Whither the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Note on the Text (or, go to intro →): The title of this lecture, Whither the UN Sustainable Development Goals?, deliberately echoes Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, which was the title of the 1993 conference at the University of California, Riverside at which Jacques Derrida delivered the two-part plenary lecture that became Specters of Marx. A subsequent collection of conference essays, edited by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, retained the title Whither Marxism? and was conceived as a companion volume to Derrida’s book.

‘Whither’ means, quite literally, to where? Yet in such a formulation it asks considerably more than a question of destination. Whither Marxism? was posed at a particular historical juncture: after the collapse of Soviet communism and amid widespread claims concerning the triumph of liberal capitalism and even the ‘end of history’. The question was therefore simultaneously diagnostic and prospective. What had become of Marxism? What remained of it? What might persist, return or assume another form? Derrida’s response in Specters of Marx famously refused the simplicity of declaring Marxism either alive or dead. Instead, he approached inheritance in terms of spectres: ideas and obligations can continue to trouble the present even when the historical formations with which they were associated appear to have passed away.

I use ‘whither’ here in a related, though deliberately looser, sense. The question is not simply: What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?  (Although I do cover the what and the why). Nor is the lecture intended simply to judge whether individual targets have been met. Rather, it asks: what perspectives underlie the SDG project? What kind of political and institutional instrument has it become? What can a framework organised around seventeen interconnected goals actually do when confronted by problems of climate, poverty, inequality, health, infrastructure, consumption and economic development that operate through profoundly different systems and at radically different scales?

This matters particularly from the perspective of Big Picture. The SDGs are themselves an extraordinary exercise in systems thinking. They propose that poverty cannot finally be separated from education; education from gender; health from infrastructure; infrastructure from energy; energy from climate; climate from patterns of production and consumption; and none of these from questions of governance, partnership and inequality. They offer, in other words, a picture of the world composed not of isolated problems but of interdependencies.

Yet this systemic ambition also generates a difficulty. The more comprehensive the framework becomes, the more we have to ask how its aspirations translate into action. Is the value of the SDGs primarily operational (i.e. changing policies, directing resources and producing measurable outcomes) or have they increasingly become a shared language through which institutions signal their commitments? And if they operate partly as rhetoric, does that necessarily make them ineffective? Shared vocabularies, diagrams, targets and institutional narratives can themselves organise attention and action.

So whither leaves the question deliberately open. It asks us to consider both the achievements and limitations of the SDGs, but also something broader: what future does this particular way of imagining global problems make possible? That question brings us back to a central concern: not only how we solve problems, but how we frame them, connect them, represent them and decide what counts as a problem in the first place.

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What are the Sustainable Development Goals?

The UN ustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 global goals adopted by all UN member states in September 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They contain 169 targets covering poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, water, energy, economic development, inequality, cities, consumption, climate, biodiversity, peace and institutions, and international partnership. 

A useful starting point is that they are not simply environmental goals. They attempt to join together three things that had often been treated separately:

• economic development;
• social justice and human wellbeing;
• ecological sustainability.

Their guiding phrase is: ‘Leave no one behind.’ And their ambition is deliberately systemic. The idea is that poverty cannot really be addressed independently of education, gender, health, infrastructure, energy, governance and the environment. This is simultaneously the SDGs’ great strength and one of their major weaknesses.

Where did they come from?

The SDGs make more sense if understood as the more recent stage in a much longer history.

1945: The United Nations: The UN was founded after the Second World War, primarily to prevent another catastrophic international conflict.

The Charter established purposes including:

• maintaining international peace and security;
• promoting international cooperation;
• encouraging respect for human rights;
• addressing economic, social and humanitarian problems.

Development gradually became one of the central activities of the UN system, even though the contemporary idea of ‘sustainable development’ did not yet exist.

1960s–70s: development meets environmentalism: Post-war development policy had generally equated development with economic growth and industrialisation. By the late 1960s and 1970s, this assumption became increasingly contested. Think here of: pollution; population growth; resource depletion; environmental degradation; The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1972).

