Agenda 2030:
Australia's Disappearing Development Goals
Between 2000 and 2015, the world coalesced around eight measurable objectives. These were the low-hanging fruit of global development, where a concerted and concentrated effort could have an outsized impact. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) became a catch-cry for development organisations and governments globally. Posters hung in classrooms and rock-stars performed in their honour.
By 2015, then SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon announced that “the MDGS helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, to make inroads against hunger, to enable more girls to attend school than ever before and to protect our planet.” In short, they were hailed as “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history.”
Even before they began, the MDGS were an historic achievement. Positioning global poverty in a human rights framework, and getting buy-in from 192 nations, was a consensus the likes of which had never been achieved before.
William Easterly, aid critic and author of
[The SDGS] include 17 goals, made up of 169 targets, tracked by 230 key indicators, and with an achievement horizon of the year 2030.
White Man's Burden, wrote in 2015 that “the MDGS were so appealing because they were so precise and measurable.” Indeed, their initial success was in avoiding theoretical differences over the sources and nature of human rights, and of the genesis of injustice; focusing instead on concrete, undeniably ‘good' and importantly, achievable goals.
Sequels are never easy, but the steps to take after the MDGS were at least clear. The prevailing opinion was that the MDGS had had their biggest impact in stable nations already on a positive path. Whatever followed would need to tackle the harder question of how life may be improved for those in fragile contexts, or in the midst of conflict, those with disability or otherwise marginalised, those in rural and remote areas, and of course, for women, whom “progress tends to bypass.”
In his report on the effectiveness of the MDGS, Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon concluded that to do that more complex work, future programs would need “to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.”
If that weren't already a more complex task, Ban's key advisor in the development of the MDGS, economist Jeffrey Sachs, described the next difficult chapter of development sitting within the context of a collision course between an ever-expanding global economy, population and consumption, and the very finite boundaries and resources of the earth itself.
As we know, the subsequent set of global goals was named the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). They include 17 goals, made up of 169 targets, tracked by 230 key indicators, and with an achievement horizon of the year 2030…
Certainly these goals would have to tread a more difficult and uncertain path than their forebears. However, few would have predicted the editorial from influential global magazine, The Economist that described the SDGS as “worse than useless” and “a betrayal of the world's poor.”
Throughout the MDGS, economically more developed nations like Australia saw themselves as funders, encouragers and spectators of the global mission.
In contrast, the SDGS sought to be relevant to all countries, in two critical ways. One: that even the most advanced nations were meeting the sustainability and equity goals across their own citizens; and two, to elicit their active participation in changing their patterns of behaviour and addressing systems that created and enshrined global poverty and injustice globally.
The marker of this new era of involvement was to be a global flag raising launch, designed to showcase the entire world community engaging with these new goals. Flags were raised by children in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, by United Nations representatives in Pyongyang, North Korea, by the Crown Princess Mary, in Copenhagen,
Denmark and by twin pandas, Qiciao and Qixi in Chengdu, China; both to adoring crowds.
The flag for Goal 17, Strengthening Global Partnerships, even flew above Number 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Even the likes of Beyonce, One Direction and Usain Bolt were enlisted to drum up the world's attention.
By contrast, the launch of the flag for Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, scheduled for Sydney was a damp and dismal affair. A small gathering of people braved heavy winds and torrential rain to stand in the foreground of the then controversial Barangaroo development on the shores of Sydney Harbour, only to see the authorities decide the inclement weather made it too dangerous for the flag to be raised at all.
This seems to have been an omen for the future. In the 5 years since the flag-raising episode, Australia's response to the SDGS has likewise been a non-starter.
In a February 2019 report on the Sustainable Development Goals to the Australian Senate's Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, the SDGS were described by one observer as “invisible in Australia.”
Seven months later, a global IPSOS survey on awareness of the SDGS found that just 51% of Australians knew of their existence, compared with three
In creating the SDGS the pendulum swung from the simplicity of the MDGS to complexity, blown by the gale force wind of global participation.
JUST 16% OF AUSTRALIANS ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE GOALS
quarters of the global population. More alarmingly, just 16% of Australians are familiar with the goals.
When faced with a clear example of not living up to external commitments, it's always easiest to deflect the blame. That is true for the office worker who is late for a meeting because of ‘traffic' or a ‘late train' just as it is for nations and world leaders falling behind on the progress required to meet the audacious goals set out by the SDGS.
As such, the prevailing critique has long been that the SDGS are sprawling and intangible – and as a result have seen low levels of engagement from economically more developed nations. While this is certainly true to some extent, there is much more to the lack of energy in the take up of the SDGS here in Australia and in the developed nations of the world.
