Geographic perspectives on development goals

Abstract

The successes and failures of the UN Millennium Development Goals and the establishment of a new set of Sustainable Development Goals provide many opportunities for geographic engagement and critical attention. Development goals, in their focus at the national level and on measurable indicators, redirect investment and frame views of the world. They are often difficult to measure and implement and sometimes contradictory. In reviewing the history, progress, and critiques of the UN goals, this article asks what a geographic perspective shares and adds to the debates about development, its measurement, and impact.

Keywords

critical geography development Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Introduction

Why a dialogue on development goals in geography? Comparisons between countries and places are characteristic of geographic inquiry and policy analysis, often expressed in socioeconomic and environmental indicators that purport to measure progress, well-being, sustainability, and the condition of ‘development’. With roots in the colonial enterprise to exploit natural resources and ‘civilize’ non-Western cultures, the idea of development has been associated with a modernizing project that measures progress primarily in terms of economic growth, and secondly as improvements in literacy, health, and living conditions (Kothari, 2006).

In its first World Development Report in 1978, the World Bank highlighted absolute poverty as a continuing problem despite progress in incomes, education, nutrition, and health, and reported a set of national development indicators that included production and trade, demography, health, and education (World Bank, 1978). The World Bank and many other international organizations now regularly report the state of development—mostly at the country level based on information provided by member nations. These development data pervade publications and teaching and are used by the media and politicians to claim comparative success or progress, failure or decline. Geography has been a partner and a critic of the idea and measurement of development—collecting and analyzing data, challenging assumptions and measures of progress, and curating texts and maps that show different aspects of development and environment around the world (Blaikie, 2000; Dorling et al., 2008; Hart, 2001; Seager, 2009; Slater, 1974; Watts, 1984). Yet some observe that geography and geographers are rarely seen as major contributors to the general theories and practices of development, despite their concern and distinctive skills (Bebbington, 2002; Peck and Sheppard, 2010).

A renewed and expanded vision of development emerged when, in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Declaration called for the elimination of poverty and hunger as well as improvements in health, education, and gender equity (United Nations General Assembly, 2000). Progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would be measured using national-level development indicators from 1990 to 2015 and against targets that included halving the proportions of people in poverty or who are undernourished. Assessing the MDGs in 2015, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon claimed

The global mobilization behind the Millennium Development Goals has produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history. The landmark commitment entered into by world leaders in the year 2000—to spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty—was translated into an inspiring framework of eight goals and, then, into wide-ranging practical steps that have enabled people across the world to improve their lives and their future prospects. The MDGs helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, to make inroads against hunger, to enable more girls to attend school than ever before and to protect our planet. They generated new and innovative partnerships, galvanized public opinion and showed the immense value of setting ambitious goals. By putting people and their immediate needs at the forefront, the MDGs reshaped decision-making in developed and developing countries alike. (United Nations, 2015b: 3)

This article seeks to open up a conversation about goal-driven development among geographers and to consider what we might add to the debates and practices about the purpose, nature, and impacts of development goals. I argue that while it is certainly true that the MDGs reshaped development decision-making, the effects are more perverse, and their success is more contested and uneven than their champions suggest. While the goals are associated with some improvements in incomes, health, and access to food and water, they are also flawed in the selection of targets, the accuracy of measurement, and the aggregation of data and classification of countries. The MDGs significantly reoriented the activities and discourses of donors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and developing countries. They produced new forms of governmentality and biopolitics aligned with processes of neoliberalism, such as a focus on public–private partnerships, quantitative outcome measures, solutions through markets, and individual rather than collective strategies (Death and Gabay, 2015; Harvey, 2007; Liverman and Vilas, 2006). In the second part of this article, I address the question of potential geographic contributions to debates over development goals. As the United Nations declares partial success in achieving the MDGs and moves forward with a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), what might geography have to say about the potential and pitfalls of setting such development goals? Can we constructively engage with the post-2015 development agenda and the SDGs in ways that are progressive and meaningful? And what does constructive engagement imply for our everyday scholarship, service, and outreach?

The MDGs

The MDGs were proposed in association with the United Nations Millennium Declaration and Summit in 2000. They were adopted by 189 member states and more than 20 international organizations, including the World Bank and World Health and Food and Agriculture Organizations. Eight goals were established, focused on human capital (measured in terms of nutrition, health, and education), infrastructure (access to water, energy, and IT), and human rights (empowering women, increasing voice and access). Each goal had specific targets for improving conditions in the developing world, from a baseline of 1990 by 2015, for a total of 21 targets measured by 60 official indicators. The goals set out to

eradicate extreme poverty and hunger—targets include halving the proportion of people living in poverty and suffering from hunger;

achieve universal primary education;

promote gender equality and empower women—targets include eliminating gender disparity in education, employment, and political representation;

reduce child mortality—target of reducing child mortality rate by two-thirds;

improve maternal health—targets to reduce maternal mortality ratio by 75%, universal access to contraception;

combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases—halt and reverse spread of HIV/AIDS and incidence of malaria;

ensure environmental sustainability—reduce biodiversity loss and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, halve proportion of people with access to improved water and sanitation; and

develop a global partnership for development—debt relief for least developed countries, increase development assistance, and access to information technology.