1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm: A particularly important moment. It was the first major UN conference to make the environment an international political issue. But a tension immediately appeared: Can wealthy countries tell poorer countries to restrain economic development in order to protect the environment? This tension between development and environmental limits remains at the heart of contemporary sustainability politics.

Invention of ‘sustainable development‘: A critical moment comes with the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Its 1987 report, Our Common Future, famously defined sustainable development as:

…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The significance is conceptual. Rather than arguing environment OR development, it proposed: environment AND development. I.e. Economic development could continue, provided it took account of ecological and social sustainability. The report helped establish the conceptual framework for the 1992 Earth Summit.

But notice the political genius of the term sustainable development. Almost everyone can agree with it. Which also means that radically different political and economic programmes can operate under its name.

1992: The Rio Earth Summit: The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, represents another major turning point. More than 100 heads of state attended. Its outputs included: the Rio Declaration; Agenda 21; the Convention on Biological Diversity; the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; principles relating to forests.

Rio effectively established the architecture through which sustainable development would become a mainstream issue of international governance. One crucial idea was: Common but differentiated responsibilities. I.e. All countries share responsibility for planetary problems. But responsibility is not equal, because countries have different: histories of industrialisation; contributions to environmental damage; financial resources; technological capacities. This argument remains fundamental to climate politics.

Millennium Development Goals: 2000–2015: The immediate predecessor to the SDGs was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There were eight. They focused on: extreme poverty; hunger; primary education; gender equality; child mortality; maternal health; HIV/AIDS, malaria and disease; global development partnership.

The MDGs were much narrower than today’s SDGs. And importantly, they largely concerned what were then described as developing countries. The implicit model was: wealthy countries help poorer countries develop.

Did the Millennium Development Goals work? This question already reveals an important methodological problem. There were very substantial improvements. For example, global under-fives mortality fell from around 90 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 43 in 2015.  There were also major reductions in malaria mortality. The UN estimated that interventions after 2000 helped avert more than 6.2 million malaria deaths, overwhelmingly among young children.  There were major improvements in primary school attendance; access to drinking water; HIV treatment; maternal health; gender parity in education. (See report →). But here is the important analytical question: Did the MDGs cause these improvements? Not necessarily.

Economic growth in China and India, technological advances, national healthcare programmes, NGOs, vaccination programmes, changing demographics and many other factors contributed. This illustrates a recurring difficulty with global goals: Correlation with progress is much easier to demonstrate than causation.

Universal Development Goals 

When the MDGs expired in 2015, governments negotiated their successor. But there was a major conceptual shift.  The Sustainable Development Goals would be universal. They apply to every country. Britain, Sweden, India, Nigeria and Brazil are all supposedly ‘developing’ towards sustainability. That is quite a radical conceptual change. Development is no longer understood simply as something that poorer countries undergo. Every society is regarded as unfinished.

What authority does the UN actually have?

We can sometimes imagine the UN as something resembling a world government. It is not. The UN is fundamentally an organisation composed of sovereign states. It therefore occupies an unusual political position: it possesses enormous normative authority, but relatively limited coercive authority. The distinction matters.

Each UN member state has a seat in the General Assembly. The UN Charter states that the General Assembly may discuss issues within the Charter’s scope and make recommendations to member states. The crucial word is: recommendations. General Assembly resolutions ordinarily do not function like legislation passed by a national parliament. The UN itself describes most General Assembly decisions as lacking legally binding force on governments, although they can carry considerable political and moral authority. 

Are the SDGs legally binding? No. The SDGs are not an international treaty imposing legally enforceable obligations upon governments. There are: no SDG police; no global fines; no court automatically punishing governments for missing a goal; no sanction for failing a goal. Indeed, the 2030 Agenda explicitly states that national follow-up and review should be “voluntary and country-led.” This is fundamental to understanding the whole project. The UN provides: goals; indicators; statistics; coordination; international comparison; expertise; forums; political pressure; legitimacy. But implementation largely depends upon governments.