No target left behind
It must be said at the outset that the SDGS' final, sprawling list of 17 goals and 169 targets, cannot be without blame for the subsequent lack of focus from nations like Australia. William Easterly gave a withering assessment of this aspect of the SDGS upon their launch in 2015;
“Unlike the MDGS, the SDGS are so encyclopedic that everything is top priority, which means nothing is a priority: “Sport is also an important enabler of sustainable development.” “Recognize and value … domestic work … and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household.” It's unclear how the U.N. is going to get more women to play soccer and more men to do the dishes.”
He goes on to describe the goals as unactionable, unquantifiable and unattainable. Easterly's assessment was reinforced by Mark Suzman, the President of Global Policy and Advocacy at the Gates Foundation, who jokingly mocked the “no child left behind” mantra of the SDGS, instead as “no target left behind.” Some five years after the implementation of the SDGS, one of the key complaints remains that the goals are diffuse, and intangible.
It is unclear to what extent those within the group who established the SDGS understood the complexity of the list they were creating. In fact, after such a wide consultation and the involvement of all member states, having a list of only 17 was seen by many inside the walls as a triumph. Paula Caballero, then Colombia's representative to the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development, described it in detail:
The Open Working Group, in the end, gave voice to all 193 Member States as well as innumerable well-informed constituencies. It was by far the most participatory process in the history of the UN. It ultimately agreed to only 17 goals – only one more than the draft that an eminent group of 23 experts came up with. This is nothing short of a most remarkable miracle.
The conventional wisdom says that in creating the SDGS the pendulum swung from the simplicity of the MDGS to complexity, blown by the gale force wind of global participation. On the surface, that explanation is completely understandable and certainly one part of the truth.
But, conventional wisdom, particularly in the world of community development, would also hold that early participation is a strong indicator of future involvement. Surely the incredible global participation in establishing the SDGS paved the way for fuller integration than even the MDGS? The answer is a little more complicated, and requires a look under the hood of the global participation project that seeded the SDGS.
Tipping the balance
For all their tangibility, one enduring critique of the MDGS was, as Easterly
The SDGS launched into a very different world than their forebears. The MDGS came to life in a period of remarkable global optimism.
continues self-effacingly, that they “gave far too much attention to middleaged white male experts in the West debating what should be done for the rest of the world.”
It is for that reason that the lead-in to the creation of the SDGS prioritised the work of global engagement. The process of gathering the voices of the world was done both offline and online, with the intent of reaching as many diverse perspectives as possible.
The consultation process received more than nine million submissions off the back of a global campaign that was backed by community partners like Scouts, and corporate partners like Coca-cola. Each submission handed over, whether virtually or physically, gave voice to each individual to share the world they wanted to see by 2030. Reflecting on the engagement process, Amina Mohammed, then a Special Advisor to the Secretary General remembers; “There were scouts and girl guides who went out to the remotest of places with paper and pencil and asked other young people for their views. That was a huge task and gave us amazing feedback.” As one example, in Nigeria alone, the National Youth Corps gathered 150,000 votes from 77 districts in the country.
However, perhaps a victim of both the success and perceptions of their predecessor, engagement of the populations of Very High Income nations in the consultation process was alarmingly lower.
While nearly seven of the nine million submissions came from low and medium Human Development Index (HDI) nations, less than 500,000 came from nations ranked very high on the HDI. Just 81,000 submissions are recorded from the people of the United States, and 73,000 from Australia. More alarmingly, despite being champions for the creation of the goals, having provided funding to catalyse the consultation program, less than 40,000 submissions were received from the United Kingdom.
Certainly the ability of the engagement process to consult voices often unheard in global programming is more than admirable, and the global engagement process was just one element of submission gathering, with more formal means for submissions to occur through civil society and political leadership.
However, the data shows that the lack of public engagement from very high HDI nations, including Australia, was not simply a reaction to the goals but evident before their existence, in the process of their creation. This is proof positive that it is not enough to blame the final list of goals for their reduced global engagement; there is something deeper at play.
When the wind blows
The SDGS launched into a very different world than their forebears. The MDGS came to life in a period of remarkable global optimism. Not only were western economies strong and strengthening, but the turn of the millennium set minds to bigger visions. Most noticeable in the early years of the MDGS was the success of the Jubilee campaign to forgive the debt of the world's poorest nations.
