Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

We are in the age of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). Two years ago this journal published a special forum on the transition away from the previous UN millennium development goals (MDGs), which ran from 2000 to 2015, to the SDGs (Special Forum, 2015, p. 12[4]). The articles collected in that forum dwelt on debates prevalent during the 2012–2015 period concerning, for instance land rights (Sexsmith & McMichael, 2015), technical assistance (Green, 2015), and calculating poverty (Ilcan & Lacey, 2015). The articles collected in this special issue emerge from the SDG side of these debates, with the advantage of having been able to reflect on the content of the 17 goals and on the associated targets and programmes that have emerged since the unveiling of the SDGs in September 2015.

As with the 2015 special forum, these articles, collected together, represent an unusual intervention in debates about the nature of contemporary international development, where the majority of scholarship tends to concern itself with measuring or collating goal performance. The articles, however, explore the SDGs as a political construct, and are less concerned with the technical aspects or realizable nature of the goals, than with the kinds of epistemological, hegemonic, or politico-economic assumptions built into them, and the ensuing effectiveness they will have in terms of addressing or perpetuating the historical impoverishment of large groups of people living in poverty. They take issue with many of the assumptions upon which SDGs rests, while also broadening the conversation to pay attention to knowledge production, modernity, colonialism, exclusion, citizenship, and other conceptual insights. In this context, the articles raise questions about the discourses and practices of the SDGs, especially in relation to how they can: define the limits of what can be said and what can be done; shape development logics through notions of division and forms of exclusion; construct political problems as technical problems; create certain spaces of imagination as a field of activity; and endorse particular ideas and forms of knowledge in models for sustainable development. The contributions to this special issue derive from a diverse range of critical scholarship that draws on Lacanian, Marxist, Gramscian, Foucauldian, and decolonial intellectual traditions. Indeed, as ‘global goals’¹ that seek to apply themselves to the whole world (this is distinct from the MDGs, which focused almost purely on ‘the developing world’; Death & Gabay, 2015), the SDGs provide scholars working in these traditions with a much broader scope within which to explore the political, social, and economic contours of the SDG agenda as they pertain to lived poverty, and economic and environmental catastrophe across the world. Here, perhaps, the affective dimensions of the SDGs have to be acknowledged as not only generating particular subjectivities but also offering a sense of a world that is moving on a particular pathway and towards something that can produce a sustainable, goal-oriented, and ‘better’ world.

Bearing similarity to the 2015 special forum, the authors of this collection of articles seek to look beyond international development policy as a banal set of technocratic fixes for poverty. However, although sitting in a tradition of extreme scepticism concerning stated developmentalist agendas (i.e. Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1994; Gabay, 2012; Harcourt, 2009; Ilcan & Phillips, 2010; Lazar, 2012; Loftsdóttir, 2016; Rist, 1997/2014; Stoler, 2008), the articles have also been written within a context where the articulation of what development means, who it should be practised by, and what its ends should be has probably never been so contested across such a broad range of actors. As with diverse, small and large-scale movements in the past (e.g. Escobar, 1995; Nilsen, 2015; Sinha, 2003; Vergara-Camus, 2014), a variety of peoples’ movements continue to question and oppose some of the more egregious environmental and social devastations of the historical international development project. Questions have been raised, however, even within the centres of development orthodoxy. For example, we have seen the re-emergence of actors funnelling aid to low-income countries under very different sets of conditionalities (i.e. China, or the much-mooted ‘BRICS Bank’). Similarly, we have witnessed a growing questioning of the ‘growth at all costs’ paradigm that has explicitly and implicitly driven developmentalist agendas in years gone by, a critique that has even emerged from the International Monetary Fund.² Clearly then, however we define the logics embedded in contemporary development orthodoxy, they do not usher forth into a political or economic vacuum.

