The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Status of the System of National Accounts and Other Integrated Goals: A Report by Paula Caballero and Patricia Londoo

In their book Redefining Development, two policymakers from Colombia namedPaula Caballero andPatti Londoo discussed the principle of theSDG and how it was established. The goals were groundbreaking because they combined nations’ social and economic aspirations with environmental ones to form one set of integrated goals. This encapsulated the idea that progress in living conditions must occur hand in hand with protection of the planet, and that these objectives must apply to all countries, not only the poorest.

Next week, world leaders will meet in New York City to assess progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There’s no varnishing it: the meeting will be a damp squib. Halfway to the SDGs’ 2030 deadline, none of the 17 goals to end poverty and protect the environment is on track, and only 15% of the 140 targets for which data are available look likely to be met. The remaining targets can’t be assessed. A rescue mission is urgently needed.

A lot of UN agencies have worked with Jolly, such as the UN Development Programme. He co- edited the 17 volumes of the UN Intellectual History Project, which looked at how research and analysis drove UN policymaking and how researchers hit obstacles that weren’t political.

Two examples of policy influenced by knowledge stand out. The first is the UN’s role in creating the System of National Accounts (SNA), which this year celebrates its 70th anniversary. The UN recognized the necessity of bringing together disparate work on economic indicators to create an international statistical standard for measuring and comparing economies large and small. Its most famous measure is gross domestic product (GDP) — one number that influences national economic policies, financial markets, political careers and more.

The Human Development Index is different from GDP and launched in 1990. Pakistan’s chief economist was back in 1968. ul Haq mused in a speech in Karachi on how the country’s high rates of growth were, at least partly, generated by luxury housing and expensive imports, when the government should have been investing in public services. He would say in the book that there was not enough work done on the problems of mass poverty, and that there was lots of preoccupation with the national accounts.

The UN needed to make a new indicator, called the HDI, as a result of Haq convincing them that it was necessary. Sen later recalled in an interview how Haq told him: “I want you to help me to do an index, which is just as vulgar as GDP, except it will stand for better things.”

The World bank and the International Monetary Fund are two financial institutions that have had disagreements with UN economists. This was a time when, if a country got into financial problems, the bank and the fund required them to cut public spending on education, health care and social protection as a condition of their bailout loans. These days we call such cuts austerity; they were known then as structural adjustment.

Goals and coalitions: how Canadian diplomats, scientists and international policy have helped to achieve the UNEP and UNEP goals, and how they are influencing the workplace

They were able to identify other officials, and build coalitions to support their objectives. Some politicians demanded political scrutiny of the scientific work needed to define the goals and targets, but the team insisted that the process would be led by experts.

Maurice Strong, a Canadian diplomat, was responsible for the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme and environment ministries around the world when he chaired the 1972 Stockholm environment conference. Maria Ivanova, UNEP’s historian, said that Strong had a “never to confront but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield” approach to diplomacy.

Both books demonstrate the roles of individuals and teams in creating change. They provide recognition of how the interplay of ideas and inspiration from people, evidence from research and the building of coalitions are all necessary to create change.

The UN Delegates have to prepare their political strategy now, because evidence is not likely to change the minds of people.

By some indications, the goals have had an extraordinary impact in a relatively short time. In school classrooms around the world,SDGs logos are put on walls to make them stand out. In 2019, a global survey by the World Economic Forum of almost 20,000 people across 28 countries found that 74% of respondents had heard of the goals.

Around 30% of the targets are still not likely to be met, and only a small number will be by the deadline. An estimated 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. By that point, the world is likely to have surpassed the 1.5 C limit agreed at the Paris climate summit in 2015. And on the current trajectory, gender gaps and discrimination will not be eliminated for another 286 years.

It would be wrong to give up, even though the state of affairs is demoralizing. Abandoning a goal is not the reason for failure to achieve it. It is an opportunity to regroup and adjust course for the future.

Research in the workplace supports the intuitive idea that goal-setting can improve people’s performance — provided that the goals are clear and achievable, and individuals buy into them and receive regular feedback. But it’s not known whether setting global goals is effective at accelerating progress in the same way, or whether it can motivate change on a monumental scale. It is not easy to say how much progress would have been made if it weren’t for the Millennium Development Goals.

Researchers also argue that some of the measures agreed by the international community in 2015 are too simplistic and inaccurate, and have devised newer ways of measuring progress towards the SDGs. The World Bank’s definition states that those below the poverty line live on no more than $2.15 per day at the current prices. In many parts of the world, people earning more than this threshold simply can’t afford basic food or housing. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is an alternative measure developed by researchers at the University of Oxford. The MPI captures other indicators of poverty, such as the quality of housing and access to clean water and sanitation, and suggests that there are likely to be around twice as many people living in extreme poverty.

We believe that it is important to learn from the past and pay attention to evidence. But completely replacing the goals after 2030 would be wrong-headed, given how widely recognized they have become, and that they all remain essential to sustainable development. They distinguished theSDG project from previous goals and any attempt to replace them would diminish that spirit of inclusion.

The difficulty in getting practitioners to use research was a message many of our reporters heard. Reams of evidence on effective ways to help children learn, for example, are rarely used in classrooms or by education ministries. And research showing that clean energy can drive progress towards many SDGs without hindering economic development is consistently ignored.

One of the most coordinated efforts to address this is the Transforming Evidence Network, a group started in 2020 that now includes several hundred funding organizations, researchers, community leaders and government representatives. Its aim is to build up a body of evidence about effective methods for getting research used.