The MDGs were developed by UN agencies in the context of the financial crisis, the end of the Cold War, and growing opposition to globalization and international economic institutions (McArthur, 2014). UN Secretary Kofi Annan saw an opportunity to reinvigorate the development agenda, producing the March 2000 ‘We the Peoples’ report that argued for ‘eliminating poverty everywhere’. A series of UN conferences during the 1990s on specific topics (education, environment, children, women, food) had generated a series of recommendations and targets. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) synthesized these into a set of international development goals that could motivate donors, but the initial goals were criticized by global civil society, were contested among various international agencies, and lacked buy in from developing countries. A slightly more consultative process was used to draft text for the September 2000 UN Millennium Summit (the Millennium Declaration) and the subsequent road map report that formalized the set of goals and targets at the global and national scales.

A pivotal decision was the selection of a 1990 baseline, and 2015 end point, for the targets. McArthur suggests that the choice of 1990 mirrored the baselines used in the topical conferences in the 1990s, addressed the lack of up-to-date 2000 data available at the time of the Millennium Summit, and was a better fit to historical trends making it easier for countries to achieve at least some of the targets (McArthur, 2014). Critics suggest that the 1990 baseline was a way to weaken the goals and to cynically ensure rapid progress in reaching the goals—especially because 1990 preceded rapid growth in incomes in China and the improvements in access to water, health care, and education in many regions (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2013; Vandemoortele, 2011b). Thus, the commitment to the MDG targets was made after much progress had already been made.

The value of a concise set of goals, with a modest set of targets, is that they can be easily communicated to the public and policy makers (Vandemoortele, 2011b). Supporters and critics alike recognized this, even as they suggested that key issues had been omitted or that an even smaller list would have provided greater focus (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2014). Apparently, a decision was made to only include targets with agreed upon indicators and robust data—one of the reasons that human rights, or issues such as participation and equality, do not appear clearly in the MDGs (Vandemoortele, 2011b).

Progress and successes in achieving the MDGs

The date for achieving most of the MDG targets was the end of 2015. Although data are not fully available for some targets and countries, victory has been declared on many of the goals and considerable progress on others (Table 1). Of the targets, the greatest successes were the halving of poverty and increasing access to improved drinking water. Improvements are reported as especially striking in Asia and Latin America—poverty fell by 84% in SE Asia and by 66% in Latin America and the Caribbean. Hunger dropped from 31% to 10% in SE Asia and from 14% to less than 5% in Latin America. Sub-Saharan Africa started from a more challenging base and did not reach many of the goals: poverty declined from 57% to 41% and hunger from 33% to 23%. For this region, the most significant changes were a decline in under-5 mortality from 179/1000 to 86/1000, an increase in access to improved drinking water from 48% to 68%, and a 50% reduction in HIV/AIDS numbers of new infections.

Table 1.

Progress on selected Millennium Development Goals (United Nations, 2015b).

Goal	Target	1990	2015
Extreme poverty (>US$1.25 per day)	Halve—Reduce to 23.5%	47%	14%
Undernourished people	Halve—Reduce to 11.65%	23.3%	12.9%
Achieve universal primary education	100%	80%	91%
Under-5 child mortality	Reduce by two-thirds to 30/1000	90	43
Maternal mortality	Reduce by 75% to 107.5	430	230
Access to improved drinking water	Halve those without in developing countries (85%)	70%	89%
Access to improved sanitation	Halve those without in developing countries (71.5%)	43%	62%
External debt as percentage export revenue	Zero	12% (2000)	3% (2013)

These statistics that show significant progress in eliminating poverty and hunger, and in the status of women and living conditions, are often a surprise to those who perceive a growing toll from disaster and disease, increased degradation of the environment, and serious damage to livelihoods from neoliberalism.

Critical perspectives on the MDGs

There is a large critical literature on the MDGs ranging from technical criticism of data sources, variable choices, and scale of analysis, to overarching objections to the ways in which the MDGs were used to reorient development thinking and funding, create and govern neoliberal subjects, and undermine local priorities. There have been several large collaborative efforts that take critical perspectives on the MDGs, including the ‘Power of Numbers’ project based at the New School (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2014) and a collective study on the MDGs and human rights (Langford et al., 2013).

Many of the critical arguments connect to geographic approaches and concerns, yet geographers are rarely authors of, or cited in, the critical literature on development goals. Exceptions include Jones and Chant (2009) who question the dominance of the MDGs and global solutions in the poverty reduction strategy papers for Gambia and Ghana and Bond (2006) who provides a powerful, but brief, critique of the MDGs as nontransparent, neoliberal, and a distraction from social struggles for basic needs and democracy. Mawdsley’s sustained attention to development paradigms includes several discussions of the MDGs (Mawdsley, 2007, 2015), including a recent call for critical development geographers to be at the ‘forefront of theorizing the ‘post-2015’ era (Mawdsley, 2017).