Many poorer nations were locked into crippling debts to wealthier nations, which limited their domestic development. They could choose to pay for health, education and development programs and repudiate loans leading to economic collapse or they could pay the ballooning interest payments often amounting near to half their Gross National Income. They could not do both.
Civil society mobilised, and at the G8 Summit in Gleneagle, Scotland there was a historic waiving of debt by the world's biggest economies. That decision met, or catalysed a wind in the sails toward the MDGS. The optimism was bolstered and spread further by the Make Poverty History movement, which captured a defiant yet politically-optimistic public mood; if we the people speak up, world leaders will act and our biggest global problems can be solved!
By contrast, the SDGS were envisaged in a completely different mood, set against a headwind not a tailwind. The Global Financial Crisis had hit in 2008 and most nations, including Australia, were meeting the looming disaster by turning inwards.
In the mind of many, nearly a decade of optimistic global cooperation had led to a fiscal cliff. Leaders had fallen prey to the lure of major stages, international summits and celebrity endorsements, forgetting their true constituents. In Western nations there was a noticeable backlash against the cosmopolitan elites, as blue collar jobs moved offshore. The mood was now nationalist not internationalist, and identity politics driven by ethno-religious sympathies replaced the global village ideology as the driving force in politics.
In the United States, this force took time to take root. The global phenomenon of Obama's meteoric rise and election in 2008 was quickly met by the formation of the grassroots Tea Party, who by the midterms had gathered enough clout to overthrow a significant number of incumbents, by directing an estimated 5 million additional votes for their chosen conservative, nationalist candidates.
In Australia, the headwind was just as clear. In 2013, Tony Abbott was elected on a set of clear campaign promises that turned the globalist tendencies of his predecessors, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard into a public weakness. He ran to “Stop the Boats” and “End the Carbon Tax”..
When the carbon tax was repealed
For an export-oriented middle power that depends on the international trade rules for its prosperity, the anti-globalist sentiment seems both short-sighted and misdirected.
the following year, our nation became the first in the world to walk back carbon-limiting legislation. The isolationist mood didn't cease there, with the first Abbott budget, in 2014, decimating Australian Aid by cutting it to its lowest level in history.
This was, in his words, “a budget emergency” yet 20% of the savings came from our overseas development aid, which already comprised less than 1% of the Federal Budget.
When we consider the lack of engagement from Australia during the consultation period of the SDGS, these are the factors we must consider. At the very time the global order was pushing to engage people and communities around the world, our leaders were daily selling us the need to turn inward, to wind up the drawbridge and bunker down. If you weren't captured by that message, it's more than likely that your faith in political leaders of any persuasion was falling, and falling fast.
Since then the headwind hasn't slowed. The rise of ethno-populists like Duterte and Modi in Asia, Trump and the Brexiteers in the US and UK, and parties like Alternative for Germany, Freedom Party in Austria and National Front in France are all proof of that.
Closer to home our leaders are certainly not in the same league as these ethno-authoritarians, but the populist cues of the likes of Trump certainly aren't missed. Within a
fortnight, Prime Minister Morrison used an address at the United Nations to call out Australia's “internal and global critics on climate change” who, he stated “willingly overlook or ignore our achievements” and then a Lowy Institute address, titled “In Our Interest” to argue against;
“any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”
He continued to warn against a new breed of “globalism that seeks to elevate global institutions above the authority of nation states to direct national policies.” While it wasn't as direct, and was certainly more articulate, it thematically echoed President Trump's speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he declared that “America is governed by Americans...we reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism.”
That position, from a superpower that believes might is right is somewhat understandable, but for an exportoriented middle power that depends on the international trade rules for its prosperity, the anti-globalist sentiment seems both short-sighted and misdirected.
Political analyst, Karim Raslan described the last decade, which covers the planning, consultation and launch of the SGDS, as one marked by collective amnesia of the dangers of authoritarianism and isolationism. He argues that “when politics becomes shaped by inward-looking nationalism, the loudest and most provocative voices are rewarded.”
In an era of self-centred bluster and swagger, the SDGS, with their ‘gold standard' consultative approach, landed the high-octane rhetoric with specific goals and measures. The SDG'S were at risk of flying over problems and differences like an international plane at 50,000 feet where everything on earth looks similar from that height. But they landed this plane.
The home front
The SDG report to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Resources Committee from February 2019 provides a clear and succinct summary of our national
interpretation and implementation of the SDGS;
While Australia is supporting other countries to implement the SDGS through its aid program, the committee firmly believes that Australia also needs to concentrate on domestic implementation to make the most of the opportunities presented by the agenda.
