SDGs: A transformative

framework for Sustainable

Development ?

Sarah Cook

Director, UNRISD

University of Sheffield, 13 November 2014

Outline

• From Millennium Vision to Development

Goals..

• .. To Sustainable Development / SDGs

• The ‘social question’ in development contexts

– Goals: Holistic, integrated and coherent

– The challenge of inequality

– Universality and global public goods

• Can the SDGs be socially transformative?

17 Focus Areas

Sustainable Development Goals

• Goal 1. Poverty eradication

• Goal 2. Food security and nutrition

• Goal 3. Health

• Goal 4. Education

• Goal 5. Gender equality and women’s empowerment

• Goal 6. Water and sanitation

• Goal 7. Energy

• Goal 8. Economic Growth and Decent Work for all

• Goal 9. Infrastructure and Industrialization

• Goal 10. Reducing inequality

• Goal 11. Sustainable cities and human settlements

• Goal 12. Sustainable Consumption and Production

• Goal 13. Combatting Climate Change

• Goal 14. Marine resources, oceans and seas

• Goal 15. Ecosystems and biodiversity

• Goal 16. Promoting Peace, Justice and Accountability

• Goal 17. Strengthening Means of Implementation and Global Partnership

A ‘social turn’ in public policy?

• Policy innovation

• Institutional innovation

• Social innovation (+ technology)

• Conceptual and discursive innovations

• Examples of social policy change – new

directions, towards universalism, new social

contracts?

Our Common Future

Brundtland Commission (1987)

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising

the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The Oxfam ‘doughnut’ –planetary boundaries & social floor http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/dp-a-safe-and-just-space-for-humanity-130212-en.pdf

9 planetary boundaries - if we go beyond these we will not have any social development or a functioning economy.

Universality and Global Public

Goods• ‘outcomes (or intermediate products) that tend towards

universality in the sense that they benefit all countries,

population groups and generations’ or at a minimum the

‘benefits extend to more than one group of countries and do

not discriminate against any population groups or any set of

generations, present or future’. (16)

• Final global public goods may be tangible (environment) or

intangible (peace); intermediate GPGs include international

regimes that contribute to final GPGs (Kaul et al.:13).

• Kaul et al. (1999)

Today international mechanisms to achieve a global social

balance persistently elude us… The challenge of designing

transnational policies to achieve social balance in different

countries with quite different political and economic

histories… will only bear fruit if democratic nation-states

with a concern for social balance invest in the construction

of international institutions.

(Maureen O’Neil, 2008:viii)

)

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