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In an international system where states jealously guard their sovereignty and policy autonomy, is it possible for world leaders to agree upon common objectives and plans for action, especially when it comes to contested issues such as that of “global development”? United Nations Resolution A/RES/70/1 of 25 September 2015 – also known as “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (hereon: Agenda 2030) – will lead you to believe that this remarkable feat is indeed possible. “Never before have world leaders pledged common action and endeavour across such a broad and universal policy agenda,” the resolution states, with certainty.

Agenda 2030 is an intergovernmental agreement that is designed to guide global development efforts over the next fifteen years, between 2015 and 2030. Its centerpiece, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), replaces the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which held sway between 2000 and 2015. The new goals are designed to build on the MDGs and “complete what they did not achieve.” But while there were only eight MDGs, the SDGs are 17 in number, with 169 associated targets, and 304 proposed indicators. This dramatic jump in goals and targets from the MDGs to SDGs has provoked criticism, even ridicule. “Play sports! Be in harmony with nature! End all preventable deaths! Only the UN could have come up with a document so useless,” said William Easterly, a leading authority on development aid. The governments that have signed on, however, are clearly pleased with themselves. “On behalf of the peoples we serve, we have adopted a historic decision on a comprehensive, far-reaching and people-centered set of universal and transformative goals and targets,” their resolution states. Is the UN’s confidence in the merits of its new agenda defensible? Do the SDGs indeed represent a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision”?

In this article, I provide an assessment of the SDGs by posing and answering five questions relating to their scope, depth, and ambition. I start, however, with a brief note on the process through which the SDGs were created and the conceptual shift, from ‘human development’ to ‘sustainable development,’ that they represent.

The Journey to Agenda 2030 – From ‘human development’ to ‘sustainable development’

The origins of the MDGs lie in a series of UN summits and conferences held during the 1990s, on topics such as nutrition, gender quality, and childhood health. Drawing on targets set at these conferences, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) articulated a set of ‘international development goals’ in 1996, which, in turn, formed the basis of the MDGs. The MDGs were never openly debated. Following the adoption of the UN Millennium Declaration, a group of high level experts was convened to formulate the MDGs, and the goals were presented as an annex to a report from the Secretary General to the UN General Assembly (UNGA). With the acceptance of this report, it was argued that the UNGA had assented to the MDGs (see, in this connection, Wisor 2012; Hulme and Scott 2010).

This was an unconventional beginning. The new agenda was challenged almost immediately by international NGOs, with the complaint that the MDGs had been devised in a top-down manner by international civil servants based in New York rather than through a democratic process of consultation with civil society. While this was a reasonable grievance, the narrow process adopted by the authors of the MDGs was quite sage given the political climate of the time. In the 1990s, as Fukuda-Parr and Hulme point out, international development specialists were bitterly divided over the merits of structural adjustment and the Washington Consensus, with the World Bank and IMF pitted against NGOs, “with the UN caught in the middle” (2011: 24). A less stealthy approach might have led to stiff, even debilitating resistance from the international financial institutions and powerful developed country governments. Even so, the MDGs’ undemocratic beginnings were always a target of criticism, and when it came to replacing the goals, the UN was careful to adopt a more open and inclusive process.

A vast amount of time and effort have gone into the creation of Agenda 2030. In July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a 27-member high-level panel, co-chaired by British Prime Minister David Cameron, to advise on the global development framework beyond 2015. The high-level panel released its final report in May 2013, with the claim that it had consulted a massive swathe of people, including “over 5000 civil society organizations to global alliances – working in about 120 countries across every major region of the world.” The results of an extensive online global survey (My World 2015) were also fed into the deliberations of the high-level panel.

The high-level panel suggested twelve “illustrative goals and targets” as possible replacements for the MDGs, and recommended putting “sustainable development at the core” of the post-2015 agenda. This signalled a decisive shift in the official discourse on the MDG-replacements from the idea of ‘human development,’ which had inspired the MDGs, to that of ‘sustainable development’ (the most influential conceptualization of which is articulated in the Brundtland Commission’s Report of 1987 as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”).

The distinction between the two concepts is noteworthy. While poverty-reduction is central to both human development and sustainable development, and while both view economic growth as a means rather than an end of development – thereby providing an alternative to mainstream, economistic perspectives that tend to treat economic growth synonymously with development – sustainable development places emphasis on meeting the needs of future generations by preserving the earth’s natural systems. More generally, it calls into question the anthropocentric bias of all development paradigms, including that of human development.

Following the June 2012 summit of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) – popularly known as Rio 20 – the MDG-replacement process was conclusively merged with the UN’s sustainable development agenda. The key outcome of Rio 20 was an agreement by member states to develop a set of aspirational sustainable development goals similar to the MDGs, and in January 2013, a 30-member Open Working Group (OWG) of the UNGA was tasked with preparing the requisite proposal. Rio 20 did not spell out the sustainable development goals, and nor, at the time of the event, were they being viewed as MDG successors. At the end of 2013, however, the UN announced that the SDGs, under preparation by the OWG, would be used to replace the MDGs. There would be only one........

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