From MDGs to SDGs: are we on the right track?

Jan VandemoorteleFormerly with UNICEF, UNDP and ILO,

co-architect of the MDGS

☺ Participation and consultation☺ Areas of concern☺ Link between global goals

and national targets

SDG-process

MDGs in retrospect

• No counterfactual, no clear attribution

☞ no meaningful conclusion

• Helped to demystify ‘development’ for general public, journalists, teachers

• Striving vs. achieving (target=streefcijfer)

• Unintended consequences

• Divided world• Weak leadership• Old world view• Parochialism

The tyranny of an acronym

• SDGs use mostly absolute benchmarks

• They mix collective with country-specific targets

• Their feasibility or level of ambition varies

Maternal mortality U5MR Underweight

Technical perspective

1. Inequality

Political perspective

SDGs’ basis premise is:“Poverty eradication is the greatest global challenge ”

+LNOB

First among 169: ‘by 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day’

?

“Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time”

(2012)

(WEF)

“…societies are increasingly under pressure from rising income inequality”

“The most important problem we are facing now, today, is rising inequality”

Robert Shiller (2013)

10.1: By 2030, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the population at a rate higher than the national average

Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries

“one of the themes of this book is that we need to consider the distribution as a whole”

Not about

inequality!

1. Inequality

2. Universality

Political perspective

Ending hunger is not a universal target; it does not concern most OECD countries

If overweight and obesity were included, it would make goal 2 universal. Why do the SDGs not mention them? Is it due to an oversight? Or are rich countries not ready to commit to specific performance targets? Or is it that the food industry lobbied successfully?

Answer: “A reliable way to make people believe in

falsehoods is frequent repetition, because

familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth”

SDGs ≠ universal agenda

SDGs ≠ equity agendaYet, many claim they do represent an

universal agenda that addresses inequality. Why?

At country level• select and adapt targets that are most

relevant to national context

At global level• address issue of aggregation for global

monitoring• use Palma ratio to track target 10.1, to

fix its faulty formulation• shift focus from targets 1.1 (end poverty)

and 2.1 (end hunger) to target 1.2

SDGs: next steps

Target 1.2

By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions

• Shifting the focus on this universal target will require persistence and affirmative action

• UN to establish public register of national definitions now; to avoid they get changed later, so as to claim the country met the target