How tick list sustainability distracts from actual sustainable action: the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

ABSTRACT

The United Nations ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals to address a range of global issues related to the future of the planet and human well-being. Critics, however, argue that the Agenda, a complex product of multi-stakeholder governance, in its drive to accommodate many competing voices, is overloaded with weakly defined, overlapping and contradictory issues, concepts and buzzwords. These serve to gloss over actual concrete global problems and forces, concealing an underlying free-trade ideology. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we draw attention to the nature of the documents used to communicate the Agenda. These documents comprise an edifice of self-referential texts that rely heavily on infographics, bullet points, charts and tables. Such formats appear to helpfully simplify, distil information and break things down into workable components. But, we show, through the affordances of these formats, the the vagueness of buzzwords, contradictions and lack of clear causalities can be glossed over, presenting the Agenda as a highly technical, engaging, and above all moral process. These formats are important, therefore, for the legitimization and rhetorical power of the Agenda, necessary for its take-up by governments and organizations around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• critical discourse analysis
• multimodality
• affordance
• organizational communication
• environment
• United Nations

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

David Machin

David Machin is Professor of Linguistics in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University, China. His interests include institutional communication and discrimination against the Roma in Europe. His books include How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis (2023) Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020) and The Language of War Monuments (2013). Email: [email protected]

Yueyue Liu

Yueyue Liu is a postgraduate researcher in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, Shanghai International Studies University, China. Her interest lies in institutional communication in relation to climate and environmental issues. Email: [email protected]