Why the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is unique
The Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development is well underway. With 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 Targets, the content of the SDGs is both broad and deep, spanning societal challenges such as poverty eradication, environmental protection and institution-building. Just give the SDGs a quick glance and you discover how many issues span multiple SDGs. In fact, it is simply not possible to address issues such as poverty without including other development goals such as economic growth, equal rights to resources and access to natural resources.
The beauty of the SDGs is that they reflect the complexity of our world where every action has a reaction, and no solution is sustainable if looked at in isolation of other development goals. In other words, the SDGs require all actors in society to break down silos and transform processes in all domains of society to make them more transparent, accountable, inclusive and democratic.
Rifkin (2010), an American Economist at the University of Pennsylvania, theorised upon the growing consciousness of humans during the last century. He argues that due to major societal changes such as a globalising economy and digital revolution, people are expanding their smaller, community consciousness into a global consciousness. A global consciousness that acknowledges that everyone and everything in our societies is in fact interconnected. And every action results in a reaction (whether positive or negative) which is either visible or invisible to the actor, but it is there nonetheless.
It is my firm belief that the UN SDGs are the first intergovernmental development agenda that embodies this growing global consciousness of interconnectivity, whereby addressing one societal problem requires including many other development goals to transition towards a sustainable human society.
In August 2017, Talents from around the world are selected to attend the 9-day UNLEASH workshop in Denmark with a clear vision to help create a platform that facilitates the development of innovative and scalable solutions to address the SDGs. My message and ambition for this workshop is clear, to contribute to the development of a realistic solution that takes into account the highly-interconnected world we live in today and activates citizens around the world to join the effort.
Written by Mikaël Maes