So how can the UN exert influence? This gives us an important idea in international politics: Soft power / soft law / normative governance. Governance does not always require coercion. The SDGs can influence behaviour by establishing a common language. E.g. Government departments, corporations, universities, NGOs and cities increasingly describe activities in SDG terminology.

Metrics: Once something becomes measurable, governments can be compared.

Reputation: A country may not legally be required to improve an SDG indicator, but poor performance can have diplomatic or reputational consequences.

Coordination: Governments can organise departments and policies around common objectives.

Funding: International development funding can become aligned around particular goals.

Mobilisation: Civil-society groups can invoke the SDGs to pressure governments.

Governing through numbers

There is something intellectually interesting about the SDG system. It attempts to convert extraordinarily difficult political questions into:

goals → targets → indicators → data → comparison → action

For example: Goal 5: Gender Equality becomes targets concerning:

• discrimination;
• violence;
• early marriage;
• political representation;
• reproductive rights.

These targets become numerical indicators. This is a form of governance through measurement. What gets counted becomes visible. But there is an obvious problem: What cannot easily be counted may become politically invisible.

Do the SDGs work?

There are two quite different answers. Answer 1: Yes, in important ways. The SDGs have created perhaps the most widely shared vocabulary for development ever produced. Governments, corporations, NGOs, cities and universities all use them. They have encouraged: better statistical infrastructures; cross-government planning; integration of environmental and social issues; new policy networks; international comparison; civil-society advocacy. The 2026 UN SDG Report argues that since 2015 there have been very substantial gains in areas including access to electricity, clean water, healthcare and digital connectivity. That is not trivial. (See SDG Report 2026 →)

Case study: Mexico — putting the SDGs into the budget: Mexico provides a particularly useful example of what meaningful implementation can look like. Rather than merely publishing an SDG strategy, the Mexican government developed methods linking the 169 SDG targets to national planning and public expenditure. UN report describes Mexico as an early leader in mapping SDGs into national planning and budgeting.

This matters. Compare:

Our university supports the Sustainable Development Goals.

with:

Every departmental budget must demonstrate how expenditure contributes to specific SDG targets.

The second changes institutional processes.

Case of Malaria Prevention: The MDG/SDG system can also act as a coordination device. Consider malaria. The global goal helps align: WHO; national governments; donors; pharmaceutical programmes; NGOs; researchers; healthcare systems. It would be wrong to say: ‘The UN Goal caused malaria deaths to decline.’ But having a shared numerical objective can make a fragmented international system operate more coherently. This may actually be one of the strongest arguments for global goals.

But are we actually going to achieve the SDGs? Almost certainly not by 2030.  The latest UN assessment is sobering. In its 2026 Sustainable Development Goals Report, the UN finds that among the 139 targets for which adequate trend data existed:

• 15% were on track;
• another 21% showed moderate progress;
• almost half were progressing only marginally or not at all;
• 15% had regressed below their 2015 baseline.

So roughly a decade after adoption, the SDGs have produced progress without putting the world on a trajectory to achieve their overall objectives. (See SDG Monitoring →)

Why are they failing?

Some explanations are external.  Since 2015 the world has experienced: COVID-19; major wars; increasing geopolitical rivalry; climate-related disasters; inflation; debt crises; disruptions to food and energy markets. The UN identifies these factors as major reasons for slow progress. But blaming external shocks only goes so far. There are also structural problems with the SDGs themselves.

Problem #1: Too many objectives: The MDGs had: 8 goals and 21 targets. The SDGs have: 17 goals and 169 targets. Comprehensiveness creates political consensus. But it reduces prioritisation. A strategy in which everything matters can become a strategy in which nothing is prioritised.

