Looking towards 2030 through the “SDGs Lens”

As the OECD begins to explore its role in the implementation and achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and where it is best suited to contribute, some important questions are surfacing. Top among these is: the 2030 Agenda may be universal, but do OECD economies really have all that much to do?

The world is coming to terms with the magnitude of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development agreement and the commitments therein, and it is at once inspiring and daunting. To be clear, we as part of the international labour movement tend to fall in the camp that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda, are historic in their ambition and provide a template for a more just and sustainable world. There are also the cynics that actually seem offended by the agreement and consider them utopian and “worse than useless”. It frankly doesn’t matter where you sit on this spectrum because the SDGs are agreed and will occupy governments in their policy making for, at minimum, the next fifteen years. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to go anywhere in the universe of international cooperation and policy making, be it at the United Nations, the G20 or the OECD, without encountering a discussion on the SDGs. There is a distinct reason for that: they are universal.

This is no minor attribute of the agreement and there a few reflections to note here. Throughout the negotiations there was a common sentiment that the SDGs and targets represented a threshold which would serve as something of a baseline or bare minimum for countries to achieve, and that in different national contexts greater levels of ambition should be pursued. A relevant example, for the union movement concerns the target on social protection floors (1.3), where it is important that the SDGs acknowledge the importance of social protection systems with specific commitments to achieve universal social protection, through floors, but that in many cases the ambition should actually be higher. This is merely one example, but it was assumed that there would be many similar instances in which, even though the SDGs are universal, most OECD countries would have less to do to achieve them. But is that really the case?

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) made an analysis, which they recently presented at the OECD, of how far along Sweden is in achieving the SDGs and their conclusions are quite surprising, or at least if you are among those who would naturally assume that Sweden is one of the few countries in the world where achieving the SDGs is in the immediate realm of possibility. Instead the SEI found that “81 of the 107 targets not dealing with means of implementation (which mainly concern development cooperation) would require at least some work to achieve in Sweden by 2030” and that the work required to meet the SDGs by 2030 “appears to be underestimated by many countries”. These findings are quite striking and highlight just how important having a universal agenda on sustainable development is and how far we are from achieving them, even at this very early stage.

In a similar vein, some national governments have already undertaken internal reviews or in some instances feasibility studies of current standing or progress on the SDGs and targets. This is a crucial first step for all governments as they begin to fully shift their policy making towards achievement of the SDGs and identify how to prioritize resources accordingly.

The universal nature of the SDGs also impacts how institutions like the OECD do business. Both as an organization of Member States who are party to the agreement and as a policy setting body and knowledge hub, the OECD now must internalize and integrate the SDGs into its overarching work and objectives. For its part, the OECD recognizes this and already has efforts underway to institute an organization wide “SDGs lens” through the Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development work, which aims to ensure integration of the three pillars of sustainable development, at the OECD and beyond. However, as the analysis of the SEI suggests, we have a long way to go.