In the next section of the article, I summarize some of the prevalent criticisms of the MDGs.

The MDG-reoriented development

The MDGs, some suggest, have biased development investments toward the measurable targets. This has led to changes in policy and behavior, and changes in ideas, that produce lower priorities for programs that do not relate to the MDGs and to fragmentation of policies that should be interconnected and multisectoral (Fukuda-Parr, 2014). This reorientation has occurred in multinational development agencies, national government donors and recipients, and many NGOs (Davis, 2011). Among the goals or targets, those focused on water and sanitation, child mortality, maternal health, and HIV/AIDS have become a major focus of attention and investment, although this may be also a result of factors—including activism, donor preferences, and government policies—other than the MDGs. For example, the target of reducing the debt of the poorest countries (Goal 8) was well underway by 2000 as a result of movements such as Make Poverty History, the Jubilee movement, private sector decisions, and G8 summits (Hulme, 2010).

The MDGs legitimized neoliberal processes and governmentalities

Many critical geographers have engaged with the debate over neoliberalism and the new ways of governing environmental issues and subjects. Political ecologists, for example, have identified privatization, the undoing of environmental regulation, the dispossession of land and resources, and the commodification and marketing of nature as processes of neoliberalism (Castree, 2008; McAfee and Shapiro, 2010; Springer, 2012). While some conform to the more deterministic approach of Harvey’s critiques (Harvey, 2007), others focus more on neoliberal environmental governmentalities inspired by Foucault (Barnett, 2005; Watts, 2003). Others see value in combining insights from Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault to understand the ways in which political economy and discourse can explain the practices, attitudes, and policies that produce approaches to environment and development that emphasize markets, surveillance, public–private partnerships, and the responsibility of individual citizens(Barnett, 2010; Bulkeley, 2009; Springer, 2012).

Informed by critical theories associated with Foucault and Marx, scholars have assessed the MDGs in terms of governmentality, biopolitics, and political economy. Fukuda-Parr et al. (2014) argue that in linking social objectives to concrete outcomes, the MDGs involve a ‘transformation that reifies intangible phenomena, simplifies complex concepts, and abstracts social change from local contexts’. They conclude that ‘goal setting is a poor methodology for elaborating an international agenda’ (2014: 11). The focus on goals, targets, and outcomes is seen as emerging from the shift to development that is top down, competitive, results based, and narrowly focused on what can be counted (Davis, 2011). Following Foucault, the goals are seen as techniques and rationalities of governmentality that measure lives, bodies, and spaces by creating categories of persons and managing them through social engineering of money and policies to meet the targets. Death and Gabay identify the MDGs as ‘an ambitious and hegemonic attempt to rearticulate the development project and produce entrepreneurial subjects’ (2015: 598). This biopolitics defines people as poor, women, slum dwellers, students, or workers—where progress is defined through higher incomes, urban services, education level, or equity—and not through the multiple identities of individuals, their collective actions, or the many other aspects of well-being and rights.

Ilcan and Phillips (2010) call the development discourses associated with the MDGs ‘developmentalities’, which rely on information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks supported by calculative practices. Because, they argue, the MDGs assign human beings as statistical referents to their national territories or social group, and place them into arbitrary classifications, the MDGs create new imaginaries of regions and groups and divert resources from practical actions to the collection of statistics (Ilcan and Phillips (2010)). The MDG governmentalities also construct certain individuals and groups as those best prepared (or most responsible) for advancing development goals, including women farmers, urban managers, millennium villagers, and private sector partners.

Other contributions from critical development theory take a political economy perspective (e.g. Amin, 2006; Bond, 2006; Pogge and Sengupta, 2015; Saith, 2006) arguing that the goals could not be met within a capitalist global economy where people are being systematically dispossessed of their land, entitlements, and jobs in the interests of capital, specifically through neoliberal policies of free trade, less government, and privatization. To quote, ‘The MDGs are part of a series of discourses that are intended to legitimize the policies and practices implemented by the dominant capital and those who support it’ (Amin, 2006: 6). Rather than address the structural basis of poverty, hunger, and inequality with roots in colonialism, the MDGs made developing countries responsible for addressing these problems, with a nod to the role of debt relief and aid in helping to meet the goals. Gore (2010) and Hulme (2010) see the MDGs as the consequence of the neoliberal accountability of ‘results-based management’ that has come to dominate development with an emphasis on goals, targets, and indicators that are specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, and time-limited.

And the MDGs can be seen as a strategy of survival, legitimacy, and accumulation by the UN agencies and their NGO clients. The MDGs were designed to give new urgency to development investments (Hulme, 2010), which include funds for the UN agencies, NGOs, and other organizations (including universities). To the extent these organizations are associated with the success of the MDGs, they gain legitimacy and support from national governments and provide sense of achievement for those who work in international development.

