. It sounded magnificent. And simultaneously, a day-dream of grand wishes.
Richard Horton, Editor and Chief of The Lancet put it this way at the time, “The SDGs are fairy tales, dressed in the bureaucracies of intergovernmental narcissism, adorned with the robes of multilateral paralysis, and poisoned by the acid of nation-states failures.”
Horton wasn’t alone. SDGs failure was foreshadowed before the Goals even launched in a string of negative news stories with headlines like “The Impending Failure of the Sustainable Development Goals” and “Why the SDGs are not that sustainable”. Why such negativity?
It seems clearly a shortcoming at inception that more careful consideration wasn’t given to the vastly different socio-economic and political environments across 193 nations and the realities that impact data collection, measurement, and reporting processes and standards. Admitted Amina Mohammed, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General, in 2015, “The one knot we haven’t tied is the accountability.”
Yet, there remain many more knots to tie. Alwaleed Al Kashif, Director of Sustainable Finance, United Nations Association in UAE, says, “The political will is not there, and it’s easier to talk about things that are easier to pass socially and politically than it is to address fundamental problems. A lot of these countries are run by dictatorships, and these are systems that usually focus more on keeping themselves in power rather than developing.”
Says Al Kashif, “This whole experience with SDGs, some of it is just talking points. For example, climate change is perceived as one of the most important goals…while innovation and infrastructure, and industry seem least important. It’s about priority, which has more media and more urgency. But you’re not going to solve issues with climate if you do not address your infrastructure and your technology and innovation; that’s what’s needed to solve that problem.” He adds, “You can’t just have one size fit all and expect it to work in every country in the world.”
As for who’s responsible for making meaningful progress on SDGs, Dr. Sanjeev Khagram, CEO, Director-General and Dean of Thunderbird School of Global Management, an institutional partner of the United Nations Global Compact, says, “When people say, these are the U.N. goals, that’s a fundamental problem because they’re not the U.N.’s goals…they’re supposed to be everyone’s goals. They have been seen as linked to the U.N. as the driver and the implementer.” And that’s integral to the problem. Khagram says, “The U.N., as much as one may believe in it, is not a great institution in terms of implementation capacity.”
Realities around sustainability are complicated, and neither the U.N. nor governments are going to save us. Instead, concerned citizens, social entrepreneurs, ‘conscious’ corporations, and NGOs will design — and implement the solutions. Grassroots action from the ground up is required for real development to take root and flourish. Sustainable development has proven unsustainable when imposed top-down, as evidenced by decades of squandered foreign aid.
Picking up the slack, social entrepreneurs worldwide are launching initiatives to solve the very problems the SDGs outline. Results have been a broader understanding of critical issues, collaborative engagement, and action that’s reaping incremental improvements. For example, in 2020, two Salvadorian teachers won the Global Citizens SDGs Challenge with Nikmati, an educational platform for online innovation training for teachers in South America. Educators empowered to tap valuable classroom content can improve education standards and enhance outcomes for millions of students.
Citizens on a mission have spawned global movements. Fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg instigated substantial climate action with her ‘school strike for the environment’ in Sweden in 2018 and subsequent truth-to-power missives. Who can forget her impassioned “How dare you.” U.N. speech?
It’s people, the everyday heroes, who move the needle. Citizen engagement is the game changer.
The Global Goals were negotiated with hundreds of global stakeholders across public and private sectors. Despite what might appear as overpromises or under-delivery, it’s hard to fault those who had such Big Ideas and succeeded in putting such wide-ranging intentions in motion. They are heroes, too.
However, despite the dedicated action underway on local levels, the sheer magnitude of the SDGs will take more time to materialize.
Social Progress Imperative published a survey in 2019 painting a grim picture that SDGs would miss their target by over 40 years. In 2021 the survey found that nations doing the best toward progress on SDGs are those that “put people at the center of the development process.” Thus lackluster progress may be attributed to unawareness of SDGs among the end-stake-holders — citizens across the globe who should have vested interests in their success.
The magnitude of the SDGs cannot be overstated and informed masses will undoubtedly advance SDGs progress. There will be great progress when the world’s citizens head the rallying cry.
Dr. Khagram adds perspective, saying, “You could argue it’s not a treaty, but if you think about international agreements, you could argue that the SDGs were the most transparent, inclusive process of creating an international agreement in the history of the world.”
Encapsulated this way, who can argue that achieving sustainable development across 193 nations was ever going to be a simple feat?
