Looking beyond 2015

The moral and practical imperatives of creating an equitable world and a sustainable planet have increasingly become inescapable. These are not unattainable ideals either. This optimism is foregrounded in a blueprint produced by the United Nations Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals. The reason for the hope is based no less on the progress, though modest, achieved on the 2015 Millennium Development Goals — especially with regard to halving extreme poverty five years ahead of the stated deadline. In 2010, the world met the MDG target on potable water, as measured by access to improved sources of drinking water. But the target with respect to sanitation was not realised. The 69th session of the U.N. General Assembly is expected to consider the OWG’s outcome document as part of the process of formulating the post-2015 agenda. The 17 objectives and 169 specific targets that the OWG zeroed in on, as compared with the eight that constituted the MDGs, in themselves may appear significant only in quantitative terms. The vision encompassing the outcome document put together by the 30-member team is clearly much wider in scope and far more ambitious than the objectives set out in its predecessor document. For instance, the MDGs had posited an end to extreme poverty and halving, by 2015, of the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day. The broad objective for the future with regard to poverty is more ambitious. The OWG postulates a reduction by half of the proportion of men, women and children of all age groups living in poverty in all its dimensions. The specific target is to ensure by 2030 that nobody any longer lives on the equivalent of less than $1.25 a day.

Significant new additions are goals concerning food security, life-long learning opportunities for all, universal social protection with a minimum floor level, and resilient infrastructure. The currently dominant theme of economic growth has been tied to the promotion of sustainable patterns of production and consumption, as well as the generation of full employment and dignified work. On some accounts, the role of the MDGs is marginal at a time when governments in the developing world are rethinking the ends of their own policies and registering progress in improving the quality of life for their populations. The other criticism is that too much emphasis was laid on quantitative targets under the MDGs with little impact on quality — as for instance with the accent put on school enrolments. The flip side to these arguments is that sustaining the global momentum on these targets contributes critically to strengthening domestic judicial and civil society engagement. The latter forms a vital democratic input to ensure that issues of human development remain high on the agendas of national governments.