The targets for poverty and hunger were arbitrary

Target 1a, which had a target of halving poverty, has been singled out by critics who note that the choice of measure—the percentage of the population living on less than US$1 a day—created a number of problems and a false success. For example, by choosing to half the proportion, rather than the absolute numbers, of people in severe poverty, the goal was made easier to reach (Pogge, 2004). A proportional target was also easier to achieve in countries with a smaller proportion of poor people or with a large population. It is a lot easier to cut poverty from 6% to 3% in Costa Rica than from 80% to 40% in Nigeria, in terms of the needed investment and policy results. MDG 1 also set a less ambitious target than even the UN agencies had proposed at conferences prior to the setting of the MDG targets.

Critics challenged the selection of less than US$1.25 a day—US$1 prior to 1999—as the criteria for extreme poverty, arguing that widespread deprivation occurs at higher income levels such as US$5–US$15 a day (Gore, 2010) and that the MDG criteria undercounts the experience of those who are extremely poor. Pogge (2004) showed that using US$2.50 a day as the break point could easily erase signs of progress. He shows that at US$1 a day, poverty fell from 1481 million to 1092 million from 1981 to 2001, whereas at US$2 a day it increased by 285 m. In Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty at US$1.25 fell from 25% to 16% but at US$2.50 a day, poverty increased from 386 million to 610 million. He also notes that millions of people live just above the poverty line with little qualitative difference in their experience of deprivation compared to those below it and that the World Bank changed the methods for measuring poverty using a different base for purchasing power parity in the later MDG period.

Changes in the proportion of people living on less than US$1.25 a day are also a very limited measure of what it means to be poor. More relevant, critics suggest, would be a multidimensional measure of poverty that includes poor health, lack of education, and disempowerment or as defined by the poor themselves in particular places (Alkire, 2007; Bahadur et al., 2015; Lemanski, 2016). One of the main criticisms of the MDGs is that they should also have considered material and relative inequality, which increased in many countries over the time period (Saith, 2006).

The hunger target (Goal 1c) suffers many of the same problems as the poverty target in terms of the choice of measure and its biases. Both the number and the proportion of undernourished people (i.e. people eating less than 1200 calories per day needed for sedentary work) declined over the MDG time period. The proportional measure for hunger showed a drop from 23.3% to 12.9%—a halving of hunger by this measure—and almost met the target of 11.65%. However, the number of hungry only fell by 21% to 780 million (rather than a 50% drop to 495.5 million). Pogge (2004) shows how increasing food prices in recent years made it even less likely that the poor could obtain adequate food and that those living active lifestyles would be hungry even at 1200 calories per day. And even more shockingly, he demonstrates that the hunger indicators were aligned with the World Bank adjustment in measuring poverty, such that the proportion of the hungry suddenly increased by 19% in 1990 and decreased by 6% in 2010, making success in reaching the target even more likely. In selecting targets only for minimal calorie consumption and child weight for age ratios, the MDGs neglected many other important (and regularly reported by FAO) dimensions of food security including prices, access, and key aspects of nutrition (Fukuda-Parr and Orr, 2014).

Lack of attention to human rights

Although the United Nations was paying increasing attention to human rights at the time the MDGs were elaborated, the goals paid less attention to rights than many had hoped for (Langford et al., 2013). Although rights had been articulated for food, work, education, gender, and health at UN conferences, these were not included in the MDGs. Darrow (2012) identifies a series of problems with the lack of human rights goals and targets in the MDGs. He notes that authoritarian and oppressive regimes could report progress while continuing to ignore human rights. One of the greatest violations of rights under the MDGs may be of those occupants of informal settlements who were removed in efforts to meet MDG 7d: ‘By 2020 to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least of 100 m people slum dwellers’. The indicator selected was the proportion of urban populations living in slums and only set out to reduce the proportion by 9%—a lesser ambition than most other goals. The apparent success of reducing the proportion of slum dwellers from 39% to 30% from 2000 to 2014 is partly a result of government efforts to eliminate slums through forcible displacement of their residents and violation of their rights (Huchzermeyer, 2013). A goal focused on slums, rather than on the political economy and biopolitics that create and define them, ignored the political economies of land tenure, prices, land grabs, and discrimination that has forced millions into precarious urban homes and livelihoods (Di Muzio, 2008). Human rights are also seen to underpin the goals for hunger and water—because access to food and clean water can be seen as a human right. Critics felt that affordability and quality should have been included in the drinking water goal (Darrow, 2012).