Problem #2: Contradictions between goals: The Goals are presented graphically as 17 colourful, equal boxes. But the world is not so harmonious. Consider: Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) versus Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and Goal 13 (Climate Action). What happens if continued economic growth increases: energy consumption; material extraction; aviation; construction; carbon emissions?

The SDG framework tends to present such goals as mutually compatible. But often they involve real political trade-offs. (Consider → systems thinking; wicked problems!)

Problem #3: Who pays? Transforming energy systems; transport; housing; healthcare; agriculture; infrastructure etc. requires enormous investment. And poorer states frequently have: smaller tax bases; high borrowing costs; significant debt; limited infrastructure; weaker institutions. Thus the sustainability debate repeatedly returns to finance. NB. Goal 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) partly exists because the other sixteen goals require financing, technology and international cooperation.

Problem #4: The UN cannot force states to act: Here lies the basic paradox. The problems are global (climate change; oceans; biodiversity; financial systems; migration; pandemics; inequality).  But political authority remains primarily national. We have global problems without a global sovereign. That is perhaps the central problem of global governance.

Have the SDGs become mainly rhetorical?

There is significant evidence supporting this criticism. A notable 2022 study by Frank Biermann and colleagues reviewed more than 3,000 academic studies examining the political impact of the SDGs. Its conclusion was striking: the strongest influence of the SDGs has been discursive. They changed the way institutions talk about sustainability. Evidence that they substantially changed was much weaker (e.g. legislation; budgets; institutional structures; resource allocation; regulatory policy).  (This is perhaps the most important critical finding for a lecture on the SDGs!)

We can put the criticism more provocatively: The SDGs may have become an extraordinarily successful visual and rhetorical system. The colourful SDG wheel appears on: corporate annual reports; university websites; government documents; sustainability strategies; investment reports. An organisation can therefore announce: ‘Our work contributes to Goals 4, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13.’

But what does that actually demonstrate? Potentially very little. This gives rise to something analogous to greenwashing. I.e. An organisation retrospectively maps activities it was already conducting onto SDG icons. For example: A university runs courses. It can claim: Goal 4: Quality Education. It employs people. Therefore: Goal 8: Decent Work. It has international collaborations. Therefore: Goal 17: Partnerships. But this is not representing any actual change or development. The SDGs simply redescribed existing activity.

Attribution versus alignment

We can assert a useful distinction.

Alignment:  This project aligns with SDG 5.

versus

Additionality: Because of SDG 5, we changed our policy, reallocated £10 million and introduced a new programme whose results can be measured.”

The second claim is much stronger. So whenever you encounter an SDG claim, ask: What happened because of the SDG that would otherwise not have happened? Nonetheless, calling the SDGs “rhetorical” does not automatically mean they are useless. Political concepts often become powerful precisely by becoming common language.

Consider terms such as: human rights; equality; democracy; climate emergency. They do not compel action automatically. But they reshape what governments and institutions are expected to justify. The SDGs may operate similarly. They establish norms.

So perhaps we should distinguish:

coercive power: You must do this.

from

normative power: This is what a responsible government ought to do.

and

epistemic power:  This is how we measure and understand the problem.

The UN has relatively weak coercive power over sustainability. But potentially considerable normative and epistemic power. This is why statistics matter so much to the SDG project. We can therefore formulate a paradox: The SDGs are politically weak precisely where they are institutionally strong.

They are successful at: setting agendas; generating indicators; creating international consensus; establishing vocabulary; collecting data. But weak (even ineffective) at: redistribution; taxation; regulation; enforcement; compelling states or corporations to bear costs. Unfortunately, sustainability ultimately requires the latter as well as the former.

Depoliticisation

There is a deeper theoretical criticism. The SDGs can make fundamentally political conflicts appear like technical management problems.

For example: Goal 10 says: Reduced Inequalities. But inequality is not simply a malfunction to be repaired. Reducing inequality raises questions about: taxation; ownership; wages; labour rights; inheritance; property; trade; wealth.

These involve groups with conflicting economic interests. Yet the graphic language of the SDGs makes everything look like a shared management task.

