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SPEAKERS
Monica Lakhanpaul, Priti Parikh, Kate Roll
Monica Lakhanpaul 00:11
Hello, welcome to a brand-new podcast series from the UCL Sustainable Development Goals initiative. I'm Professor Monica Lakhanpaul
Priti Parikh 00:20
And I'm Dr Priti Parikh, and this is unlocking the SDGs: a blueprint for the future. Both Monica and I are academics at UCL, and we've known each other for over six years as colleagues, friends and partners in crime.
Monica Lakhanpaul 00:34
In this podcast series, we'll be exploring, analysing and critiquing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, looking at them through a whole range of lenses and angles.
Priti Parikh 00:46
We're going to be speaking to experts from across UCL and overseas to explore the goals and the issues they aim to tackle on the ground.
Monica Lakhanpaul 00:54
But we ask ourselves, what is sustainable development? What did the goals really mean? Where did they actually come from? And why do they exist at all?
Priti Parikh 01:03
To answer this, and tell the whole story of how the SDGs came to be, we have with us lecturer in Innovation, Development and Public Policy at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and the faculty of the built environment, Dr. Kate Roll. Dr Roll is the founder and chair of the UK sustainable development solutions network, a network of universities supported by the United Nations, she's taking us back in time, to the immediate aftermath of World War 2.
Kate Roll 01.47
The origins of sustainable development, and there's lots of different ways to come about this, I'm going to tell quite a Western history, but there's other ways to trace this. If we think about part of what typified the post-World War boom, we're talking about mass production, we're talking about the chemical revolution, we're talking about new ways of doing intensive agriculture, we're talking about population growth. So those are all the post-World War 2 industrial chemical shift in the way society in the world works. And so in the early 60s, this is where we start really seeing increasing environmental awareness, we see concerns about populations, the population bomb, consumption, small is beautiful. This is really rising in the 1960s. And we see different milestones along there. There's the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the human environment, coming at an incredibly fraught time in history, this is the end of the Vietnam War, the Cold War is still going, we're having incredible movement in terms of decolonization. So it's coming at this really wild historical time. But it's also a moment where this idea of the connection between ecology and poverty, and out of that conference, we see things like the establishment of the UN environmental programme, we see for the first time governments having ministries of the environment. I think the next major milestone after Stockholm would be the 1983 Brundtland Commission. And this is where you really see what are the most dominant definitions of sustainable development come through. This is what we really associate with the advent of sustainable development and the Our Common Future report that came out in 1987. And that's really tackling this tough paradox between sustainability and development and it was a landmark report, because this term was able to get actors from different sectors from different kinds of countries developing, less developed countries, industrial, post-industrial nations to all say, okay, we can get behind this notion. Coming forward, the next one to really emphasise would be the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. And that's where you get the agenda 21, which was a none binding action plan. But again, really focusing on environments, on the connection between environment and development, and pushing this agenda that we saw articulated in the 2000s through the Millennium Development Goals. And then more recently, with the Sustainable Development Goals, the movement between the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and then into the Millennium Development Goals. I think one of the most important things to think about is what is the UN at this time, we're entering the post Cold War period, we're in this difficult place for the UN, also a time when there's a lot of mistrust in the UN. So the coming millennium was really a moment where the UN was saying, what are we about, this is under Kofi Annan, you know, what is the mission for the UN in the 2000s? More cynically, you know, how can the UN be relevant in these coming years. In the 2000s since the advent of the Millennium Development Goals, which were just 8 goals with 21 targets that sit below that was really about the UN trying to articulate an agenda and have a sort of a voice in directing aid and promoting its role in that agenda. But the MDGs were for some of those same reasons that the parsimony, there only being eight, and this idea of being tied to an eight agenda, I think, also became roundly criticised for that. So there being a concern that the MDGs, the