Achieving Sustainable Development: are the SDGs fit for purpose?

The idea of “sustainable” development seems here to stay, but what does unsustainable development look like? Three members of the senior management team at the United Nations Environment Programme shared their views on how to consume sustainably, how to measure the success of the Sustainable Development Goals, and why development can sometimes occur in the wrong areas.

Margarita Astrálaga, Regional Director, UNEP Regional Office for Latin America & the Caribbean, spoke about the challenges posed by rapid urbanisation, often fuelled by the arrival of members of poor rural communities.

The developed world is equally responsible for finding more sustainable ways to live, according to Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. He pointed to rising recycling rates as “just one example of how each one of us and then collectively in our countries and as a European Union are able to reduce the footprint that we cause”. Thirty-five percent of municipal waste was recycled in Europe in 2010, compared with 23 percent in 2001.

Mr Steiner said "we are on the verge of being able to decouple some of our consumption footprint from the actual needs that we need to satisfy, and this does not imply that we suddenly close down all sorts of markets, or that we shut off the lights. It is just a different way of more consciously – and with the use of technology and innovation and economic incentives – reducing the overall footprint of our daily consumption behaviour."

On the subject of economic incentives Mr Steiner also discussed fossil fuel subsidies, challenging the idea that eliminating these (as called for in the proposed Sustainable Development Goal 12c) would disadvantage poor countries.

"Sometimes 80 percent of those subsidies only reach the richest and the well-off because they are the ones who have the largest consumption of fossil fuels," Mr Steiner said. “If you want to help the poor then try not to have a fossil fuel subsidy in general. Have targeted measures. You can have very specific target group measures that allow access to energy at a cheaper or subsidised level to those that need it, but don’t subsidise the well-off in consuming even more fossil fuels, creating even more emissions.”

In such a context, are the SDGs fit for purpose. On this question Achim Steiner said: “I think the SDG's are never going to be a perfect development theory, but considering that in just over a year the 193+ countries, member states in the United Nations General Assembly have come up with a set of sustainable development goals which they can agree - and secondly, the world is now delivering the indicators and targets to monitor their implementation and in Addis we will been negotiating and hopefully agreeing a framework for financing for development - I think could be considered a very encouraging signal.”

The SDGs have come under attack for being too numerous and too vague. The Economist called them “a mess”: “Every lobby group has pitched in for its own special interest. The targets include calls for sustainable tourism and a ‘global partnership for sustainable development complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships’, whatever that means.”

On the last point, Maryam Niamir-Fuller, UNEP’s Special Advisor to the Executive Director on Post 2015 and Sustainable Development Goals, offered an answer.

"Essentially it's focused on the partnership or the handshake between those who have and those who have not. So the partnership around financing, the partnership around technology transfer, the partnership for assisting and giving more capacity building to countries. It's no longer about a donor/recipient relationship. The paradigm absolutely has to change."

And how will the success of a ‘global partnership for sustainable development complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships’ be measured?

Ms Niamir-Fuller said much depends on the outcome of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, in Ethiopia in July. And she said more substance and nuance will be added to the definition when the SDGs are decided in New York in September.

“What is it that we are trying to measure? Is it how well commitments are met?” she asked. “Is that what we mean by the handshake, the global partnership? If so then yes, we can measure whether commitments were made or not. Does it mean that we are being more innovative in the kinds of partnerships that we wish to find? Bringing a social agenda to the economic agenda, or environment into that, in which case we would be measuring, shall we say, integration, the number of cross-sectoral activities that are happening.”

This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Alexa Frogger with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team.