In this issue, several authors focus on the politico-economic dimensions of the SDGs, and acknowledge the governance and power relations associated with neoliberal agendas. In this regard, Susanne Soederberg’s article, entitled, ‘Universal access to affordable housing: Interrogating an elusive development goal’, engages in a discursive analysis of core policy documents of leading development institutions and global business organizations that link to the self-actualizing discourse of neoliberalism in which global housing goals are framed. Alongside her critical insights into access to affordable housing, Soederberg advances the argument that power relations have sought to reframe global housing goals in the processes and practices of neoliberalism, such as in the ability to frame the problem of housing exclusion as one almost exclusively relating to slums in the Global South without recognizing that many poor people do not live in slums but are forced to reside elsewhere due to costs and various types of social exclusion. While access to adequate and affordable shelter has long been a basic human right, the ambiguous aim of SDG 11—make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable—is shaped, she argues, by neoliberalism, including its ability to de-historicize and de-politicize social and economic relations. Instead of calling into question the underlying premises of the neoliberal housing agenda, some governing actors, such as corporations, are playing a crucial role in rebranding neoliberalism under the rubric of risk management and in fostering the global development project wherein housing strategies are bordered and forged in the confines of a business model. It may, therefore, not be surprising that the core institutions and policies linked to the SDG 11 (and to the MDG 7–11) do not recommend collective responses to the housing shortage such as cooperatives. Soederberg argues that the solutions to the lack of affordable and adequate housing for vulnerable populations promote the importance of private property and individualized self-help strategies that rely on businesses and minimum state involvement.

Michael Spann’s article, entitled, ‘Politics of poverty: The post-2015 sustainable development goals and the business of agriculture’ concentrates on sustainability in relation to agriculture and its role in poverty reduction and development. The author reveals how the interests of agribusiness are aligned and advanced through a problematic conception of sustainability that underpins the SDGs. In his focus on the agricultural aspects of the SDGs, he advances the argument that the ‘agriculture for development’ agenda ensures that the interests of agribusiness are premised on a highly contested neoliberal approach to development, one that naturalizes food scarcity imaginaries as the justification for the expansion of global agricultural value chains. This agenda, he maintains, is also premised on a framing of smallholder farmers as ‘backwards’, inefficient, and non-productive which in turn renders these farmers and their practices as obstacles to development. While the author acknowledges that the SDGs would have been an opportunity to bring together state and private sector support in a way that could support actual sustainable development, he recognizes the failure of this form of development under the SDGs. However, he emphasizes the global alter-development movement of people who are creating dynamic self-conscious alternatives to the SDGs and other conventional approaches to development. This is a movement underscored by the food sovereignty movement, which advances alternatives to industrially based systems of production, consumption, and distribution of food, and revolves around grassroots organizations playing an active role in countering mainstream explanations of hunger, redesigning food systems, and advancing wider political ideas about the development project and sustainable agriculture that would potentially lead towards a more socially just world.

Bearing similarity to Soederberg’s and Spann’s emphasis on the links between the SDGs and a neoliberal approach to development, Nora McKeon’s article, entitled, ‘Are equity and sustainability a likely outcome when foxes and chickens share the same coop? Critiquing the concept of multistakeholder governance of food security,’ focuses on the modalities and implications of the arrival of multistakeholderism on issues of governance. In moving out of corporate boardrooms and into the space of global governance in the mid-1990s, and becoming intimately connected to goal 17 of the SDGs, multistakeholderism, the author emphasizes, is a form of governance. She reveals how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and multistakeholder standard setting initiatives are based on the logic of the best interest of businesses to ‘act responsibly’ with regard to environmental and social issues. In the governance context, the author is critical of the UN and its championing of CSR and multistakeholder approaches through initiatives such as the Global Compact and the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. We are reminded that the mulitstakeholder approach tends to privilege the framing of the common good in terms of the neoliberal principles of market competition, efficiency, and productivity over alternative civic visions such as those based on solidarity.

In her article, entitled, ‘Politics of “leaving no one behind”: Contesting the 2030 sustainable development goals agenda’, Heloise Weber takes up the SDG incantation of ‘Leave no one Behind’ (UN, 2016). Arguing that the SDGs are explicitly drawn around a highly contested neoliberal agenda, Weber suggests that achieving sustainable development becomes an impossibility given the role played by deregulatory and liberalized economic and social policies in creating unsustainable development in the first place. Furthermore, Weber argues that ‘leaving no one behind’ is an explicit project of compulsion; that everyone ought to be a part of this project, which is called sustainable, even when it is not. It is in, and because of this compulsion that Weber finds the prospects for resistance and rearticulation. In a similar vein to Weber, Samid Suliman explores the contradiction that lies at the heart of SDGs as they relate to international migration. Whilst the presence of migration in the SDGs appears a major step forward from the absence regarding migration in the MDGs and targets, Suliman suggests that migration remains subordinated to the drive towards accumulation and growth in the SDGs, a drive that itself has been responsible for the long-term growth in numbers of economic refugees. Suliman shows how the presence of migration in the SDGs is a means by which migrants can be indexed according to their potential contributions to economic accumulation and growth. This depoliticizes the factors that serve to propel people to migrate, whilst simultaneously underpinning and perpetuating these very same factors. As a result, migrants cannot, under current conditions, conform to the normative agenda that the SDGs hold out for migrants, that is, economically productive, development actors.

