The extraordinary story of how theSDG came to be was told in defiance of the system
The Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on Government Policies and Political Spending: A Memoir of the 20-Year Anniversary of the UN
The UN conference in New York the year after was the beginning of the history of theSDG. 20 years ago, the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The anniversary summit saw the delegation lead by Ms. Caballero. The UN plan to end poverty in low- and middle-income countries were part of the Millennium Development Goals that were focused on between 2000 and 2015. In Redefining Development, Caballero writes about her frustration that the MDGs had been conceived by a small number of nations and that they ignored the growing environmental crisis. “The MDGs in fact cemented the divide between countries,” write Caballero and Londoño. There was no space to acknowledge shared issues, such as deep pockets of poverty in developed countries, or to tackle the threats to the global commons.
But politicians’ response to the SDGs has been lacklustre. Starting in 2020, a team of 61 researchers scoured more than 3,000 academic studies published between 2016 and 2021 for scientific evidence that the SDGs were having an impact on politics1. The meta-analysis, led by Frank Biermann, who studies global sustainability governance at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, showed that although the SDGs were influencing political discussions, there was little evidence they were driving substantive changes in government policies or spending. To correct their course, governments must engage beyond this superficial level.
Jolly, who turns 90 next year and still does research at the Institute of Development Studies in Falmer, UK, is part of the second generation of researchers at the UN. He is old enough to have witnessed the Second World War and the resulting poverty, which influenced so many to devote their lives to the pursuit of peace and prosperity. Yet he is young enough to bring that story to today’s generations.
Two examples of policy influenced by knowledge stand out. The UN is a part of the creation of the System of National Accounts, which is 70 years old this year. The UN recognized the necessity of bringing together disparate work on economic indicators to create an international statistical standard for measuring and comparing economies large and small. GDP is one of the most famous measures that influences national economic policies, financial markets, political careers and more.
The original HDI ranked countries according to three variables: income, education and life expectancy. To do well in the HDI, nations needed to invest in things beyond those fuelling growth, such as education and health care. The HDI is now well established; Jolly eventually took over from Haq as director of its annual report in 1996. But the HDI didn’t ‘dethrone’ GDP, as its originators had intended. Members of the SNA team at the time did not take kindly to an upstart indicator, he told Nature.
And so Haq persuaded the UN that the organization needed to create a new indicator — the HDI — which he then developed with Indian economist Amartya Sen and other colleagues. Sen explained that Haq told him he wanted him to help with an index, which would stand for better things.
In 1983, he and his colleagues tried to persuade the International Monetary Fund that the policies were hurting children. Two years later, to support their argument, UNICEF, under Jolly’s leadership, commissioned a two-volume study called Adjustment with a Human Face (published in 1987). Despite this and later evidence that adjustment programmes have no positive effects on growth, and can even hamper it (see go.nature.com/3p7jazj), the UN economists failed to sway their counterparts.
Defending the Sustainable Goals for 2030 and Beyond: UNEP and Maria Ivanova’s The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution
But they persevered, identifying other officials who they could work with and building coalitions to support their objectives. Some politicians demanded political oversight of the scientific work that would be needed to define the goals and targets, but the Colombian team stood firm, insisting on a participatory process that would be led by experts.
The success of the 1972 Stockholm environment conference, chaired by a Canadian diplomat, shows how important it is to rally nearly 200 countries to agree to something completely new. In her 2021 book The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution, UNEP’s historian Maria Ivanova summarizes Strong’s approach to diplomacy as “never to confront, but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield”.
Both books demonstrate the roles of individuals and teams in creating change. They provide recognition of how the interplay of ideas and inspiration from people, evidence from research and the building of coalitions are all necessary to create change.
With the SDGs nowhere near to being achieved, the other lesson that UN delegates must take with them is to prepare their political strategy now, because evidence on its own is unlikely to change minds.
By some indications, the goals have had an extraordinary impact in a relatively short time. TheSDGs have entered the global lexicon as they are used in government and corporate plans and their logos are taped to classroom walls around the world. In 2019, a global survey by the World Economic Forum of almost 20,000 people across 28 countries found that 74% of respondents had heard of the goals.
Only about 12% of the targets are now likely to be met by the deadline, and on around 30%, progress has stagnated or gone backwards. An estimated 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. The goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C of pre-industrial temperatures was set at the Paris climate summit in 2015. It will not be possible to eliminate gender gaps and discrimination for another 286 years.
It would be wrong to give up even though the state is demoralizing. Failure to achieve a worthy goal is not a reason to abandon it. It’s a reason to study what went wrong, regroup and adjust course — for 2030 and beyond.
The UN has been setting global goals since at least the 1960s as a way to focus attention on the needs of the world’s poorer countries. The Millennium development Goals, a set of eight international development targets, were set in 2000 and this idea gained prominence.
Some of the measures agreed to by the international community in 2015 are too simplistic and inaccurate and have been devised newer ways of measuring progress towards theSDG. For example, the World Bank predicts that 586 million people will be living in extreme poverty in the next 17 years, which is based on their definition of poverty, which states that those below the poverty line live on just $2 per day. But in many parts of the world, people earning well above this threshold cannot afford basic food or housing (see Nature 618, 886; 2023). The Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, and the UN Development Programme, is an alternative measure. The MPI indicates there are likely to be around two times as many people living in extreme poverty if you look at the other indicators of poverty.
We strongly support efforts to learn from the past and to take heed of evidence. Replacing the goals after 2020 would be wrongheaded given how well known they have become and how important they are to sustainable development. The spirit of inclusion that differentiated the project from previous goals is detracted from any effort to replace them.
Widespread frustration at the discrepancy between research and policy is driving interest in studying the problem. Many people try to get science and evidence used in a systematic way, using anecdotes, theories, and other methods, but only a small number go about it that way.
A group of hundreds of funders, community leaders and government representatives made up the Transforming Evidence Network, which started in 2020 and is considered one of the most coordinated efforts to address this. Its aim is to build up a body of evidence about effective methods for getting research used.
