Is sustainable development bad news for children’s rights?
A provocation paper
Professor Aoife Nolan, Professor of International Human Rights Law, University of Nottingham
Introduction
Sustainable development — development ‘that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’[i] — is a pressing issue for policymakers, civil society and academics whose work focuses on children. This includes the international children’s rights sector. The key global framework is the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015.
References to children abound in that agenda, with ‘almost all of the Sustainable Development Goals proper [having] targets that refer explicitly to children or youth’[ii]. The SDGs, as they are called, set out state undertakings to address a wide range of specific challenges faced by children. These include poverty, hunger, education, child labour and trafficking, child marriage, and violence against children — areas that have been the subject of extensive attention from the children’s rights sector over the last thirty years. The SDGs also address issues that have only come on to the child rights agenda relatively recently, for instance climate change[iii] and economic inequality[iv].
If implemented effectively, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development should result in actions and the mobilisation of institutions and resources to contribute to outcomes that advance children’s enjoyment of their rights in a broad range of areas. Indeed, the 2030 Agenda was widely welcomed by those working internationally on children’s rights for bringing the development and children’s agendas together. This was not least because of the 2030 Agenda appearing to have closed a historic gap between the fields of human rights and development — a gap that had led to criticisms of the latter for its blindness and, in some instances, resistance to the former.
Since their adoption, there has been a growing tendency globally towards the integration of the SDGs into work around the implementation of child rights, as well as a new emphasis on the realisation of child rights as an essential condition for achieving long-term development goals. In a significant move, the leading body on child rights, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has begun to refer to specific SDGs and related targets in its assessment of state efforts to give effect to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).
So surely the 2030 Agenda is a ‘win’ for child rights? The jury is still out. Despite the apparent positives of the SDGs for children’s rights, a serious question remains as to whether sustainable development will ultimately be supportive or undermining of those rights. It might not even be going too far to say that the SDGs may be bad news for child rights. Here are four reasons why this might be the case.
Overlapping but not the same
The 2030 Agenda is expressly grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights treaties,[v] including the UN Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC)[vi]. Much has been made of the overlap between the aims and content of the SDGs and the UNCRC by prominent actors in the child rights field like UNICEF and OHCHR. However, while the SDGs and associated targets strongly echo the language of, and elements to be found in, different provisions of the UNCRC, this is then undermined by the narrowness of some of the indicators that are set to be used to monitor implementation[vii]. For instance, the indicator for quality education in SDG target 4.1 (‘to ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes’) is reduced to meeting minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics at grade 2/3, end of primary and end of lower secondary. Amongst other things, this reduces the implicit scope of commitment of the target by excluding upper secondary education — a key element of education as conceptualised under the UNCRC — while rendering the scope of education quality far narrower than that contemplated by international human rights law[viii].
As such, there needs to be very significant care taken to highlight where the SDGs correspond with children’s rights (and hence support giving effect to those rights) and where they do not. In this regard, it is striking that while the SDGs and their associated indicators pay significant attention to areas associated with children’s rights related to survival, development and protection, the same is not true with regard to children’s participation rights. The capacity of SDG-related efforts to advance these rights is thus likely to be limited.
More broadly, there are serious grounds for worry when sensible recognition of overlap develops into a merging of child rights and the SDG agendas in such a way as to undermine the former. This is a particular worry when it comes to children’s socio-economic rights — rights to, among other matters, food, housing and social security. For years, some states (including the UK) have argued that these issues are better addressed as questions of development policy goals, rather than as legally binding standards to which governments have to give effect. It is crucial that those rights, which are central to child survival and flourishing, should not be subordinated to development concepts and approaches as a result of the growing influence of the SDGs in terms of international political discourse and legal standard setting in relation to areas such as education, child protection, and child poverty. Child rights advocates must be alive to this risk as they consider how to engage with the SDGs. This is particularly so given the issue of accountability, to which I return below.
The challenge of implementation
There are also concerns that SDG implementation mechanisms will be neither child rights–sensitive nor compliant. The High-Level Political Forum (the HLPF) is the main UN platform on sustainable development and has the principal international role in the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda. Positively, in the HLPF a focus on children has been advocated by the Group of Friends of Children and the SDGs. This is a self-appointed collection of states whose work focuses on ‘advocating for the promotion of child rights, child well-being and child participation in the planning, operationalization and monitoring of the SDGs’ [ix]. Important questions, however, have to be asked about the limits of the role of such a group where children’s rights are perceived to conflict with states’ interests in development.