Inadequate representation of gender

While initially seen as a victory for women’s rights, MDG 3 (to promote gender equality and empower women) has a very limited view of gender equality and empowerment, with targets that include eliminating gender disparity in education (measured by enrollment ratios), providing access to paid employment (share of women in wage employment), and women’s political representation (proportion of seats held in parliaments) (Kabeer, 2005). Nothing is said about the quality of education, equity in earnings, or legal rights for women (Yamin and Boulanger, 2014). As Kabeer argues, the indicators can show progress but also have downsides:

Women’s access to paid work may give them a greater sense of self-reliance and greater purchasing power, but if it is undertaken in conditions that erode their health and exploit their labour, its costs may outweigh its benefits. Women’s presence in the governance structures of society clearly carries the potential to change unjust practices, but if the women in question are drawn from a narrow elite, if they have been invited rather than elected, and if they have no grassroots constituency to represent and answer to, their presence will be only a token. (Kabeer, 2013: 24)

Only one of the 13 recommendations of the 1995 Beijing conference on women is addressed in the targets and indicators (Sen and Mukherjee, 2014), causing Antrobus (2005) to call them the ‘Major Distracting Gimmicks’. While MDG 5 focused on improving maternal health, this is only measured in terms of maternal mortality (5a) and access to reproductive health care during pregnancy. Some suggest that the influence of the Vatican, US evangelical Christians, and conservative Islamic states removed broader sexual and reproductive rights from the MDGs (Berer, 2012; Hulme, 2010).

Insufficient attention to environment

The MDG 7—ensuring environmental sustainability—included only four targets to cover the enormous breadth of environmental challenges to development. Target 7a—integrate principles of sustainable development into country policies and reverse loss of environmental resources—was very vague and is measured in terms of forest loss, CO₂ emissions, and ozone depleting substances. MDG 7 includes one of the most spectacular failures of all MDGs. The target of reversing climate change instead saw a global increase of greenhouse gas emissions of 50% from 21 million metric tons in 1990 to 33 million metric tons in 2012, with emissions in developing regions more than tripling in magnitude (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2013; Janetos et al., 2012). Target 7b—a significant reduction in biodiversity loss—is also poorly defined with the quantitative measure in terms of only the percentage of terrestrial protected areas. While the area of land protected in the developing world increased from 8.4% in 1990 to 15.7% in 2014, this did not stem the loss of biodiversity (Butchart et al., 2010; Chape et al., 2005).

Target 7c—halve the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation—is more precise, although the measure that is reported is limited to access to ‘improved’ water or sanitation, where improved is defined as water that is contained from outside contamination, available within 1 km of the household. Among the criticisms of the drinking water and sanitation targets are that they do not focus on key components of access such as affordability and reliability (Langford and Winkler, 2014). Although piped water extended to 1.9 billion people, with less fecal pollution, other aspects of water quality (such as arsenic or other chemical contamination) were not addressed. Water is often only available for a few hours each day, required considerable time to collect, and, as a result of water privatization or full cost charging, many people could not afford to pay for their improved water (Dar and Khan, 2011).

Problems of attribution

While the United Nations and others proposed causal links between the establishment of the MDGs and progress on key development indicators (e.g. Mcarthur, 2013), it is very difficult to attribute global or national improvements to the internationally agreed goals (Cimadamore et al., 2016; Kanie and Biermann, 2017). Although some development institutions did use the MDGs in targeting and evaluating projects (Davis, 2011), there is little evidence that setting a goal was linked to outcomes on the ground (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2013). Many other factors have been identified as reasons for success including reductions in conflict in key regions such as Africa and SE Asia, philanthropic investments in health by institutions such as the Gates Foundation, the rise of democratic governments under pressure to reduce poverty in regions such as Latin America, and the globalization of trade and communications to the benefit of the developing world (McArthur and Rasmussen, 2017).

A geographical perspective on the MDGs

Geographical perspectives are consistent with many of these criticisms, despite the lack of focused attention on the MDGs. Political economy, biopolitics, and governmentality have been used by geographers to critique the neoliberal development project—unpacking not only the structures and discourses of development but also how development and neoliberalism produce nature and patterns across space. For example, critical geographers have shown how biopolitics constructs people as poor or hungry and sheds light on the everyday experiences of precarity and deprivation as embodied in individuals’ relationships to space, place, and nature (Elwood et al., 2016; Loftus, 2015; Nally, 2015; Rose-Redwood, 2006; Waite, 2009). The critical geography journal, Antipode, published a powerful analysis of the politics of the MDGs (Ilcan and Phillips, 2010), showing how the UN employs the rationalities of neoliberal governance—information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks—to shape subjectivities and create ‘developmentalities’ using calculative practices. For example, the Millennium Villages Project suggests populations can escape poverty through identifying their problems and choosing from available options, lists of stakeholders from NGOs and businesses are enrolled in achieving the goals, and decentralization is seen as the key to success (Ilcan and Phillips, 2010).

But geography may have missed a simpler opportunity for constructive critique of the MDGs. Geography has useful perspectives on the arbitrariness of thresholds in the use of indicators, including those that demonstrate the ways in which the selection of map classes can control interpretation or how the way a forest is defined can influence its management (Crampton, 2011; Robbins, 2001). We also understand the problems of aggregated data and the false imaginaries created by dividing countries into developed and developing.

