The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were created as a global plan for ‘peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future’. As a successor for the Millennium Development Goals, they were created to provide global targets and indicators to create steps towards this agreed upon goal. The SDGs are active from 2015-2030 and so may be implemented in many ways and formats towards the overall goal. As they have great potential to involve society in sustainable development, will their interactive beginnings influence how they may be implemented around the world?

The goals were the cumulation of decades of work by the UN and member states, they were devised using a consultation programme and an open working group (OWG) of representatives from 70 countries that were then negotiated and finalised. To create the goals the OWG were given a briefing for them to be “limited in number, aspirational and easy to communicate, addressing all three dimensions of sustainable development (social, economic and environmental)”.

The creation was a highly focused, intense process with a methodology to ‘Ensure the full involvement of relevant stakeholders and expertise from civil society, the scientific community and the United Nations system in its work, in order to provide a diversity of perspectives and experience’. For this, the OWG worked with UN expert groups, and inter-agency technical support teams  to reach the eventual goals.

They were designed to represent the global complexity of issues, meaning that success in one area will have multiple eventualities in other targets. These goals offer a stable framework for development in the absence of scientific certainty across individuals and smaller facets within a larger problem, these uncertainties are often associated with post normal science. Whilst the complexity in these challenges is often recognised (Leach et al. 2010) it can be difficult to use this to create successful solutions rather than narrower ineffective options such as those that can be seen in green-washing, a strategy where companies use symbolic communication rather than substantive actions (Walker & Wan, 2011).

In the resulting goals a science to society linear approach is inappropriate, not simply because of differing cultural contexts, but because the inputs/outcomes of targets and indicators is societal success. Universality in this instance therefore cannot be applicable due the variety and individual validity of cultures worldwide (Sismondo, 2010). The framework created is enhanced by the Division for Sustainable Development Goals who support participation of stakeholders and further supports this by facilitating and monitoring multi-stakeholder partnerships and voluntary commitments.

References

• Leach, M., Scoones, I. and Stirling, A. (2010). Dynamic sustainabilities. London: Earthscan, p.2.
• Sismondo, S. (2010). An introduction to science and technology studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, p.23.
• Walker, K. and Wan, F. (2011). The Harm of Symbolic Actions and Green-Washing: Corporate Actions and Communications on Environmental Performance and Their Financial Implications. Journal of Business Ethics, 109(2), pp.227-242.

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