Perhaps a way of getting much greater global attention to whatever we do is to link it explicitly to making the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) really happen.1 The SDGs are part of a history of broken promises by the international community. There have been endless global goals established by UN agencies since the 1960s, reaching an apex with the Millennium Development Goals in the year 2000. None of the MDGs were achieved by the end date of 2015 (some advocates argue that we did cut extreme poverty in half, but that is not true).2 Their successor, the SDGs, vastly expanded the MDGs, but we are nowhere on target to reach any of the 17 goals by 2030.
To me, a major proximate reason for this failure is that the SDGs have not been anywhere near adequately funded. The estimated shortfall is hard to assess, but analysts place it at between $1 and $4 trillion a year. But why have they not been adequately funded? To me, the answer is compensatory legitimation, where the state tries to retrieve its eroding legitimacy by goodwill gestures while the actual state of the people continues to deteriorate.3 From a progressive perspective, the unfulfilled promises and the attempts at legitimation are interrelated parts of our world system. Increasing poverty and inequality, pervasive racism and sexism, widespread conflicts, the danger of nuclear confrontation, and the specter of climate catastrophe all call into question the legitimacy of the social order. To compensate for this, actors in the world system of neoliberal globalization must introduce polices, for example, the MDGs and the SDGs, aimed at ameliorating some problematic conditions and thus restoring legitimacy to our social order. This argument does not question the good intentions of many of the proponents of these policies but does question their effects. Simply having these policies appears to be sufficient for compensatory legitimation; providing the needed resources and bringing about the needed structural changes in order to fulfill these promises, judging by past experience, seems not to be forthcoming. This does not have to be so. We could achieve most of the SDGs in a very few years if we were willing to devote a relatively small portion of global resources to this cause, amounting to 1% to 4% of global GDP.4 Yet those resources are not forthcoming.
I do not mean to negate the value of the SDGs. While systemically, they may serve as compensatory legitimation, their promises represent an advance over the MDGs. They are not simply the result of elites pretending to offer something to those marginalized. The SDGs and other goals are the result of a world of contested terrain in which those who are disadvantaged and harmed by our multiple global crises have fought for needed social change. Yet, from a different perspective, the SDGs have been a joke, an embarrassment—another in the string of promises that we choose not to fulfill.
What if we somehow made something like “Making the SDGs Real” a central tenet, slogan—something—for our new global social movement. It could galvanize global attention to our movement, and, since the SDGs cover lots of issues, they might be something all of our component movements and organizations could rally around.
The SDGs explicitly assume that what is needed is increased GDP growth and an increased role of business, markets, and private actors.5 That, of course, is exactly wrong. If we made achieving the SDGs central to our movement, we would be showing how we will never achieve the SDGs without the systems change we are all fighting for.
1. Steven Klees, forthcoming, “Why SDG4 and the Other SDGs Are Failing and What Needs to Be Done,” in D. Brent Edwards, M. Niaz Asadullah, and Amber Webb., eds., “Critical Perspectives at the Midpoint of SDG4,” Special Issue, International Journal of Educational Development.
2. Jason Hickel, “The True Extent of Global Poverty and Hunger: Questioning the Good News Narrative of the Millennium Development Goals,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 5 (February 2016): 1–19.
3. Hans Weiler, “The Political Economy of Education and Development,” Prospects 19, no. 4 (1984): 468–477.
4. Jeffry Sachs, Guillaume Lafortune, Olivier Cattaneo, and Abdoulaye Fabregas, “The Case for Long-Term SDG Financing,” Reflection Paper (Paris: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2023).
5. The UN is being taken over by private corporations under the guise of multistakeholder governance. See Harris Gleckman, “A Corporate Takeover of the UN Must Be Stopped,” Al Jazeera, August 3, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/8/3/a-corporate-takeover-of-the-un-must-be-stopped.
