This is not the first time it will have missed, by the way. International development types will recall that the Millennium Development Goals laid out in 2000 as guideposts for 2015 were mostly missed too.
We could trundle along this path until the end of the decade to discover then that we failed, again, to measure up to our expectations of global prosperity. But perhaps it’s time for a rethink?
As the consequences of climate change roar into view — reminding us, by the way, of our collective failure to meet carbon emissions targets — and the COVID pandemic leaves us wondering what our next unanticipated risk will be, it’s time to re-evaluate how we try to engineer future wellbeing.
Goals like the SDGs are meant to be aspirational and ambitious. (Bloomberg LP has incorporated the SDGs in its sustainability strategy, which is outlined in the Bloomberg Impact Report 2020.) Yet rebounding from one missed target to the next seems pretty pointless. Indeed, it can undermine the notion of collective action. It risks inuring the world’s consciousness to mass destitution; to levels of poverty, sickness and death that should remain unacceptable. If we care about sustainable development, we should try to bring it about in a different way.
Just consider the scale of the failure. The first, and perhaps most important goal, was to put an end to extreme poverty, defined today as scratching by on less than $2.15 a day, in 2017 dollars at purchasing power parity. In 2019, the last year with complete data, it afflicted 8.5% of the world’s population, down from 10.8% in 2015.
If it had maintained that downward pace, it would have hit around 4.4% by 2030, which adds up to nearly 400 million extremely poor people. And it won’t: In 2020, the Covid pandemic sent poverty soaring around the world.
There’s lots more. By 2030, all girls and boys were supposed to “complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.” By 2019 only 36% had achieved a minimum proficiency in reading and only 51.6% hit the target in math, percentages that were not much different from when the goals were first written four years earlier. Covid then made things worse.
Big chunks of the world are nowhere near gaining universal access to modern energy services. The least developed countries are not close to achieving economic growth of at least 7%. Maternal mortality was supposed to fall to 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. In 2020, though, 223 mothers per 100,000 died during childbirth. At the current pace of improvement the death rate will still exceed 200 seven years from now.
The SDGs didn’t even work as advertising, to draw attention to the needs of the world. Measured by the relative popularity of Google searches on the subject, interest in the US ranks at a level of 2 out of 100, compared to 72 in Zimbabwe. And even in Zimbabwe the goals are kind of unimportant: There are nearly eight searches for HIV for each search on the SDGs.
The whole goal-setting process was about mobilizing effort. Rich nations were supposed to dip into their pocket to offer developing countries financial support toward the goal of a better global future, raising their aid budget to the long-unmet target of 0.7% of GDP. This would somehow mobilize oodles more in private finance. Money would flow.
Alas, it didn’t. Even adding contributions related to Covid and the war in Ukraine, official development assistance from rich countries only reached halfway to the target. And the private sector wasn’t interested either.
Perhaps these shortcomings were to be expected. As Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development pointed out, the goals “demanded progress way outside any historical norm.” But there might be ways to map out a global strategy toward shared wellbeing that is not engineered from the start for failure.
The most obvious lesson, brought up even back in the day by some of the more exasperated participants in the SDGs’ inception, is that it might be a good idea to stick to objectives that can be translated into targets subject to measurement. “Ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature,” aka Goal 12.8, or its neighbor at 16.6, “develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels,” do not.
The process to determine the SDGs was, to put it mildly, messy. Intended as improved successors to the MDGs concocted in the office of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general at the time, the SDGs were supposed to represent a global consensus of what sustainable development means. That meant everybody had a say.
That also means that the list of goals is almost comically long. They include promoting public-private partnerships, ensuring macroeconomic stability, enhancing “North-South, South-South and triangular, regional and international cooperation” in science, technology and innovation, and ensuring “access for small scale artisanal fishers to marine resources and markets.”
They include stuff outside the currently accepted bounds of international cooperation. Perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a national government to invite the SDG people in to help “ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision making at all levels.”
Joking aside, these sorts of lists are not just too long and mushy. They fail to target what we know about what can help deliver wellbeing.
Consider the one millennium goal that was accomplished: reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015. That came about mostly because China successfully inserted itself into the global economy, entering the WTO and riding an export-led economic boom that freed millions of Chinese from poverty. International goal setting and cooperation had little to do with it.
It is worth considering that future prosperity will depend mostly on what developing countries do themselves. International expertise and money may be critical to address targeted, specific challenges — think malaria, pneumococcal infection or HIV. But multinational coordination of the kind the development goals hoped to bring about does not produce development.
This is a valuable lesson. As climate change barrels into the present, the global effort to curtail carbon emissions threatens to take over the entire international agenda.
A narrow, limited, precise set of measurable development goals meets this moment much better than the sprawling blob bequeathed to us by the sustainable development dream of 2015. They should be put together in a hurry. Otherwise, the climate emergency will hoover up all the money and attention that might be otherwise available to eliminate extreme poverty and ensure the survival of mothers in the poorer corners of world.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
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• Solar Plans Run Into a Chinese Wall: Liam Denning
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of “American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise” and “The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.”
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