What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

As you may imagine, the SDGs encompass a lot. We can’t simply say we are going to solve poverty or hunger, or make the world an equitable place. I wish we could! Additionally, while I mentioned that these goals are complementary and many cannot be achieved without addressing multiple at once, it would be unfair to say we can address them all at the same time. Think about the time, resources and human capital needed to address just one of these, like climate action. Clearly it’s not simple, considering there are still UN signatories that have failed to adopt rigorous climate action policies and/or strategies. For others, there may be clear priority areas: think about countries at war, or with high tensions between one another. Do you think their priority is going to be SDG4 (related to education) when work towards SDG16 would be more effective for addressing their current crisis? Or what about countries where hunger is hardly an issue, do you think SDG2 is their priority? These are global goals that we are trying to achieve, but countries are taking a national approach to address them.

The fact that SDGs are being prioritized over one another – which is understandable, given how complex each one is to address, and the unique environmental, economic and political needs of each country – is problematic. The Agenda established a goal for all SDGs to be achieved by 2030, not just one or two (or any less than 17). This brings me to a few common critiques with the Agenda and the 17 SDGs: on one hand, some say that the SDGs are too ambitious, and that 18 years (less than ten now) to achieve zero poverty, zero hunger, quality education for all, global warming mitigation, etc. is impossible when these issues have existed for decades (if not centuries), not to mention the fact that our society is governed by neoliberal schools of thought and capitalism, two things that depend on inequity and constant growth to thrive. The SDGs ask us to change these systems and schools of thought almost entirely. Can we really do it?

On the flip side, the second criticism with the SDGs is that they are too broad. While each goal does have a set of indicators that help narrow the scope of each goal (for instance, under SDG2, 2.2 is “end all forms of malnutrition” and 2.3 is “double the productivity and income of all small-scale producers”), in order to account for so many different issues, there has to be some degree of generalization. This allows for flexibility in how each country chooses to meet the goals, based on their unique needs and resources. However, this generalization makes it difficult to understand what, specifically, must be done to achieve each goal. How do we end all forms of malnutrition? How do we track our progress? When do we know that we’ve achieved a goal? These are big questions, and are so difficult to answer with the breadth of the goals that many countries struggle to take action – because they simply don’t know what to do, how much to do it, how to track it, and for how long they need to do it.