By Javier Surasky-
A new
edition of the Sustainable Development Report, published annually by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), has been released. As in
previous years, after reading it, I feel that I have wasted my time.
With its 67
pages of analysis, followed by 420 pages of annexes and tables, including a
snapshot for each UN member state presenting the same information already
available in other tables of the report, plus a chart showing the evolution of
indicators that adds little to the UN Statistical Commission’s database.
The report
indicates that in its building, “Where possible, we use official SDG indicators
endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission. Where there are data gaps or
insufficient data available for an official indicator, we include other metrics
from official and unofficial providers” (p.70). I have looked through all the
national dashboards and have not been able to identify a single mention of data
taken from other sources. In fact, there is no clear citation of the source of
origin.
Beyond these elements, the report has multiple shortcomings. Just for the sake of example, we mention:
- The appropriation of recommendations long expressed by other bodies, as occurs when the report states, “We propose, as a first instance, the establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly as a subsidiary body of the General Assembly” (p.9). The proposal for a UN parliamentary assembly has precedents reaching back to the San Francisco conference itself, and the World Federalist Movement, established in 1947, has included it in its agenda. There has also been a campaign to this end for several years driven by a global network of parliamentarians, civil society organizations, and scholars. The book by Leinen and Bummel, published in 2018, entitled A World Parliament: Governance and Democracy in the 21st Century, is a very good reference on the subject (and it will be updated and re-edited in 2024).
- Proposals of dubious grounding and of serious danger in practice, such as considering the involvement of the Security Council in situations of sovereign debt insolvency (p.6).
- Readily contestable claims for which no explanation is given: the report maintains that “there are real prospects for the emerging economies, both low income and middle income, to narrow the educational and technological gaps with the richer countries, enabling all parts of the world to enjoy the benefits of modern science and technology.” (p.1). Well… analyses of the digital technology situation consistently point to the risk posed by the hyper-concentration of their development in an ever-smaller number of States: according to the 2024 AI Index Report by Stanford University, in 2022, China and the United States accounted for more than 82% of new global patents in the field of artificial intelligence. The perspective, as indicated, is set by the creation of a new gap between digitally wealthy and digitally poor countries.
However, the report’s truly troubling part is its first chapter of recommendations for the Future Summit.
The Recommendations of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the Future Summit
The Introduction
This report
chapter is organized into five sections following the structure defined by the
UN member states for the Future Pact, a political document expected to be
adopted by that international meeting and currently under negotiation.
SDSN’s
recommendations begin by acknowledging the centrality of the “5Ps”, which were defined
as critical areas in the 2030 Agenda: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and
Partnerships. These areas aim from their inception to highlight that the 2030
Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals require a holistic vision, which
is then reinforced in the same 2030 Agenda by affirming their interdependence.
Breaking
that basic logic, perhaps due to the urgency of current times, the
recommendations’ text underscores “the priority of Peace as the necessary condition
to achieve every other objective.” (p.1) This is a truly crude error that seems
to ignore that there is no peace while there is poverty, hunger, lack of
education, extreme inequalities, a lack of solid and transparent institutions,
and many other conditions of peace expressed in other SDGs.
I often had
to explain that reducing poverty was not one more important SDG than others but
part of an indivisible network of goals. Yet, this is the first time I must
explain it against the pretense of “peace first," a claim that may
resonate with common sense and be quite easy to sell in the current context but
that experts should avoid.
A little further on, perhaps seeking to defend the importance and success of the voluntary national reporting process on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, it is highlighted that, to date, only Haiti, Myanmar, and the United States have not presented at least one Voluntary National Review. Again, this is true but partial. The reasons why each of those three countries has not reported are very different and deserve to be specified to lend seriousness to the assertion:
- Haiti has been in a crisis that has lasted several years, which, in fact, makes it impossible to imagine that the country can carry out a voluntary national review of the SDGs.
- Myanmar experienced a coup d'état in 2021, which even prompted the adoption of Security Council resolution 2669. Since then, there has been a diplomatic struggle for the country’s legitimacy representation at the UN, which has been repeatedly postponed by the General Assembly’s credentials committee, and the Security Council is still debating the situation.
- The United States has simply decided not to do so on the well-known premise of its moral superiority and its internal doctrine of being the Beacon of the World, as has been the case for decades in the field of Human Rights.
Moreover,
as Cepei has shown for the region of Latin America and the Caribbean, a greater
number of Voluntary National Reviews does not tell us anything about their
quality and alignment with the reporting commitments made in the 2030 Agenda.
Failures in the quality of reporting from countries in that region lead to VNRs
that do not meet their objectives: a formal success hides disappointments in
substance.
Finally, countries and regions are called upon to adopt paths leading to achieving sustainable development by the year 2050. We will return to this point later, which is aligned with the article published in the journal Nature on June 17, 2024, under the title "Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 — a road map". It is good to remember that the G-77 countries strongly opposed holding the Future Summit, denouncing that its objective was to reform the SDGs to include elements that had been contested in the 2030 Agenda negotiation process and that they were not willing to do this. They were assured that this was not the case...
Sustainable Development and Development Financing
Here, after stating the well-known delay in progress towards the SDGs, it is pointed out that this is due to four reasons:
- Many of the adopted goals require a horizon of realization "until 2050".
- The failure to reform the international financial system.
- The impact of multiple global crises, including Covid-19 and wars.
- Failures in the national and global governance of the SDGs result in civil society and academia disempowerment and in policies based on “my country first.”
Regarding
the first point, which does not clarify why 2050 is a good year or an accurate
deadline to achieve the longer-term SDGs, and on which the report places an
excessive and never well-explained emphasis, we already explained that this
implies breaking a political commitment with the G-77, which would lead to the
absolute failure of the Future Summit. To be clear, the Future Summit is not
the forum to have that discussion unless the intention is to drive it to
collapse.