Most reports of progress on the MDGs focused on progress at the global or regional scale. At the global level, aggregation produced a greater sense of progress as millions of people emerged out of poverty and hunger in China and India and gained access to improved water, changing overall global averages. A ‘tyranny of averages’ overlooks equity and variation within nations for reasons of data availability (Vandemoortele, 2011a).

It is important to note that the MDGs only focused on the so-called developing world—defined as Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa; Latin America and the Caribbean; the Caucasus and Central Asia; Eastern, Southern, Southeast, and Western Asia; and the Pacific Islands. The developed world was excluded (Australia and New Zealand, the United States and Canada, Japan, Eastern and Western Europe, and Russia). Even at the beginning of the MDG period, this classification was breaking down as Mexico and South Korea joined the OECD club of higher income countries. By 2015, new groupings and terms had emerged including the ‘advanced’ or ‘emerging’ economies and middle-income or newly industrializing countries, often including Brazil, Korea, and Mexico. The decision to set the MDGs only for the developing countries let the developed countries off the hook for the deep pockets of poverty and deprivation within their own countries and entrenched a division between the north as the benevolent provider of assistance and the south as the disciplined subject (Mawdsley, 2015).

The regional aggregations also created a narrative of rapid progress in Asia and Latin America and of failure in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within each of these regions, there are countries like Vietnam or Brazil or Ghana that showed great progress on poverty, hunger, or water goals, and other countries like Central African Republic and Madagascar that made little progress or regressed on key goals. The regional aggregation probably does the most damage to Africa (Easterly, 2009)—where the region and its countries is narrated as failing on most of the goals—reflecting what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the ‘danger of a single story’ about Africa (Adichie, 2009).

The most pervasive distortion associated with aggregation is the lack of attention to variation within countries. In Ghana, for example, overall poverty decreased (measured in the percentage of people living on less than US$1.25 a day) dramatically from 49.4% in 1993 to 22% in 2012, over the MDG challenge period. But local level poverty (measured as the percentage living under 1413 GHC based on the Ghana Living Standards Survey) varied from 5.6% in Accra to more than 70% in the Upper West region of Ghana, with even greater variation at the district level (Ghana Statistical Service, 2014). And, of course, these indicators vary between households and within households and between urban and rural areas.

The MDGs conform to the UN convention of reporting by, and on, recognized member nations at the level of the nation. This obscures and erases some of the most impoverished and oppressed peoples on the planet—indigenous nations who have no official representation within the states that bound them or within the UN except as observers with NGO status—and for whom development indicators do not exist or are resisted (Watene and Yap, 2015). For example, in the United States, American Indian poverty and hunger rates are far higher than those of other groups in society.

Geographers are very familiar with these problems of data aggregation and the hidden geographies of suffering. We recognize pitfalls of the ‘ecological fallacy’—where group data are used to make inferences about individuals—in which average poor performance data for Africa or a country construct a place or individual as conforming to that average. We also understand the way in which the choice of arbitrary, modifiable, and socially constructed spatial boundaries—such as census districts—influences the results of statistical analyses that aggregate point or local data into larger regions. When goals, and progress to reaching them, are based on aggregated geographic data, there are considerable risks of bias and misinterpretation (Openshaw, 1984). Critical GIS scholars understand that the choice of variables, scales, indices, and visuals has significant implications for what is prioritized, invisible, and biased, but also the power of spatial analysis to inform debates about social and environmental justice (Elwood, 2008; Sheppard, 2005). Having missed some of the opportunities to inform the debates on the MDGs, geographers could engage more actively with the newly established SDGs.

The SDGs

On September 12, 2015, at the UN General Assembly, countries adopted a new set of goals to ‘end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all’ (United Nations, 2015a). The 17 ‘SDGs’ are much broader and more ambitious than the MDGs, with 169 targets, most to be reached within 15 years by 2030. They are also supposed to apply to all countries, not just those in the developing world. There is continuity with the MDGs with goals of poverty reduction, health, and education. But there are many more goals with an environmental focus. Seen as an integration of the people-centered MDGs with the planet-centered Rio+20 declaration, the SDGs are a core of the ‘Post 2015 Development Agenda’ centered on people, planet, prosperity, and partnership.

The 17 goals are to

end poverty in all its forms everywhere;

end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture;

ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages;

ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all;

achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls;

ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all;

ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all;

promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all;

build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation;

reduce inequality within and among countries;

make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable;

ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns;

take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (taking note of agreements made by the UNFCCC forum);

conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development;

protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss;

promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels; and

strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

The process was apparently more inclusive than for the MDGs, with a large consultation process of thematic and national conversations, as well as door-to-door surveys and an open working group with representatives from 70 countries (Death and Gabay, 2015). Critical discussion on the SDGs is only just starting to emerge among scholars and development practitioners—with most indicators for the 169 targets not yet defined. The preliminary set of indicators totaled a mind-blowing 300 measures (Hák et al., 2016).