millennium development goals, that were established in 2000, were really sort of a new rationale for neoliberal development. The Millennium Development Goals were criticised for a whole bunch of different reasons. One is that they were too narrow, we only had eight goals, those goals were designed for less developed countries, LDCs, and the idea that these didn't apply to the global north, they were just for the global south, and they were tied to an aid agenda. So that's a very particular view of the goals and very particular purpose of the goals. So it was narrow, both in terms of scope, narrow in terms of who they were supposed to apply to narrow in terms of conceptualizations of poverty and development, there was a lot of concern that by looking at things like poverty, education, sustainability, in isolation, that these were very apolitical. They didn't have a sense of poverty is being tied to political power or economic power. They were very sat in a basic needs framework that even at the time, when they were being created, was being roundly criticised within the development community. So narrow in that sense, and then narrow in terms of how it was drafted, the MDGs were really a project from the UN Secretary General's Office created in a technocratic and not particularly consultative manner. By contrast, the SDGs had a little bit of a different story, and really sought to address some of those major criticisms, the SDGs are much broader. So there's 17 goals, there's 169, targets and almost 240 indicators, the process for creating them started in 2012, 2013, there's sort of a three year process that combined both what was called the UN task team, so it had the heads of state for the UK, Indonesia, and Liberia working together as sort of a technical team looking at the agenda. But then you also had what were called the Open working groups, which was an effort to use surveys different convenings, to really try to bring in bottom up views of what should be in the SDGs. And they had a specific mandate to work with indigenous groups, women, others that have traditionally been left out of the process. And environment ministers from Latin American countries, for example, were very integral in this. So these voices that have been left out in the MDGs process, were much more prominent in the SDGs. In terms of what the goals are, we've got 17 goals, 169 targets, 232 indicators. And these are goals that cover everything from goal number 1. which is no poverty, to 4. quality education, 13. climate action, so they're much more comprehensive. And the SDGs are interesting in the sense that you can go online and download the spreadsheet with all the goals, targets and indicators, and really open up the hood and look at what's going on there. How have ideas of female empowerment been put into practice, been operationalized, in terms of targets and indicators. There's lots of different folks in different organisations who are looking at progress of the SDGs, and looking at how countries are doing, who are doing red, amber, green ratings, and really trying to measure those changes. I think you can look at the SDGs in those terms and see where we're improving or not improving. For me, the more important measure of the SDGs is the extent to which they're entering policy discourse, to the extent to which they're being referred to and understood as important. Is it becoming the kind of thing that governments need to respond to? Are they aware of these goals? Are these helping to shape their political agenda? Are these helping to determine what they need to address? Or if there's a report saying they're failing in certain areas, is that something that they feel they need to respond to? Because what makes the SDGs powerful is not that there's an enforcement mechanism, it's that they're considered to be highly legitimate, that they're considered to be something that we've signed up to, that people care about, and that is embarrassing to do poorly, or it's embarrassing to backslide, it's embarrassing to not do as well as a peer country. And so to the extent that the SDGs are able to push action, and change some of the discourse change some of the agendas, I think that's really important. So I think it's very hard to do attribution, and it's very hard to track progress and know what's coming from where, but I do think the SDGs have been very successful in gathering this kind of legitimacy and gathering this kind of momentum and shaping the conversation and not allowing some of these things to drop off the agenda.
Monica Lakhanpaul 11:01
You've been listening to Unlocking the SDGs, a blueprint for the future. This episode was presented by me, Professor Monica Lakhanpaul.
Priti Parikh 11:09
And me Dr. Priti Parikh
Monica Lakhanpaul 11:11
And produced by the UCL SDGs initiative, with support from UCL Global Engagement.
Priti Parikh 11:16
Many thanks to our special guest Dr Kate Roll.
Monica Lakhanpaul 11:20
If you'd like to hear more podcasts from UCL, please do subscribe to UCL Minds wherever you download your podcasts.
Priti Parikh 11:26
Join us next time, we'll be back soon.