Behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a stirring tale of people overcoming huge odds against hostile institutions

Bucking the system: the extraordinary story of how the SDGs came to be

Behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a stirring tale of people overcoming huge odds against hostile institutions

A Development Economist in the United Nations: Reasons for Hope Richard Jolly Routledge (2022)

Redefining Development: The Extraordinary Genesis of the Sustainable Development Goals Paula Caballero with Patti Londoño Lynne Rienner Publishers (2022)

Next week, world leaders will meet in New York City to assess progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There’s no varnishing it: the meeting will be a damp squib. Halfway to the SDGs’ 2030 deadline, none of the 17 goals to end poverty and protect the environment is on track, and only 15% of the 140 targets for which data are available look likely to be met. Progress towards the remaining 29 targets cannot be assessed. A rescue mission is urgently needed.

Delegates travelling to New York would do well to read two books that offer insights and hope for individuals trying to make a difference. Richard Jolly’s memoir A Development Economist in the United Nations is a panoramic account of six decades spent as a researcher, much of it for the UN, in which he was both a witness to and a participant in the development of world-changing policies influenced by science. Redefining Development is a dramatic first-person account of how Paula Caballero, a senior official at Colombia’s ministry of foreign affairs, conceived the idea of the SDGs and how she and deputy minister for foreign affairs Patti Londoño persuaded the rest of the world to back it — and to let scientists design the goals free from political interference, as much as was practical.

Jolly, who turns 90 next year and still does research at the Institute of Development Studies in Falmer, UK, is part of the second generation of researchers at the UN. He is old enough to have witnessed the Second World War and the resulting poverty, which influenced so many to devote their lives to the pursuit of peace and prosperity. Yet he is young enough to bring that story to today’s generations.

Jolly has worked with many UN agencies, notably the children’s agency UNICEF and the UN Development Programme. He co-edited the UN Intellectual History Project — 17 volumes on how research and analysis drove UN policymaking and how the researchers gathering evidence hit obstacles that were not necessarily political.

Measures of growth

Two examples of policy influenced by knowledge stand out. The first is the UN’s role in creating the System of National Accounts (SNA), which this year celebrates its 70th anniversary. The UN recognized the necessity of bringing together disparate work on economic indicators to create an international statistical standard for measuring and comparing economies large and small. Its most famous measure is gross domestic product (GDP) — one number that influences national economic policies, financial markets, political careers and more.

Related to GDP, but different from it, is the Human Development Index (HDI), launched in 1990 (see go.nature.com/3sc8arx). Back in 1968, Pakistan’s then-chief economist Mahbub ul Haq mused in a speech in Karachi on how the country’s high rates of growth were, at least partly, generated by luxury housing and expensive imports, when the government should have been investing in public services. “There was endless preoccupation with the refinement of our national accounts; not enough work on the real problems of mass poverty,” he would reflect later in his book The Poverty Curtain (1976).

And so Haq persuaded the UN that the organization needed to create a new indicator — the HDI — which he then developed with Indian economist Amartya Sen and other colleagues. Sen later recalled in an interview how Haq told him: “I want you to help me to do an index, which is just as vulgar as GDP, except it will stand for better things.”

The original HDI ranked countries according to three variables: income, education and life expectancy. To do well in the HDI, nations needed to invest in things beyond those fuelling growth, such as education and health care. The HDI is now well established; Jolly eventually took over from Haq as director of its annual report in 1996. But the HDI didn’t ‘dethrone’ GDP, as its originators had intended. Members of the SNA team at the time did not take kindly to an upstart indicator, he told Nature.

Another theme in Jolly’s book revolves around disagreements between UN economists and those working for more influential financial institutions, notably the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This was a time when, if a country got into financial problems, the bank and the fund required them to cut public spending on education, health care and social protection as a condition of their bailout loans. These days we call such cuts austerity; they were known then as structural adjustment.

Jolly writes how he and his colleagues tried to persuade the IMF in 1983 that these policies were hurting children. Two years later, to support their argument, UNICEF, under Jolly’s leadership, commissioned a two-volume study called Adjustment with a Human Face (published in 1987). Despite this and later evidence that adjustment programmes have no positive effects on growth, and can even hamper it (see go.nature.com/3p7jazj), the UN economists failed to sway their counterparts.

Birth of the SDGs

Caballero and Londoño’s Redefining Development picks up the baton from the designers of these earlier indicators. Theirs is a remarkable story of how two representatives of Colombia’s government created the conditions for the SDGs as a set of universal indicators for all countries; and how they achieved this against the odds and despite a mountain of political pressure from more powerful nations. It is extraordinary that few outside a narrow circle of experts know of their story.

The history of the SDGs began in January 2011, ahead of a UN conference in New York the following year. The conference was intended to commemorate 20 years since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Caballero led her country’s delegation at the anniversary summit. Between 2000 and 2015, the world’s focus was on a different set of indicators, called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), comprising a UN plan to end poverty in low- and middle-income countries. In Redefining Development, Caballero writes about her frustration that the MDGs had been conceived by a small number of nations and that they ignored the growing environmental crisis. “The MDGs in fact cemented the divide between countries,” write Caballero and Londoño. “There was no space to acknowledge shared issues — such as deep pockets of poverty in developed countries — or to tackle the threats to the global commons.”

And so, with the support of Colombia’s former president Juan Manuel Santos and its then foreign minister María Ángela Holguín, the pair devised a more participatory process, involving researchers, non-governmental organizations and government officials from Colombia and around the world. Together, they advocated for a wider set of goals, which would be based on science and implemented by all countries. These goals would encompass targets to alleviate poverty, as well as environmental, social and economic ones — moving beyond GDP as “the guiding North Star”. The authors write how critics called their idea “blasphemous”, “a sheer impossibility” and “the pipe dream of a negotiator who did not understand the system or the history”.

But they persevered, identifying other officials who they could work with and building coalitions to support their objectives. Some politicians demanded political oversight of the scientific work that would be needed to define the goals and targets, but the Colombian team stood firm, insisting on a participatory process that would be led by experts.

Caballero and Londoño’s quest to rally nearly 200 countries to agree to something completely new has echoes of how Canadian diplomat Maurice Strong successfully chaired the 1972 Stockholm environment conference, which resulted in the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and of environment ministries around the world. In her 2021 book The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution, UNEP’s historian Maria Ivanova summarizes Strong’s approach to diplomacy as “never to confront, but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield”.

Both books demonstrate the roles of individuals and teams in creating change. They provide recognition of how the interplay of ideas and inspiration from people, evidence from research and the building of coalitions are all necessary to create change.

With the SDGs nowhere near to being achieved, the other lesson that UN delegates must take with them is to prepare their political strategy now, because evidence on its own is unlikely to change minds.

Nature 621, 247-248 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02807-y

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Ehsan Masood