The same applies to sustainability. Imagine the chain:

climate crisis
↓
Goal 13: Climate Action
↓
targets
↓
indicators
↓
dashboard

Something extraordinary has happened. An existential political and ecological problem has become a dashboard. Dashboards are useful. But dashboards can create the illusion that: if we measure the system sufficiently well, we can manage our way out of the problem. Sometimes the issue is not insufficient information. It is conflicting interests.

SDGs as an interface

One productive way to conceptualise the SDGs is therefore as an: interface. They sit between: complex planetary realities and institutions capable of acting upon them. The SDGs compress complexity into a simplified visual architecture: 17 icons → 169 targets → hundreds of indicators. That compression makes global coordination possible. But every act of compression loses information.

So, do the SDGs work? The strongest answer is: It depends what we expect them to do.

If the expectation is: Will the SDGs compel governments to transform the global economy? The evidence is weak.

If the expectation is: Can they create shared norms, metrics, language and coordination around global problems? Then they have been remarkably influential.

And if the question is: Can they support substantive policy when governments choose to institutionalise them? Cases such as SDG-linked budgeting suggest they can. So rather than asking simply: ‘Have the SDGs succeeded or failed?’, ask three different questions: 

1. Outcomes:  Has poverty, hunger or carbon emissions actually declined?

2. Attribution:  Did the SDGs cause that change?

3. Institutionalisation: Did governments change laws, budgets, organisations or practices because of them?

These produce quite different answers. We might map implementation across a spectrum, as follows:

Symbolic → Discursive → Procedural → Financial → Regulatory → Transformative

For example:

Symbolic
Put the SDG wheel on the website.

↓

Discursive
Mention the SDGs in strategy documents.

↓

Procedural
Require departments to report against them.

↓

Financial
Link expenditure to targets.

↓

Regulatory
Change laws or regulations to achieve them.

↓

Transformative
Measurable social or ecological systems change.

Much activity remains towards the left-hand side (i.e. symbolic). The challenge is moving towards the right (i.e transformation).

what happens next?

Goals are not causes: A goal describes a desired future. It does not explain the mechanism by which that future will be produced.

“End poverty.”

“Achieve gender equality.”

“Protect life below water.”

These are valuable normative statements. But none tells us: who must act; who must pay; who must surrender power; what laws must change; which industries must contract; what conflicts must be resolved. Those are questions of politics.

We are now close enough to 2030 that the debate is already shifting toward a post-2030 global development framework. The 2026 UN assessment itself acknowledges that discussions about what follows the SDGs are beginning. A major question is therefore not simply whether the SDGs will be achieved. They won’t be achieved in full. The more interesting question: Which parts of the system should survive after 2030?

Should there be:

• fewer goals?
• stronger accountability?
• binding commitments?
• clearer financial obligations?
• planetary boundaries?
• country-specific targets?
• stronger measures of inequality?
• obligations upon corporations as well as governments?

The SDGs can be read in two radically different ways.

Optimistic reading:  They are perhaps the most ambitious expression yet of humanity attempting to identify a shared future: no poverty, no hunger, equality, peace and an ecologically viable planet. That collective articulation has real value.

Critical reading:  They create the appearance of planetary governance without providing the political authority required to achieve it. The world agrees about the destination while avoiding the conflicts involved in getting there.

Almost everyone agrees the SDGS are ‘good’. But what is less clear is what kind of political power would actually be required to achieve them. That takes us from sustainability to the much more difficult question of global governance.

References

World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), Our Common Future.

United Nations (2015), Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

United Nations (2026), The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026.

Biermann, F., Hickmann, T. & Sénit, C-A., eds. (2022), The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance Through Global Goals?, Cambridge University Press. (Cambridge University Press)

Biermann, F. et al. (2022), ‘Scientific evidence on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals‘, Nature Sustainability. Particularly useful because its review of more than 3,000 studies concludes that impact has been real but predominantly discursive rather than transformative.