Early draft, not for citation Seminar on ‘Critique of Sustainable Development’, IEA Nantes, June 6-7, 2017 The Climate of Sustainable Development Goals: A View Sitharamam Kakarala Fellow, IEA Nantes (2016-17) & Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India About a decade ago a scholar of Indian origin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote “the climate of history” , speculating what climate change arguments could mean to his discipline, History, especially if the planet Earth were to become, as speculated by climatologists and creative writers alike, a plane t without ‘us’, the human beings (Chakra barty, 2009). Any honest and meaningful discussion on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) would have to confront the same ‘hard’ question as a backdrop of critical reflection, for, in a planet of Earth without ‘us’ not only the knowledge of history but all human knowledge itself becomes superfluous. I venture to propose in this paper to approach the issue of SDGs from such a perspective to highlight some key concerns and unresolved and built-in contradictions in the UN framework, with a hope to find meaningful way forward. From MDGs to SDGs? The SDGs, often seen as successor of the previous UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 2000-2015 (Sachs, 2012) argue that the ‘successful’ implementation and realisation of these goals will depend upon arriving at concrete action from states parties, sound indicators and close monitoring, very similar to that of the MDGs. I however would like to suggest that much has transformed materially and conceptually during the first decade and a half of the new millennium that makes the SDGs challenge qualitatively different from that of its predecessor not merely in terms of obtaining commitments from the states parties or arriving at relevant and effective indicators of implementation, or rigorous methods and strategies of monitoring etc. Rather, the real challenge with regard to realising the SDGs lie in, I venture to suggest, arriving at conceptual clarity: what is the substance of the idea of ‘sustainability’? how should we understand the term in a deeply diverse and economically uneven world of needs, wants, 1 | P a g e
Early draft, not for citation aspirations, production and consumption? What are the right or appropriate indicators of performance? How should they be monitored? Notwithstanding a lot of writing on the idea of sustainability, it’s a truism that there is no real consensus. How then should we approach of studying SDGs? Some suggested that the SDGs be clustered under three heads: economy, environment and social inclusion (Sachs, 2012). While it’s a useful approach as it helps them to view as three key clusters as opposed to 17 individual goals, and hence making them amenable to public memory and recollection, they are also been presented as though there are no conflictual issues between each of these three clusters. The dominant wisdom presents that the goals of social inclusion (reduction and eventual eradication of poverty, hunger, access to quality education and health etc) are intricately dependent upon achieving rapid economic development (the so called growth model), though some have cautioned on the need for carefully worked out redistributive strategies to make the ‘gains’ reaching the bottom most sections of the society (Sen & Dreze 2013). The achievements of MDGs in this logic were intricately connected to sustaining rapid economic growth for relatively longer periods of time. Are SDGs visualising the continuity of the same process and policies, may be with a little extra emphasis on the environmental concerns? In MDGs environmental protection was represented by only goal 7. In SDGs however goals 8, read in conjunction with goals 12, 13, and 14 present a more expansive conceptualisation of environmental protection that includes issues such as climate justice. Read together seriously, goals 8, 12, 13 and 14 present the need for a qualitatively higher commitment towards environmental and climate sustainability. Goal 8 promotes ‘ sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all ’. Thus, presenting a view that sustained economic growth can at once be sufficiently inclusive, providing full employment and environmentally sustainable. Goal 12 emphasizes on sustainable consumption and production, goal 13 urges combatting climate change, goal 14 advocates sustainable use of marine resources. I would like to submit that the substantive meaning and content of goal 8 is to be derived in the light of combined reading of goals 12 to 14. Thus, the idea of sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth is to be pursued through commitment to sustainable consumption and production goals that utilise the natural resources in a sustainable way, which in turn have clear convergence with climate 2 | P a g e
Early draft, not for citation action goals. The pursuit of sustained and inclusive growth envisaged under the MDGs had no such constraining value framework. A new dimension of Sustainability Let me further state as to why I argue that SDGs have a constraining value framework. Any rudimentary analysis of production and consumption patterns over the last three decades cannot but indicate how fundamentally unsustainable our existing production and consumption patterns are. I draw my data and arguments from the global (ecological) footprint network modelling, which is gaining significance in understanding (and reinterpreting) the idea of sustainability over the last decade. 1 At its simplest level, the concept of ‘ecological footprint’ is calculated based on a measure of a nation’s available ecological resources on one side (such as forest land, farm land, marine resources etc) and extent of consumption on the other (such as carbon emissions, energy, food, marine, forest resources consumption, extent of human habitations etc) and the resulting ecological deficit/reserve. 2 The outcome is to present the national ecological footprint in terms of the ‘global hectares’ that the nation is consuming at present and how much deficit or reserve that the country is in. similarly, at the individual level, the per capita global hectares required for an indivi dual person’s consumption is also provided. An interesting insight that emerges from this new approach is an insight that though many developed countries seem to have done exceptionally well with regard to economic and human development their ecological fo otprint indicates fairly high levels of ‘unsustainable’ production and consumption patterns. As figure 1 demonstrates, top 12 HDI countries have a per capita ecological footprint ranging from 4 global hectares (gha) in the case of Norway to 8.59 gha in the case of United States, when the available per capita biocapacity is 1.71 gha. Similarly, while many developing countries have fared poorly with regard to economic and human development indices, their ecological footprint has not yet reached significantly unsustainable levels. As figure 1 demonstrates, many developing countries which have a very 1 I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Henk Manschot and Caroline Suransky for introducing the concept, the network and materials in this regard. 2 Complete details of the concept and method are available at http://www.footprintnetwork.org/our- work/ecological-footprint/ 3 | P a g e
Early draft, not for citation low HDI rank (between 135 and 150) are performing well as their per capita ecological footprint is well under 1.79 gha. The situation however rapidly changing, especially in those countries which are embarking on rapid economic expansion, for there appears a close connection between rapid economic expansion and growth, changing patterns of production and consumption and per capita gha, leading them into, from the vantage point of ecological footprint, unsustainable direction. My intention here is not to romanticise the underdevelopment of the global south or unduly criticise the developed west. Rather the intention here is to highlight that there is a complex and deeply entangled problem between achieving high economic growth and the consequent cultures of unsustainable production and consumption on the one hand, the ecological deficit footprint on the other. The tension between goal 8 and goals 12 to 14 in the SDGs are to be scrutinised in the background. Figure 1. source: http://data.footprintnetwork.org/ 4 | P a g e
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