There is also evidence of an effort to ensure that an element of child participation is included in the work of the HLPF. However, it remains unclear to what extent the body charged with responsibility for managing this effort, the UN Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY),[x] will be successful in ensuring child participation throughout the HLPF’s work ‘in all matters affecting the child’, as required by UNCRC Article 12. Problems may well arise due to the ongoing lack of clarity with regard to the parameters of the role of the MGCY and other stakeholders in terms of contributing to HLPF processes, whether through reporting or otherwise[xi]. Furthermore, given that the MGCY’s scope applies to people under thirty, not only children under eighteen, it is unclear the extent to which the participation of different age groups of children will be prioritised and ensured within the MGCY itself.
More broadly, it is open to question whether the extent to which the reference to child rights in HLPF processes — including in states’ voluntary national reviews for the HLPF (in which they assess and present their progress in advancing the SDGs)[xii] — is in fact reflective of a child rights-based approach to SDG implementation at the national level. Does it in fact signal something much weaker and blander? In the UK’s 2019 report, for instance, mentions of human rights and child/girls rights crop up frequently. It is telling however, that references to children’s rights as frames for development-related domestic law and policy efforts arise only when legislative child rights-focused measures introduced at the devolved level are highlighted in the context of SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions[xiii].
The UN Committee with responsibility for oversight of the UNCRC has stated that as part of its assessment of state records in implementing the Convention, it will ask governments to provide information on how the planning, implementation and monitoring of measures aimed at achieving the SDGs integrates a child rights-based approach[xiv]. However, the Committee’s mandate, its inevitably limited capacity, and the fact that the HLPF is the key monitoring body for the purposes of follow-up on the SDGs, mean that without an integration of a specific child rights focus into the HLPF’s monitoring work, child rights risk being little more than a ‘tag-on’ to international development efforts.
The structural risks
The 2030 Agenda also poses a challenge to children’s rights at a more fundamental, systemic level.
The SDGs (and their associated financing model, the Addis Ababa Agenda)[xv] have been criticised for doing (or being likely to do) little to change ‘the broader policy ecosystem that perpetuates poverty and increases inequality’.[xvi] Despite the Addis Ababa Agenda’s recognition of the need to invest in children and youth and ‘the vital importance of promoting and protecting the rights of all children, and ensuring that no child is left behind’,[xvii] the SDGs are vulnerable to the charge that they are a central part of a neoliberal economic paradigm that has long underpinned international development.[xviii] Enthusiasm for ‘the market’ and reliance upon traditional understandings of aggregate economic growth as the key driver for social and economic development remain hardwired into the post 2015 regime.
While child rights have a significant potential role to play in rendering SDG-related efforts more child-sensitive, there is thus far limited evidence in practice of those rights having an impact at more than a rhetorical level. This is certainly so in terms of challenging those aspects of the financing model that are rightly viewed as potentially undermining of human rights. For example, the emphasis on public-private partnerships — a key feature of the model — bodes poorly for the development of strong public sector institutions generally understood as required for the effective delivery of rights.
Indeed, the 2030 Agenda envisages a central role for ‘partnerships’ in terms of ensuring SDG implementation. Key actors identified in the Agenda itself, and whose role has been emphasised in UN-driven initiatives since adoption, include non-state corporate and high-profile development entities like the World Bank. This is potentially very worrying from a child rights perspective given the historic resistance of business and international financial institutions to taking human rights into account in terms of the framing and practice of their work. If these bodies have not been enthusiastic about bringing human rights to bear in development previously, why would they be so now? Certainly, there is extremely limited evidence in the five years since 2015 that there has been the sea-change in attitude necessary to ensure that children’s rights form a central part of the work of corporate and international financial institutions — whether SDG-focused or not.
Accountability
And finally, there is the ongoing problem of accountability. As McInerney-Lankford notes, ‘law and legal accountability are defining hallmarks of human rights, which remain a quintessentially legal concept’.[xix] It is without doubt that the introduction of human rights language was a key value-added element of the SDGs in contrast to the framework that preceded them, the Millennium Development Goals.
However, ultimately, the SDGs are not binding in the sense that rights are. There is no formal accountability process for SDG non-achievement. Where states fail to meet targets on education, health, justice institutions, economic and gender equality climate change, there is no meaningful sanction — not even the periodic ‘naming and shaming’ enabled by the least demanding model of international human rights law. Admittedly, international law child rights accountability mechanisms are of course neither perfect nor always effective. But that is an argument for strengthening those processes; it is not an argument for or justification of the lack of formal accountability of states in the 2030 Agenda context.
