The 2030 Agenda and eradicating poverty: New horizons for global social policy?

Towards understanding the 2030 Agenda

The United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development – Transforming our World (2015–2030) (United Nations, 2015) succeeded the Millennium Declaration (MD) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The agenda is a path-breaking amalgamation of developmental and ecological agendas which hitherto were under two separate remits in UN development agenda setting. The fact that over 190 countries succeeded in adopting (by acclamation) the 2030 Agenda is not to be underestimated. Yet, we need to recognise that it is the result of tough negotiations between interest groups: governments with divergent interests, progressive not-for-profit civil society and a powerful, commercially driven business community. Thus, the negotiators did not build on a common analytical framework as to the causes of poverty or climate destruction. ¹

Nevertheless, if our common goal as policy analysts and activists is to transform the world progressively, as is the rallying cry of the agenda, and if a core component of this commitment is to pursue the eradication of poverty, we need to draw on this agreed text. We can build on what is useful, and at the same time, imaginatively but realistically transcend the agenda where it lacks ambition and supplement the missing analysis and critique. To do this, this article compares the 2030 Agenda with preceding UN development decades to understand history, and then in the following section unpicks the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the agenda while searching for elements of progressive global social policy.

UN development agendas, income poverty and policy approaches

Since their inception, most UN development agendas have been about policy – sometimes explicitly, sometimes more opaquely. The early UN development decade texts, covering the 1960s and 1970s, were blunt. The newly independent, low-income economies of the south were a united force in global power politics and demanded a restructuring of the global economy. They were able to influence the thrust of the first two UN development decades, which adopted a Keynesian-influenced analytical approach, mainly relying on domestic investment, international trade and policies regarding commodity prices, programmes for debt relief, and international financing from official development assistance (ODA), as the mechanisms required to reach high gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates. This was the south of the ruling classes, concerned with their insertion in the global economy, and this approach was particularly evident in the text of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) formulated in 1974.

It was not until 1980 that the global community became more attuned to issues of intra-country social justice in both high- and low-income countries. This was partly a result of shifting global dynamics, with trade unions and ‘voices of the poor’ slowly being able to influence global policy discourse. This direction became more pronounced as the cold war ended and a rights-based discourse gradually emerged. The third (1980–1990) and fourth (1990–2000) UN development decades, the Copenhagen Summit on Social Development (1995) and the two Poverty Eradication Decades following the social summit (1997–2007 and 2008–2017) committed to eradicating poverty as a key objective.

The UN social summit of 1995 recognised unemployment, social exclusion and lack of participation as the factors generating poverty. The social summit’s policy stressed the creation or promotion of appropriately and adequately remunerated employment as central to anti-poverty strategies and policies. There was also an emphasis on the rights to education, food, shelter, health and information, and the need to promote basic social programmes. These objectives were carried over into the Millennium Agenda adopted a few years later.

However, several key points were lost in translation, in the transition from the social summit to the MD. The remit of the MDGs was a much narrower one: to merely decrease poverty by half, which means that the MDGs were not rights-based or universalist. Decent work was not at the heart of the development agenda, as it had been in 1995, and more generally, policy formulations overall faded from the agenda. Copenhagen’s explicit remit to increase social expenditures and guard against fiscal budget reductions, for example, disappeared in the MDG text. Such omissions left the door open for shortcuts: they prompted policy- and decision-makers to underestimate the role of the state and to limit the fight against income poverty levels to groups just below the poverty line, thereby able to report success without an effort to systemically erase poverty.

The main success observed during the MDG era was that global acute income poverty decreased from 35% to 10% between 1990 and 2013. A regional disaggregation, however, quickly reveals that much of this improvement was due to trends in China, where extreme income poverty (measured as US$1.90 per person per day) indeed dropped from 750 million persons in 1990 to less than 100 million persons in 2013 (World Bank 2016a). This moved global poverty data in a favourable direction because of China’s immense population. In Africa, on the contrary, the number of people who make do with less than US$1.90 per person per day has increased from roughly 280 in 1990 to over 380 million persons in 2013 (World Bank 2016b). This actually happened despite a commodity price boom that lasted for over a decade. In Africa, there was no ‘trickle down’ effect to increase incomes of the lowest quintile. The income poverty criterion used, US$1.90 per person per day, is a poverty level that allows for little beyond a basic calorie intake; it means survival at the most dire level (Cimadamore et al., 2016).

