Flawed approach to development

World leaders have gathered in New York City for the 78th session of the High-Level Week at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), taking place from September 17–23. Leaders and other senior representatives of the UN’s 193 member states convene annually in New York to discuss the state of the world and what needs to be done to set things right.

The international community has rarely faced such an unprecedented array of challenges on a colossal scale requiring global leadership as it is now—from extreme poverty, climate change, and unconstrained artificial intelligence to Great Power tensions, destructive conflicts, and a growing global youth population in urgent need of new skills, opportunities, and, perhaps most importantly, hope.

Marking the halfway point to the deadline set for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, world leaders will adopt the SDG Summit’s Political Declaration, which seeks to provide high-level guidance on “transformative and accelerated actions” for all countries delivering on the seventeen SDGs.

Guiding this effort is the UN document, Global Sustainable Development Report 2023. This report outlines necessary shifts, not only in energy sources, consumption patterns, and supply chains but also in values, hearts, and minds. Drawing on the latest data and scientific insights, the report offers ways and means to pursue these shifts.

Unfortunately, a sobering message from the summit is that only 15 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets are on track to be achieved by 2030, leaving over 500 million people likely to still live in extreme poverty.

This raises several questions about the fundamental concept of sustainable development (SD) and the implementation of the SDGs: Is something seriously wrong with the way in which Sustainable Development (SD) has been conceptualised and is being implemented through the SDGs? Here is a checklist of what is fundamentally wrong both with SD and with the SDGs:

1. The concept of sustainable development itself, which came to the fore mainly with the Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future” (1987), has been primarily framed within mainstream economic theory. Within the framework of orthodox, neoclassical economics, in particular, this idea has been largely perverted to signify a quantitative compromise between economic growth and the need for environmental protection.

2. SD and the SDG approach attempt to mesh two conflicting goals: environmental protection and economic growth. SD places a premium on economic growth over the environment. This approach believes that only minor adjustments to the market system are needed to launch an era of environmentally sound development, which will result in the realisation of the SDGs.

3. The SD-and-SDG approach perpetuates and reaffirms questionable policies in their ethnocentric, technocentric, and anthropocentric qualities. While past approaches have failed to meaningfully address the needs, values, and cultural differences of developing countries, the current approach repeats these mistakes.

4. While Sustainable Human Development should be considered a major concern by itself and a crucial condition for the overall sustainability of the economy and society, mainstream theorising and policy implementation regarding SD are essentially concerned with the sustainability of capitalist growth and profitability.

5. Capitalism is, overwhelmingly, the main driver of planetary ecological collapse. From climate change to resource overconsumption to environmental degradation, the engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development and revolutionising technology, science, culture, and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, dredging oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, drilling/pumping out lakes of fuels, and devouring the planet’s last accessible resources to turn them all into “products”, while destroying the fragile planetary ecologies built up over aeons of time.

6. Perhaps one of the greatest failures of SD is its lack of attention to excessive consumption in the West and the unsustainability of this practice. Maximisation of profit and environmentally sustainable and equitable consumption cannot be achieved simultaneously.

7. SD and the SDGs do not look at the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. This is where the real lack of sustainability rests.

Will the SDG Summit’s Political Declaration in UNGA-78 amend the fundamental assumptions upon which SD and the SDGs are based? Unless we modify our ideas about both production and consumption and the socio-economic relations that perpetuate inequality and inequity, the world will continue to be plagued by large deficits in the realisation of the SDGs in the run-up to 2030.

(The writer is an honorary professor at Karnataka State Rural and Panchayat Raj University. )