Criticism of the SDGs

Complexity

Criticisms of the SDGs so far focus, in particular, on the large number of goals and targets, which are viewed as too complex to communicate to the public or drive policy, and too ambitious, universal, and absolute to be successful (Langford, 2016). For example, the Economist termed them the ‘Stupid Development Goals’ and the ‘169 commandments’—so sprawling and misconceived that they are doomed to failure (Economist, 2015). Perhaps, the Economist speculates, NGOs and national governments think that the more goals and targets the more money for development. Others suggest the goals and targets are too narrow and directed to allow for local variation and creativity, and are a distraction from a core goal of eliminating poverty.

The expansion in the number of goals and targets, especially as the indicators are developed for measuring progress toward targets, will add even more calculation, monitoring, and quantification to the process of evaluating development and its biopolitical processes (McMichael, 2017). This is evident in the many calls to take advantage of new technologies—remote sensing, social media, big data analysis—for creating social and environmental indicators (Jerven, 2017; Kharrazi et al., 2016; Ryerson and Haack, 2016). This can result in overly narrow assessments that again redirect policy toward quantifiable outcomes rather than broader but harder to measure social needs.

Contradictions

Other critics focus on the contradictory nature of many of the goals, suggesting that the growth goals cannot be met without sacrificing many of the environmental ones or that sustainability cannot be achieved under the current economic model of capitalism (Hickel, 2015a). As Sexsmith and McMichael argue, SDG efforts to reconcile economic development and environmental protection may produce a ‘Faustian bargain’ where environment is subordinated to the ‘economism of development thinking’ (2015: 16). The SDGs, argue Fletcher and Rammelt, assume a ‘fantasy’ of decoupling resource consumption from human well-being, in which simultaneously achieving growth, protecting the environment, and reducing inequality face overwhelming challenges (Fletcher and Rammelt, 2016). For example, SDG 8—seeking decent work for all and sustained economic growth—includes a target of 7% growth in gross domestic product per year in least developed countries, partly driven by export expansion. Decoupling this growth from increasing environmental impacts will be difficult. As Hickel argues, the SDGs seek to reduce inequality through income growth for the bottom 40%, but without touching or redistributing the incomes of the top 1% and without degrading the environment (Hickel, 2015b). But this postcolonial perspective is hard to reconcile with goals that focus on the individual, trade, and green growth.

Another contradiction is that the SDGs take for granted the need for the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs and the spread of free trade—policies that many argue deepened poverty for millions and degraded the environment. Goal 17—revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development—actually includes a target (17.10) that promotes universal open trading systems under World Trade Organization, thereby increasing exports from developing countries.

The SDG targets are rife with poorly defined but widely used terms such as sustainable, resilience, and modern. The goal of being ‘sustainable’ is mentioned in 10 of the 17 goals without clear definition, and resilient is a goal in 2 of them. We have been debating the definition of sustainability for decades, it has become widely used, and yet there is still no consensus on how to measure it (Camacho, 2015; Hugé et al., 2013; Liverman et al., 1988). Geographers have engaged critically with the rush to resilience as concept and catchphrase, arguing that it lacks attention to power, agency, differing values, and inequality and justifies neoliberal ideologies of community self-reliance (Cannon and Müller-Mahn, 2010; Cote and Nightingale, 2012; Cretney, 2014).

Positive reactions to the SDGs

More positive views include those who see more progressive, and even radical, opportunities possible within the SDGs. Hajer and colleagues (2015) are enthusiastic about the transformative potential of the SDGs, if they involve the full range of societal actors. Death and Gabay (2015) see value in the way the SDGs remove the division between developed and developing countries, thus recognizing the universality of poverty and the processes that create it. They appreciate the global call for reductions in inequality and the push for strong sustainability based on some alternative development paths. Death and Gabay (2015) also see positive parallels with the radical Latin American discourse of ‘buen vivir’ (living well) that draws on indigenous worldviews to highlight harmony, community, environment, and culture.

Some NGOs have endorsed the SDGs. Rosche (2016) explains why Oxfam decided to participate constructively in consultations on the SDG goals on gender and to try and influence the goals, targets, and indicators. Oxfam developed a strategy to bring women’s rights into the SDGs, including the elimination of violence against women and addressing the unpaid burden of care. They joined with other NGOs to push for a stand-alone goal, meeting with UN agencies and governments as well as the UN High-Level Panel and the Open Working Group charged with developing the SDGs. She sees great progress in the acceptance of a stand-alone gender goal—Goal 5 to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’—that includes commitments to end discrimination, eliminate violence, value unpaid care and domestic work, promote women’s participation and leadership, and ensure access to reproductive health and rights. She also argues that the SDG’s overarching principle of ‘Leave No-one Behind’ is a win for women and that it implies an intersectional approach that requires that disaggregated social data—including sex, age—will be assessed for all goals and targets. Others celebrate the sensitivity to gender and equity in the SDGs but question the overall lack of attention to the structural causes of gender poverty and discrimination such as macroeconomic policies focused on growth and free trade rather than social support and fair employment (Bidegain Ponte and Enríquez, 2016; Esquivel, 2016; Fukuda-Parr, 2016; Razavi, 2016).

