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Abstract
The recently passed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) encompass a variety of explicit and implicit goals that address inequality. Although formulations remain vague and targets abstract, the SDGs go much further than previous development goals in addressing inequality as a central issue. Against the background of insights from inequality research, the article assesses their potential to become discursive resources for fundamental reforms of established development ideas.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for very helpful comments from the two anonymous reviewers. Discussions at a meeting of the German Political Science Association's working group on Development and the colloquium of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University Duisburg-Essen, helped to improve the paper. We would like to thank the Institute for World Society Studies, Bielefeld University, for supporting a workshop on Global Inequality, and Andreas Braun, Pascal Berger and Thomas Kron for their feedback. Special thanks go to Frank Gadinger and to Martin Koch.
Notes
1. UNDP, Humanity Divided; and World Bank, Inclusion Matters.
2. Even though the explicit inequality goal in the SDGs is ‘only’ the tenth, public discourse has emphasised inequality, among other newer topics, as one of the key challenges to be addressed by the SDGs. For instance, an official UN commercial, #We have a Plan, emphasises inequality reduction as one of the three main aspirations of the goals: ‘Global Goals for Sustainable Development. 17 goals to achieve 3 extraordinary things in the next 15 years. End extreme poverty. Fight inequality and injustice. Fix climate change.’ http://devpolicy.org/in-brief/will-this-ad-help-the-sdgs-20151002/.
3. Ostry et al., Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth.
4. For example, Piketty, Capital.
5. Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-nots.
6. Golub, “From the New International Economic Order.”
7. Andrews and Bawa, “A Post-development Hoax?”; Escobar, Encountering Development; and Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics.
8. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth; and Stiglitz et al., Mismeasuring our Lives.
9. What we argue does not pertain to the implementation of the SDGs; it is still too early to assess how states will cope with the SDGs, and our analysis does not aim to account for effects. Nor do we offer an ideological critique, discussing who will benefit from the SDGS and who commands interpretative sovereignty over them. We are aware of inconsistencies and shortcomings in the document and, if the SDGs were to be taken seriously, their potential for conflict. Since future discussions of the SDGs will deal mainly with the chances or failures of implementation, however, we see it as important to deliberate on their discursive potential at this early stage.
10. Ziai, Development Discourse.
11. Grugel and Uhlin, “Renewing Global Governance.”
12. Ellerman, Helping People.
13. Therborn, “Globalization and Inequality,” 454.
14. Grusky, Social Stratification.
15. Marmot, The Status Syndrome; and Sen, Development as Freedom.
16. Brockman and Delhey, “The Dynamics of Happiness”; Giddens, Sociology, 338; Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice; and Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.
17. Marx, Relation of Wage-labour.
18. Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism”; and Bourdieu, Distinction.
19. Carroll and Fennema, “Is there a Transnational Business Community?”
20. Tilly, Durable Inequality.
21. UNDP, The Real Wealth of Nations, 57.
22. Heintz, A Macrosociological Theory; Heintz, “Introduction”; Galtung, “Rank and Social Integration”; Lagos, International Stratification; and Nettl and Robertson, “Industrialization, Development or Modernization.”
23. Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy.
24. Therborn, “Globalization and Inequality,” 469.
25. Roberts and Hite, From Modernization to Globalization; and Wallerstein, World-systems Analysis.
26. Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.”
27. Golub, “From the New International Economic Order,” 1004.
28. Gong, The Standard of Civilization, 14.
29. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 1181.
30. Go, “Global Fields and Imperial Forms”; and Strang “From Dependency to Sovereignty.”
31. Maul, Human Rights.
32. Melamed, Putting Inequality in the Post-2015 Picture.
33. A senior UN member of the SDGs working group process emphasised the goal to ‘change the discourse’, while a UN-DESA staff member commented on the purpose of the SDGs, namely to help to ‘change the mindset’ of states, pointing to the SDGs’ importance as discursive resources. Author’s interviews in New York, April 2014.
34. A condensed reflection of inequality theories and concepts is given in UNDP, Humanity Divided.
35. Pogge and Sengupta, “Rethinking the Post-2015 Development Agenda.”
36. The work of the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, Angus Deaton, (and others) addresses this fact. See, for example, Deaton, The Great Escape. The need for inclusion has also been acknowledged by international development organisations to some extent. World Bank, Inclusion Matters.
37. OECD, Growing Unequal?
40. The High-Level-Report of Eminent Persons in preparation of the SDGs strongly suggested leveraging disaggregation techniques along these lines: ‘In all cases where a target applies to outcomes of individuals, it should only be deemed to be met if every group – defined by income quintile, gender, location or otherwise – has met the target’. UN, A New Global Partnership, 15.
41. UN, A New Global Partnership, 5.
43. Browne and Weiss, “The Future UN Development Agenda.”
44. Thomas and Twyman, “Equity and Justice.”
45. Toye, “Assessing the G77.”
46. Willkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.
47. OECD, Growing Unequal?
48. Golub, “From the New International Economic Order”; and Thakur, “How Representative are BRICS?”
49. Quadir, “Rising Donors.”