The Sustainable Development Goals: a plan for building a better world?

Abstract

Despite some clear positives, the draft text of the Sustainable Development Goals does not fulfill its self-proclaimed purpose of inspiring and guiding a concerted international effort to eradicate severe poverty everywhere in all of its forms. We offer some critical comments on the proposed agreement and suggest 10 ways to embolden the goals and amplify their appeal and moral power. While it may well be true that the world's poor are better off today than their predecessors were decades or centuries ago, to judge whether this is moral progress, we must bring into view what was possible then and what is possible now. We may well find that there have never been so many people avoidably subjected to life-threatening deprivations as there are today, and if this is the case, we should insist that our governments end this oppression immediately through appropriate institutional reforms to be prominently outlined in their post-2015 agenda.

Keywords:

• SDGs
• MDGs
• post-2015 agenda
• poverty
• inequality
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Pogge received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, and is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale. He holds part-time positions at King's College London and the Universities of Oslo and Central Lancashire. Pogge is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as President of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network aiming to enhance the impact of scholars, teachers, and students on global poverty, and of Incentives for Global Health, a team effort toward developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide (www.healthimpactfund.org).

Mitu Sengupta is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Dr Sengupta is the head of research and development for the Centre for Development and Human Rights (CDHR), a nongovernmental organization based in New Delhi, India, and a Director of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network, founded at Yale University, that aims to leverage the resources of academia toward the end of eradicating global poverty.

Notes

1. For further information and additional literature, see www.yale.edu/macmillan/globaljustice/DirtyMoney.html (last accessed December 26, 2014).

2. These were among the leading demands that emerged from a crowd-funded Delphi study that ASAP completed with a panel of 26 leading experts. See http://academicsstand.org/2014/09/policy-options-for-addressing-illicit-financial-flows-results-from-a-delphi-study (last accessed December 26, 2014).

3. See, for example, Bhumika Muchhala, “United Nations: Varying visions and priorities at SDG working group,” March 19, 2013. Available through Third World Network Info Service on UN Sustainable Development: http://www.twn.my/title2/unsd/2013/unsd130302.htm (last accessed January 16, 2015).

4. World Bank data for alternative poverty lines can be looked up at http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet (last accessed February 4, 2015).

5. The recently proposed Individual Deprivation Measure is the outcome of a deliberate effort to overcome these limitations (see Wisor et al. 2014).

6. The Palma ratio is the income share of the richest 10% divided by that of the poorest 40%. We propose that each country should aim, by 2030, to reduce income inequality to the square root of its present Palma ratio. Thus, countries with current Palma ratios of 4, 2.25, and 1.69 would commit to reaching, by 2030, Palma ratios of 2, 1.5, and 1.3, respectively. Countries with current Palma ratios of 1 or below would merely need to remain within this range. See www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/it-all-about-tails-palma-measure-income-inequality.pdf (last accessed December 26, 2014) for a discussion and defense of the Palma ratio. For some data from European countries, see Cingano 2014, Table A1.2, p. 36.

7. “The indicators that track them [the suggested targets] should be disaggregated to ensure no one is left behind and targets should only be considered ‘achieved’ if they are met for all relevant income and social groups” (HLP 2014, ix).

8. See Third World Network, “SDGs: The disappearing act of the ‘inequality’ goal,” www.twn.my/title2/unsd/2014/unsd140602.htm (last accessed December 26, 2014).

9. This share might be 2% in 2016 and then increase by another 2% each year, reaching 30% in 2030. At today's level of subsidies and export credits, this mechanism would raise between $6 billion (2016) and $90 billion (2030) a year over the SDG period. For comparison, current official development assistance stands at ca. $130 billion from all countries.

10. Article 28, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.