Environment in the SDGs

Many of the SDGs focus directly on the environment, including biodiversity and ecosystems, climate change, and oceans, and others focus on the main forces driving environmental degradation including energy and water use, food production, consumption, and urbanization. Climate change has been identified as the one stress that could undermine the other environmental goals, as well as those on poverty or health (Ansuategi et al., 2015; Campagnolo and Davide, 2017; Reckien et al., 2017; Wright et al., 2015). How well do the SDGs address the climate challenge?

Goal 13 is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts and has five targets that include strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters, integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning, improving education, awareness raising and human and institutional capacity, implementing climate finance for the developing countries of US$100 billion annually by 2020, and promoting mechanisms for raising capacity for effective climate change–related planning and management in least developed countries and Small Island Developing States, including focusing on women, youth, and local and marginalized communities. Goal 13 was heavily influenced by the prospects of a climate agreement under the UNFCCC and by the anticipated findings of the 2013 IPCC reports. The targets include recognition of several concerns of critical scholars and activists working on climate—such as additional financing for climate adaptation and capacity building for least developed countries, small islands, women, youth, and marginalized communities.

But they also include targets that are going to be very difficult to measure in a meaningful way. For example, we continue to disagree about how to measure resilience and adaptive capacity, what the actual costs of responding to climate change may be, and whether ‘raising capacity’ can be converted into the recognition of the rights, loss and damage, and vulnerability of countries, women, children, and other groups.

The US$100 billion funding for developing country mitigation and adaptation was a back of the envelope calculation that did not take account of the problems of costing nonmarket impacts, the reports that requested up to US$300 billion a year for adaptation alone or the relabeling of development assistance to appear to contribute without additional funding (Liverman and Billett, 2010).

Commitments to ‘building capacity’ can be seen as a very vague statement that distracts from the real material needs and rights of the most vulnerable (Archer and Dodman, 2015). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) lists capacity building as including ‘strengthening relevant institutions, including focal points and national coordinating bodies and organizations, and strengthening climate change communication, education, training and public awareness’. Capacity building often involves highly paid consultants and training, rather than understanding of local needs and supporting serious responses to them. And assessments of capacity building often only focus on the number of people trained or attending workshops rather than substantial measures of progress.

Conclusion

I have suggested that geographers have, for the most part, ignored or evaded discussion of development goals in their full technical, material, discursive and political dimensions. Our engagement with development debates is longstanding and critical, but few development geographers (with important exceptions) engage directly with either the international institutions or NGOs. This may be partly a result of our focus on the case study and complex identities of places and people that leads us away from analysis at the scale of the United Nations and large regions (Bebbington, 2002). Many geographers have a healthy skepticism about statistics and aggregations that provide inadequate representations of lives and landscapes, or are unwilling to engage with the debates over facts and knowledge in a post-truth society.

Geographers are well positioned to contribute to the discussion of the post-2015 development agenda and some have begun to engage. For example, Herrick (2014) calls for health geographers to engage with SDG 4 which seeks to ensure healthy lives through reducing the burden of HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, tropical diseases, and the noncommunicable diseases of cancer, cardiac disease, diabetes, and respiratory disease. She sees opportunities for geographers to connect health goals to urban political ecology, to examine the links between global health funding and local suffering, to map the industrial epidemics associated with tobacco, alcohol, and diet, and to disaggregate by place and sector. Barnett and Parnell (Barnett and Parnell, 2016) discuss how SDG 11 on sustainable cities will require careful theoretical research, monitoring, and evaluation that recognize the diversity of city experiences and needs and the dynamic relationships and contingencies between places, global processes, and dispersed outcomes. Kaika warns that the new urban agenda reflected in the SDGs relies on techno-managerial solutions and ecological modernist thinking that did not work for urban citizens and environments (Kaika, 2017).

What are some of the possibilities for geographic scholarship and active engagement? We can work within the system by recommending indicators, methods, and strategies for assessing and supporting progress toward the SDGs. We can sustain and expand the criticisms of the problems with nation-based, quantitative, contradictory, development indicators. We can offer our nuanced understanding of scale, statistics, and spatial analysis and our ability to connect social and environmental conditions. We can bring our training in critical theory and political ecology to more progressive visions of development that pay more attention to nature, labor, gender, multiple identities, and bodies. We can become politically active in resistance and protest against damaging development or run for political office to change the system from within. We can propose alternative development visions that take account of local, subaltern and indigenous voices and agency, reassert the significance of social protections, and admit the inevitable trade-offs and contradictions between growth and environment.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Audra El-Vilaly for research assistance and the discussants of the oral version of this article at the Association of American Geographers in 2016—Ed Carr, Bill Moseley, Andrea Nightingale, and Farhana Sultana—for their thoughtful comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Support for research was also provided by the University of Arizona, Office of Research and Development and by the Agnese Nelms Haury program in Environment and Social Justice.

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