There is thus a serious risk that states and others who are challenged by the burdens of obligation and accountability imposed by child rights will embrace the language and processes of the SDGS (together with their limited accountability mechanisms) in such a way as to sideline child rights in future child-related work. In turn, this will result in the conceptualisation of work around health, climate change, education, poverty, and social protection as a matter of non-enforceable development goals rather than legally binding rights.
Children as a social group are already disadvantaged when it comes to exerting direct and indirect influence on policy and other decision-makers responsible for securing their wellbeing and flourishing. Without the beating stick of accountability, who will hold those responsible for failing to achieve child-related SDGs to task?
The British Academy has undertaken a programme of work that seeks to re-frame debates around childhood in both the public and policy spaces and break down academic, policy and professional silos in order to explore new conceptualisations of children in policymaking. Find out more about the Childhood Policy Programme.
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[i] United Nations, ‘Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future’, UN Doc. A/42/427 (August 4, 1987), 24.
[ii] K. Arts, ‘Children’s Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals’ in U. Kilkelly & T. Liefaard et al (eds), International Human Rights of the Child (Switzerland: Springer, 2018) 537–561, 546.
[iii] UN General Assembly, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN Doc. A/RES/70/1 (21 Oct. 2015), Goal 13.
[iv] Ibid, Goal 10.
[v] See UN General Assembly, ‘2030 Agenda’, paras. 10 and 18.
[vi] The CRC is also explicitly cited as a key standard to be taken into account in fostering ‘a dynamic and well-functioning business sector’. Ibid, para. 67.
[vii] This example is taken from Simon McGrath & A. Nolan, ‘SDG and the Child’s Rights to Education’ (2016) Vol.54 Norrag News, https://www.right-to-education.org/blog/sdg-4-and-child-s-right-education (accessed 2 March 2021).
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] ‘Statement at the 2020 High-level Political Forum on behalf of 61 countries and observers in their national capacity and as members of the Group of Friends of Children and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ (July 2020), 1, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/26867GoF_General_Debate.pdf
(accessed 2 March 2021).
[x] The UNMGCY self-describes as the ‘UN General Assembly–mandated official, formal and self-organised space for children and youth (under 30) to contribute to and engage in certain intergovernmental and allied policy processes at the UN’. (UN Major Group for Children and Youth, ‘Who Are We?’ https://www.unmgcy.org/about (accessed 2 March 2021).
[xi] Summary Expert Group Meeting, ‘HLPF 2016: Shaping the reporting by Major Groups and Other Stakeholders on Their Contribution to the Implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’ (April 19, 2016), https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/10132EGM-Summary_Comments_11May_final.pdf (accessed 2 March 2021).
[xii] See, e.g., HLPF/UNDESA, ‘2019 Voluntary National Reviews Synthesis Report’, 32–33, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/252302019_VNR_Synthesis_Report_DESA.pdf (accessed 2 March 2021).; HLPF/UNDESA, 2020 Voluntary National Reviews Synthesis Report, 29–30, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/27027VNR_Synthesis_Report_2020.pdf (accessed 2 March 2021).
[xiii] UK Government, ‘Voluntary National Review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’ (June 2019).
[xiv] UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘Contribution to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (March 2019), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CRC/HLPoliticalForumSustainableDevelopment.pdf (accessed 2 March 2021).
[xv] UN General Assembly, ‘The Addis Ababa Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development’, UN Doc. A/69/L.82 (2015).
[xvi] Center for Economic and Social Rights, ‘Two Years On: Can Human Rights Save the 2030 Agenda?’ (Feb. 15, 2018), http://www.cesr.org/two-years-can-human-rights-rescue-2030-agenda (accessed 2 March 2021).
[xvii] UN General Assembly, ‘The Addis Ababa Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development’ UN Doc. A/69/L.82 (2015), 3.
[xviii] See, contra, L. Engberg-Pedersen, ‘Is the Influence of Neoliberalism on Development Norms Waning? Evidence from the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ Development Policy Review (online publication 18 Sept 2020).
[xix] S. McInerney-Lankford, ‘Human Rights and Development Regimes — Reflections on Convergence and Influence’, EJIL-Talk (10 February 2016), https://www.ejiltalk.org/esil-international-human-rights-law-symposium-human-rights-and-development-regimes-reflections-on-convergence-and-influence/ (accessed 2 March 2021).