As a step beyond the commitment of the MDGS, the SDGS bind both first world and poorer nations to report back to their global peers on their progress. When that report, Transforming Australia, was released in 2018 it found that just one third of the assessed indicators were on track to being achieved.
The Chair of the National Sustainable Development Council, Professor John Thwaites, said on the release of the reports that “it is clear that Australia has a considerable way to go to achieving most of the UN'S Sustainable Development Goals and that this will require a major change from business as usual.”
We find it easy to commit to an international accord that provides us a framework, and a distant ceiling, for the scope of our overseas development assistance. However, we are certainly less comfortable with the idea that those same standards would affect, or even inform, our own sovereign decisions.
The systemic and interrelated issues targeted by the SDGS require of countries not only to be external benefactors, but to make decisions and compromises that lead to changes on the domestic front. Right now, where this hits home most clearly is the juxtaposition between continued global economic growth (Goal 8) and the preventing of further degradation of the environment (Goals 13, 14, 15).
For Australia and its leaders, this very juxtaposition between economic growth and climate action has been in sharp focus even before the onset of the catastrophic bushfire season that we have endured.
At the Pacific Island Forum in August 2019, Prime Minister Morrison was confronted by world leaders who live at the forefront of the impact of global warming. During the forum, Tuvalu's Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga said directly to Morrison, “you are concerned about saving your economy in your situation in Australia, I'm concerned about saving my people in Tuvalu.” Meanwhile, then Tongan Prime Minister 'Akilisi Pōhiva was moved to tears.
The implementation of the SDGS demands more of world leaders than its predecessor. Because of its systemic focus, it requires behaviour change from nations that have enjoyed a less constrained existence on the global stage. In that light it comes as no surprise that the SDGS are paid lipservice from leaders without actionable domestic plans.
The report to the Senate committee went further in critiquing the lack of leadership from governmental figures in the implementation of the SDGS here at home:
Individual agencies are engaging with the SDGS to different degrees without clear standards or an agreed communication strategy. Several lead and supporting agencies failed to make written submissions to the inquiry. An agency was also initially resistant to appearing at a public hearing, despite having lead responsibility for more than one goal. The committee was concerned that this did not reflect the necessary and avowed commitment and coordinated leadership on the SDG agenda. Moreover, unlike many other countries, Australia does not have
The Sustainable Development Goals can only ever be a statement of ambition unless we plan for how we will achieve them. Julie Bishop
mechanisms for coordinating the national implementation of the SDGS, such as an overarching plan, formal consultative platform or regular progress report.
In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo signed a Presidential Decree that created a national framework for all departments to map their planning alongside the SDGS. The work is being led by the Ministry for National Development. By contrast, a few hours south, Australia is lacking in leadership from a federal level, with the exception of the Department of Foreign Affairs whose focus is not on domestic implementation.
At the UN Summit Plenary Meeting for Sustainable Development in September 2015, Australia's then-Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, made a prescient point: “the Sustainable Development Goals can only ever be a statement of ambition unless we plan for how we will achieve them.”
Five years down the track, Australia needs that national implementation plan.
There are great domestic gains being made through the framework of the SDGS. Remarkably, these are not often led by the civil society community who almost take the existence of the goals for granted now. In the last five years, I've seen significant energy coming from the business community who are using the framework to reorient and redefine their social responsibility and sustainability programs to deliver better impact.
As well as universities, many of whom have taken a pledge to commit to the SDGS and are pushing research and thought leadership on their implementation; like Monash University's Institute for Sustainable Development or University of Western Sydney, who is the world hub for Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities.
Similarly, there are good things being done at all levels of government thanks to the framework provided by the SDGS. However, with 17 goals and 169 targets, and with requirements set for all layers of society from government, civic, academic and business communities alike, and with lofty ambitions for regional and global cooperation, it is a folly to suggest that in this current inward-looking global mood, the SDGS will just happen.
The many diffuse actions sparked by the SDGS need to be scaffolded by an implementation plan that builds toward improvements locally and nationally, as well as globally. It must foster interagency and cross-sector communication and cooperation and this must be led at a Federal level, and follow the ‘gold standard of participation' from the general public.
Yes, the SDGS are flawed. Yes, they are convoluted and no, they won't benefit simply from an independent international passion for globalism. They provide a roadmap to a world we all want to live in – getting there requires strong leadership and active engagement.
To lose the opportunity that they present to build a more cohesive community at home and around the world would not only be a devastating waste, it will only defer and compound the urgent challenges we're facing.
With a decade left, the time is not too late.