The causality between UN development decades and global socio-economic outcomes is not uni-directional, as a counterfactual is lacking, and multiple factors and constellations contribute to economic outcomes. Be that as it may, three trends cannot go uncommented.

One is that during the MDG era, the promise to cut acute poverty levels by half is achieved nominally, but, as mentioned, concentrated mainly in one country. The second is the drastic increase in inequality: over the past 10–15 years, income and wealth disparities have multiplied. Possibly, the weak stance on poverty of the MD and the MDGs may have fed into, and certainly did not counter, the increasingly visible and palpable global and intra-country social and economic injustices.

Furthermore, we observe a distressing procrastination in the UN’s poverty agenda. According to the successive UN development decades, extreme poverty ought to have been eradicated by 1990, or by 2005, or by 2015. The time horizon keeps shifting. Now, in the Agenda 2030, it has been moved forward to 2030, a full 40 years late with regard to the commitment made in 1980 (United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 1980).

The nature of global social policy in the 2030 Agenda

The question, then, is on two levels. The first level is how is poverty framed: is the 2030 Agenda different with regard to its concept of poverty, and if so, in what respect?

On the positive side, the 2030 Agenda is much broader and slightly deeper than the MD and the MDGs - the understanding of poverty has expanded in two ways. The agenda refers to all forms of poverty, and it refers to inequality as a significant factor in poverty. In the sense of deepening, the goal of eradicating poverty has been reinstated from earlier UN development decades. Overcoming inequality within and between countries has been elevated to a stand-alone goal, giving it significant weight. At the level of aspirations, these insights can only be welcomed, even if the agenda has yet again pushed the timeline far into the future.

The second level of enquiry is how (global) social policy defined: what is the policy portfolio and what is the structural nature of policies called upon to address and eradicate poverty? A gracious reading of the agenda will find that its multidimensional understanding of poverty (SDG goal 1.2) does cast a wider net for social policy action. The remit of social policy in the Agenda 2030 is broader and more sophisticated than in the earlier development agendas. Social policy in terms of its policy domains has conventionally tended to cover food security and incomes, education, health, housing, access to water and sanitation, and gender equality. As we saw, the Copenhagen agenda also stressed employment policy. All of these policy areas – and including decent work – are found in the 2030 Agenda (under SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8).

In addition, the 2030 Agenda has factored the impact of climate change into the discourse. The very term sustainable development refers to the ecological components of the agenda, and there are five SDGs devoted entirely and explicitly to the environment (SDGs 7, 12, 13, 14 and 15).

The SDGs thus correspond to the social policy remit of the Millennium Agenda and its list of MDGs and have widened the conventional social policy domains to include ecological requirements. They are also more detailed and use rights-based terminology. They are thus a step in the progressive direction, even in those sections that build on the MDGs. The extensions of the notion of social policy are positive, even if the policy areas as addressed in the 17 SDGs are analytically weak and disjointed.

However, an outright systematic analysis of the genesis of poverty is missing, which in turn constricts the social (and economic) policy platform that would be required. To what extent then can the 2030 Agenda constitute transformative global social policy with a view to eradicating poverty?

At the level of social policy domains, there are two important innovations vis-à-vis the earlier development decades or the MD. First, there is the introduction of social protection with a concrete policy recommendation to institute social protection floors ² corresponding to Recommendation 202 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) adopted in 2012. That recommendation contains ‘four guarantees’ that are well-rehearsed: universal access to child benefits, basic income security for persons in active age, the right to a social pension and access to essential health care (ILO, 2012). Access to social security for the formal sector is addressed in the 2030 Agenda preamble, which commits to all the human rights conventions. Therefore, with the social protection floor, which addresses the informal economy, the agenda de facto promotes social protection in its comprehensive form as a policy to eradicate income poverty.

