The year 2015 has bequeathed a really ambitious, genuinely multilateral and indivisibly universal agreement to the world’s leaders and peoples: the Sustainable Development Goals. Their 17 primary and 169 subsidiary “goals to transform our world” cover an enormous range of issues, from ending poverty, through gender equality, climate action and decent work and economic growth to the creation of peace, justice and strong institutions – and all this by 2030. In coming years an equally large challenge will face everyone involved in and concerned with this huge agenda: how to implement the commitments made.
Compared to the Millennium Development Goals agreed at the United Nations in 2000 these new ones are far more extensive in scope and much more participatory in design and execution. This new level of ambition responded to widespread demands of stakeholders involved in the extensive consultations since 2012. In contrast to the top down and elitist planning of the 2000 agenda the 2015 one drew in all the governments, the various groupings in which they function at the UN and the principal non-governmental and civil society organisations throughout the world in 11 thematic and 83 national consultations as well as door-to-door and opinion surveys. Politically and ethically this latest global exercise is far more inclusive and legitimate than before. Ireland can be proud of the role played in bringing it to a successful conclusion as a joint facilitator with Kenya.
Putting the commitments into practice will tax the capacity and ingenuity of these stakeholders. Does so large an agenda prevent the setting of necessary priorities? How can the goals be implemented without legal compulsion and institutional innovation? Will their very breadth inhibit focussed decisions and encourage sub-optimal compromises? Are the planned statistical indicators capable of withstanding a conservative capture of the monitoring process? Questions such as these have been posed even by sympathetic critics concerned that it is too ambitious.
The deep involvement of such a broad range of actors in drawing them up should help make them more sustainable. Periodic reviews, although voluntary, can be transformed into national political issues as well as reinforcing international benchmarks of development. The goals are more genuinely universal than before because they go beyond the traditional model of development aid from richer to poorer states. By incorporating commitments to equality at national as well as global levels they make it more difficult for local privileged elites to evade responsibility for failing to implement the goals agreed. And the most positive signs of this new participatory paradigm is the greater engagement and empowerment of women required to put them into effect.