The other three
obstacles are the expression of a lack of political will to implement the
agreed commitments, which affects both developed and developing countries for
different reasons (see this blog’s reference to the agendas of the urgent and
the substantive). Thus, three out of the four obstacles are just symptoms of a
much deeper and more entrenched problem in international relations.
The same
section states that “the single most important investment of all, quantitatively
and qualitatively, is education. With higher education, and a supportive
business and regulatory environment, many other things follow” (p.4). With this
paragraph, the report seems to discover the interdependence between objectives,
but in a biased manner.
Education,
educational models, and curricula do not arise from a vacuum. Education
reflects the practices of the community and is the most important mechanism of
social reproduction, along with the family; thus, the model of education is
necessarily tied to actual social practices and values. The change that
education can produce, working slowly not to lose its integration and
representativeness of social life, requires a horizon that goes beyond the year
2050.
On the
other hand, with changes in education, clearly “many other things are achieved,”
but “many other things” are also required to change education: well-nourished
children, gender equality, well-paid jobs, universal healthcare systems, and a
long list enable or block access, retention, and educational achievements. Have
you ever tried teaching hungry children who repeatedly miss school for
financial reasons? I have. Let me tell you that education cannot be a tool for
change under any conditions.
Finally, this chapter’s almost complete disregard for the regional level is striking.
International Peace and Security
The
beginning of this section once again confuses “causes" and “symptoms."
The report states: “The greatest threat to global peace is the interference by
one nation in the internal affairs of another nation against the letter and
spirit of the UN Charter. Such interference (…) generate untold international
tensions, violence, conflict, and war” (p.5).
The
intervention prohibited by the UN Charter, which is qualified by an element of
coercion to differentiate it from the political play characteristic of
cross-pressures in the field of international relations, does not occur in a
vacuum either. Indeed, a brief overview reveals reasons ranging from
ideological motives left over from the Cold War (the embargo against Cuba) to a
determined defense of "friendly" governments that assure the
intervener access to natural resources, highly valued geostrategic positions,
or trade advantages.
Inequality
and the gross difference in military power between states, as well as the
irresponsibility of their leaders, challenge and constantly threaten
international peace and security. This is combined with a worldwide spread of
low-quality democracies on the verge of authoritarianism or even disguised authoritarianism
posing as democratic systems, as clearly shown by The
Economist’s Democracy Index.
When referring to the necessary reform of the Security Council, it is argued that it “should also be attentive to requests from member states to support them in preserving internal peace when it is threatened by global illicit arms flows, transborder drug trafficking, international organized crime, external debt insolvency, or other factors that undermine the capacity of the state to carry out its core functions.” (p.6). Honestly, including the Security Council in cases of debt insolvency seems to me more than dangerous, with or without reform. Who will request the intervention, the debtor or the creditor? Can the Council decide to take measures, whether or not they involve the use of force, in those cases?
Science, Technology, Innovation, and Digital Cooperation
Besides
once again raising the flag that COVID-19 might have been caused by an accident
in a lab working on pathogens research, something that has never been proven,
this part does not contribute anything significant. A call to create
supervisory bodies and to include the theme of risks associated with new
technologies as a cross-cutting issue for the work of the United Nations system
and, of course, more reports.
There is no word about “AI for good” or “AI for sustainable development,” and there is nothing about digital justice without mentioning the concentration of advances in a few private hands in a very limited number of states. I would have expected more, considering the presence among the signatories of some benchmarks on these issues.
Youth and Future Generations
This part emphasizes issues related to children and youth without offering new ideas or proposals that appear notable. References to future generations are virtually non-existent, and calling for the Future Summit to support the establishment of a United Nations Council for Future Generations and Youth does nothing but complicate pre-existing proposals since “future generations” and “youth” are two different actors, with different participation needs and possibilities for action. It is difficult to see why creating a body that groups both would be advantageous.
Transformation of Global Governance
In this
fifth and final axis, the proposals are limited to creating more bodies without
clearly stating the reasons, functions, or how they could be financed.
Beyond the
previously mentioned appropriation of the idea of establishing a UN Parliament,
it is suggested to create the aforementioned Council for Youth and Future Generations
plus a Council of the Regions; a Council of Cities, a Council of Indigenous
Peoples; a Council of Culture, Religion, and Civilization; and a Council on the
Anthropocene.
Is creating
more specialized thematic bodies the way to establish a more effective and
efficient multilateralism? I do not believe so. Besides the financial problems
it would pose, it promotes increasing management in silos, the exact opposite
of what sustainable development promotes.
In summary,
the recommendation text fails to capture the concept of interdependence, which is
crucial both for sustainable development and for the construction of a
multilateralism governance that can work based on data and be action-oriented
within a comprehensive understanding of the reality it acts upon and promote
synergies and coherence among efforts.
Finally, some references to possible modifications to introduce in the Security Council are poorly substantiated and do not contribute any element that has not been discussed before, although an explanation of the signatories’ reasons would have been a meaningful contribution.
Conclusion
The 2024
Sustainable Development Report is not a piece that those interested in the
subject should regret not having read, and little more can be said of the
recommendations chapter before the Future Summit.
We have
decided not to delve into the analysis of the Index of Countries’ Support for
United Nations-based Multilateralism, which is included in chapter three of the
report, but will write an entry on it soon. Just a preview: we believe this
index is incapable of measuring what it claims to measure, even as a proxy.
Looking at the signatures supporting the recommendations to the Summit of the Future included in the report, knowing the signatories’ trajectories, and having learned from some of them, the lack of depth in the analysis and the ease with which ideas are thrown out without justification are disappointing, at the very least.
.png)