A second innovation, reaching beyond the conventional remit of social policy, is the SDG discussion on the care economy and the need to recognise and valorise it. ³ The bulk of care work involves providing support to children, seniors and people who are ill or who live with disabilities. It is usually not remunerated and is typically delivered by women and by girl children. It is a major factor creating poverty, either directly, because the people concerned are substituting unpaid work for paid work, or indirectly, because those who give care are not enhancing their own capacity. The connection made in the agenda between the aim to make the care economy productive and to build up social protection for care providers has a transformative potential. It is in fact of special interest to progressive global social policy, since it sees the interdependence between care receivers and care providers in international care chains (Esquivel 2016; UNRISD 2016).

The natural policy twin to poverty eradication is decent work. Here, the agenda is less transformative and, at least at first sight, burdened with an inherent policy contradiction. The goal of full and productive employment and decent work (SDG target 8.5) is part of SDG 8, which is devoted to economic growth. This is a conflict of objectives: if climate change is to be reversed, or at least stopped, as is posited in other SDGs (12, 13, 14 and 15), then the notion of economic growth, measured in GDP and GDP per capita, needs to be revisited and reconceptualised. In countries faced by low per capita incomes and low levels of economic productivity, economic growth remains a precondition for poverty eradication. In the high-income countries, conversely, it is primarily redistribution of economic growth that would be necessary to overcome absolute and relative poverty. The orientation towards economic growth is also misleading because it is very difficult to achieve growth in a resource-neutral fashion; economic growth tends to undermine the goal of ecological sustainability.

For a critical assessment of the 2030 Agenda, it is moreover necessary to move beyond the level of policy domains. A more profound assessment needs to introduce a different measuring stick to examine whether the agenda constitutes progressive global social policy; in other words, whether it goes beyond the remedial and seeks to tackle the structures that generate poverty in the first place.

One way of doing this is to examine the social policy remit of the 2030 Agenda not merely in terms of its ‘portfolio’, in terms of which domains the agenda casts as comprising (global) social policy, but rather from a functional or systemic perspective. One can, for example, apply the ‘5 Rs’ criteria proposed in the global social policy literature, which encompass redistribution, regulation, social rights, resource consciousness and relationality (Deacon 2014: 203). Three of the requirements are met. SDG 10 calls for a redistribution of incomes within and between countries, specifically from richer to lower income quintiles and from richer to poorer countries.

The entire agenda of course speaks to resource consciousness and the need to take account of the planet’s ecological boundaries. The SDGs that address climate change, land use, water use and energy are generically about resource consciousness. Indirectly, SDG 10 can be understood as furthering intergenerational equity. Social rights, too, permeate the agenda, notably in the preamble, and also in the commitment to universalise access to health and education.

The agenda is, however, not progressive on two other counts. The regulation of the dominant economic powers is not a theme. Even where it broaches the issue of governance, the policy recommendations remain vague and opaque. There is, for example, no recognition of the need to regulate large-scale private business or international trade and finance. Global production chains are merely asked to reduce waste. This contrasts strongly with earlier UN agendas, such as the NIEO, which called for regulation and supervision of transnational corporations (UNGA, 1974).

And finally, relationality is not addressed. This is the ultimate crux of the 2030 Agenda. It is completely oblivious to power relations. Ultimately, transformation is not possible without tackling power asymmetries (UNRISD, 2016). With its express commitment to the eradication of poverty, the agenda will have a difficult time if it does not face head-on the structural inequality in access to economic, social and political power, which is what underpins all forms of income and wealth inequality (Rogers and Balazs, 2016).

Outlook: new horizons for global social policy?

The 2030 Agenda, as were all the preceding international development decades and agendas, is a reflection of geopolitical constellations. It was possible to widen and deepen the agenda with regard to poverty and its twin, income inequality, and in respect of policy ideas, because progressive governments incorporated some of the demands of civil society into the agenda’s text. Partly, this was in recognition of the negative impact of climate change and of political tensions and conflicts on societies as a whole, and the drive to find global responses. At the same time, the ultimate weakness of the agenda, its reluctance to challenge power asymmetries, is an outcome of the current political constellation where the private sector has gained increasing power over agenda setting. As long as that is so, poverty eradication will remain an elusive goal, despite the Agenda’s transformative remit, even beyond 2030, and progressive global social policy will be limping on only three of its five legs.