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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
If I told you that I had made 17 new year’s resolutions — everything from doing more work and exercise to spending more time with my family — you’d probably suspect that I was being overambitious. If I went on to explain that I’d broken my goals down into 169 targets, you might conclude that I was both excessively fastidious and doomed to failure.
Yet those are precisely the number of targets that the world set itself in 2015, when 193 countries at the UN General Assembly agreed on the sustainable development goals to improve the planet and the quality of human life on it. Although they gave themselves 15 years, they were also setting themselves up for a fall.
Sure enough, as we edge past the halfway mark towards 2030, you may not be surprised to learn that planet Earth is off course on its resolutions. The UN published a progress report in July, in which it warned that the SDGs were “in peril”, with a mere 12 per cent of targets on track.
A separate Accenture study showed that “only 49 per cent” of 2,800 business leaders believed that the SDGs would be met by the target of 2030. With stated goals such as “ending all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere” (step up Afghanistan), all I can say is that it’s good to see optimism is alive and well in the corporate sector.
You can see why the sustainable development goals, an extension of the millennium development goals — set in 2000 and of which mercifully there were only eight — came about. The idea was to hold up a mirror to the world and to help marshal the resources to improve the reflected image.
The hard truth is that the SDGs were doomed from the start. A cursory look at the 17 goals tells you why. Goal one is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” — a laudable ambition indeed, but one that we must secretly know is a stretch.
Yet it is the complexity, not the level of ambition, that is the real problem. SDG three covers “good health and wellbeing”. It is subdivided into 13 targets, which range from ending all preventable deaths under the age of five to reducing road injuries and deaths.
Some ambitions, however admirable, are contradictory. To meet SDG 9 — “resilient infrastructure” — the Democratic Republic of Congo will have to build more roads. It is a western European-sized country, but it has only a few thousand kilometres of paved roads versus an estimated 6.5mn in western Europe. More roads would bring the people of DRC many benefits, including easier access to doctors and schools. Regrettably, they would also cause more road deaths.
Roads may have more unpredictable consequences. They could accelerate deforestation (acting against SDG 15, which is “life on land”) by opening up isolated areas to logging companies.
You could argue that connected populations are less likely to practise slash-and-burn agriculture or to use wood for cooking. But the point is that change is unpredictable and societal improvements rarely move in lockstep. Development is not a paint-by-numbers exercise.
The goals of increasing income (SDG one) and of reducing inequality (SDG 10) may also pull in opposite directions. Some economists, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, argue that, as societies escape poverty, some people inevitably do better first.
That was the great insight of Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw China’s poverty-slaying reforms, when he told his impoverished socialist country that “to get rich is glorious”. Not everyone managed glory immediately, but many got there in the end.
The SDGs are a wish list for the world. But a list of desirable outcomes, as Richard Rumelt, a professor at the University of California, has written, is not a strategy. Strategies involve isolating the crux of a problem and finding the best way to tackle it.
A poor country could plausibly concentrate all its firepower on SDG 5: gender equality. To really improve the lives and choices of women, a government would need to make progress in many of the other SDGs as well. In time, empowered women might take care of much of the rest.
Equally, a government could decide to concentrate on infrastructure. Rural roads would help farmers sell more food to cities, saving the country foreign exchange on food imports and building up a financial surplus that could be redirected to other sectors.
Plausible development strategies differ from country to country. They cannot be imposed from the outside.
Poor countries lack the capacity to do everything at once — even in the imaginary circumstance in which enough development money flowed in from outside. The sustainable development goals prioritise everything. In the real world, that is to prioritise nothing.