A final contribution that explores the contradictions at the heart of the SDG’s neoliberal agenda is from Kalpana Wilson. In this article, entitled, ‘Re-centering “race” in development: Population policies and global capital accumulation in the era of the SDGs’, Wilson examines the discursive and material processes of racialization that emerges through the resurgence and reframing of population policy in the context of the SDGs. In particular, she brings attention to the key drivers of the FP2020 ‘global family planning strategy’ initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the British government. The analysis brings attention to the colonial and Cold War histories of population control and policies, and the emergence of contemporary approaches which connect climate changes, conflict, and migration to population growth. Wilson reveals that through a renewed stress on population growth in the SDG era, population strategies and policies are enmeshed in efforts for their expansion, rely on embodied coercion and violence which is racialized and gendered, and have adverse implications for women’s reproductive health and lives.

A final dual set of articles address the SDGs from a perspective of what they ‘do’ and what they represent. In their article, entitled ‘Decoupling: A key fantasy of the post-2015 sustainable development agenda’, Robert Fletcher and Crelis Rammelt suggest that the commitment to decoupling economic growth from its historical environmental impact found in the SDGs is so self-evidently contentious and unachievable that a Lacanian psychoanalytical approach is required to unpick the presence of such a central theme in contemporary international development policy and practice. In their article, they argue that decoupling serves as a ‘fantasy’ by which fundamental tensions between the goals of poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and profitable enterprise (tensions that decoupling is meant to reconcile) can be obfuscated. As such, a persistent belief in decoupling, despite the doubts that surround it even amongst its advocates, serves to sustain faith in the possibility of attaining sustainable development within the context of a neoliberal capitalist economy necessitating continual growth to confront inherent contradictions.

Finally, in their article entitled, ‘The affective politics of the sustainable development goals: Partnership, capacity-building, and big data,’ Clive Gabay and Suzan Ilcan suggest that theories of affect are a productive approach to understanding the SDGs, and the historical development project more broadly. Although used widely in security studies, and the study of emotions and the international, Gabay and Ilcan argue that theories of affect have been under-utilized as a framing approach in development studies. With a focus on how international development has been historically concerned with producing ‘capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 1), Gabay and Ilcan define affect as a ‘force’ composed of embodied resonances and intensities that circulate socially between and through bodies to create new intimate connections, imaginations, and certain kinds of citizens, be they entrepreneurial, fearful, or otherwise. In this article, they suggest that SDGs exemplify an affective agenda in three main ways, via ‘participation’, ‘capacity building’, and ‘big data’. In each case, Gabay and Ilcan argue that these agendas aim to affect pre-social objects into particular, governed social beings, who will engage in ‘empowered’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviour.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clive Gabay

Clive Gabay is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He has interests in the political sociology of international development, and the historical sociology of Whiteness, as refracted through the public production of ideas about Africa in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain. His most recent book, Exploring an African civil society: Development and democracy in Malawi, 1994–2014, was published by Lexington Books in 2016.

Suzan Ilcan

Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research focuses on international development and humanitarian aid, migration and refugee studies, and citizenship and social justice. She is the author of Longing in belonging: The cultural politics of settlement (Praeger), co-author of Issues in social justice: Citizenship and transnational struggles (Oxford UP) and Governing the poor: Exercises of poverty reduction, practices of aid (McGill-Queen’s UP), and editor of Mobilities, knowledge, and social justice (McGill-Queen’s UP).

Notes

1 See one of the United Nations' SDG websites: http://www.globalgoals.org/.

2 This is not to say that the IMF has suddenly rejected economic growth as a working paradigm. This is clear from the IMF's role in entrenching austerity policies in Greece. Nonetheless, public pronouncements from the IMF about the universal efficacy of austerity and neoliberalism (Ostry, Loungani, & Furceri, 2016) indicate that organizations such as the IMF are not homogeneous actors lacking in any internal politics (for an analysis that draws this complexity out with regards to the World Bank, see Sande Lie, 2015, and for how dissenting voices have been shut down in the past, Broad, 2007).