Development goals and geography

The new year—2018—brings us ever closer to the ambitious UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. They include ending poverty and hunger; ensuring health, education, and water for all; making cities, infrastructure, consumption, and economies more sustainable; protecting climate and ecosystems; and increasing equality, peace, and partnerships. The SDGs and their precursors—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—were the focus of my intervention that argued for more and critical attention from geographers to the nature and implications of setting international goals for development.

I am very grateful to the busy colleagues—Emma Mawdsley, Bill Moseley, Andrea Nightingale, and Farhana Sultana—each with deep knowledge of development issues—who have taken the time to comment on my paper, and to others who heard or read the article and made constructive suggestions. Their responses provide important extensions, nuances, and criticisms of my original paper and further build a case for geographers to pay critical attention to development goals.

For example, Emma Mawdsley (2018) focuses her commentary on the crucial question, overlooked in my article, of how efforts to achieve development goals will be financed, given that overseas development aid from higher income countries is far removed from the recommended 0.7% of gross national product and is often not addressed to countries or sectors in greatest need. She identifies an important shift to an emphasis on private sector investment and on domestic taxation as the way to fund development, normalizing the role of business, and neoliberal processes such as trade, in development. Prompted by her commentary, I read some of her work that shows how development donors are now helping to reduce the risks of private investment and encouraging the commodification of land, infrastructure, and health in the global south (Mawdsley, 2015, 2016; Mcewan and Mawdsley, 2012). I realized how closely this is reflected in debates about climate finance where patterns of investment, including the relabeling and redirection of development funds and the role of private investments, deserve greater critical attention (e.g. Roberts and Weikmans, 2017)

Bill Moseley (2018) comments that a focus on development goals may lead us into an intellectual dead end, thus challenging the main argument of my paper. He raises concerns about the value of working on development goals given that many data collections by development agencies are just exercises in self-justification. He worries about what the SDGs do not measure and the huge attribution problems in linking development interventions to real improvements. While I did ask whether the successes in reducing poverty and hunger or improving water access can really be linked to the MDGs, the question of whether goals have any real relation to development on the ground, and whether good data are actually available to assess this, is best raised by those geographers, such as Bill, who have inside experience within development agencies and who commit to long-term field study where development can be contextualized in local contexts.

Literature on the challenges and implementation of the SDGs has flourished over the last year, but geographic work is still mostly absent. One exception, identified by Bill, is a double issue of the African Geographical Review ‘From the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Africa in the Post-2015 Development Agenda. A Geographical Perspective’ with an overview paper which argues for the value of geographical perspectives in understanding the SDG agenda in Africa, especially the internal variations in problems and solutions, multi-scalar perspectives, and human–environment relations as viewed from political ecology (D’Alessandro and Zulu, 2017). The 13 papers include authorship by geographers and other social scientists based or trained in Africa.

Andrea Nightingale (2018) raises important questions about the process and politics of creating development goals, including the ways in which consensus can silence a diversity of views. She wants to know who was involved in developing the SDGs and who was not, and what were the debates behind the scenes. There is little literature on this as it relates to development goals, and I agree that we often read too much into published texts or final products. We should do more interviews and triangulations with those involved in the policy process and the creation of goals. Her approach to triangulation, as I understand it, is to use multiple methods that can be used to identify different, rather than converging, perspectives in efforts to show the situated knowledges that underpin development (Nightingale, 2016).

Another criticism of my essay is that I argue for getting the measurements right, rather than challenging the principle and validity of quantitative measurement especially of concepts, such as poverty, which are not only multidimensional but embodied and performative. She wants geographic critiques to provide us with new imaginaries of development that reflect lived realities.

The need for more work on understanding the process of creating the goals and on the embodied experience of poverty and other deprivations is also reflected in the commentary by Farhana Sultana (2018). She wants us (me) to think more deeply as to why some goals were chosen and others were not, and who had the authority to influence them. Surely, she asks, geographers should focus beyond the MDGs and SDGs to study more profound and challenging issues of oppression, justice, and exploitation—human experiences that are not captured or solved by the current set of goals. Her views are supported by papers in a recent issue of Globalizations, where Gabay and Ilcan call for more research on the affective politics of the SDGs (Gabay and Ilcan, 2017). They criticize the universalism of the SDGs and the way in which individuals have been made into objects in need of help and then constructed as active subjects, responsible for their own development and then managed through partnerships, capacity building and big data that remake and relabel bodies and communities. Other recent papers make similar points—Weber argues that the 2030 agenda may undermine political struggles for social and environmental justice because the SDGs privilege a universal and neoliberal market approach, as expressed in Goal 17 which promotes the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and Goal 1 which promotes microfinance (Weber, 2017). Weber suggests the SDGs overlook guarantees of free entitlements (e.g. a right to water or food rather than ‘access’) except in the case of education. She also explores the power and interests behind the SDGs.

Where I disagree with Farhana is with her skepticism about whether geographers can influence development agencies in debates about policies such as development goals. In the case of climate, I would argue that geographers have played significant roles in the elaboration of climate goals and policies, especially in highlighting the importance of vulnerability and adaptation and in introducing critical perspectives on gender, race, and scale (Ford et al., 2007; Liverman, 2015; Smit and Wandel, 2006; Tschakert, 2012).

Since I wrote the original paper, there have been some attempts to assess progress toward the SDGs. Recent reports from the United Nations and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDKN) are based on limited and proxy data for many targets, illustrating the point that I and others have made about the complexity of measuring the SDGs. The United Nations highlights slow and inequitable progress, notes a real decline in bilateral aid to the least developed countries, and notes an uptick in debt service to 6.1% in 2015 from 3.6% in 2011(United Nations, 2017). The report notes that income inequality dropped in 49 of 83 countries between 2011 and 2015 but does not provide other measures of inequality. The environmental indicators, such as those for Goal 14—conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources—are also limited to measures of protection and fishery exploitation showing that in 2017 only 5.3% of global oceans were under protection and, in 2013, 31% of marine fish stocks were overfished. The report admits that ‘The lack of sound disaggregated data for many…vulnerable groups—including children, youth, persons with disabilities, people living with HIV, older persons, indigenous peoples, migrants, refugees and those internally displaced—exacerbates vulnerabilities by masking the extent of deprivation and disparities. What’s more, a lack of rigorous evidence and comprehensive data has long compromised the ability of governments and the international community to accurately document the discrimination faced by various groups’ (p. 13). The SDG Indicators and Dashboards report (Sachs et al., 2017), by the SDKN, finds that of the 230 indicators for the SDGs, only 150 have established definitions, and that in the voluntary national reviews countries are struggling to implement the full range of indicators, doing better on socioeconomic than environmental reporting.

The SDKN report does raise the important issue of international spillovers that I should have discussed in my paper, given my focus on geography. The SDGs rely on countries to monitor and implement their own goals, but for many their ability to achieve them is limited because their own environment, economy, and even social conditions are heavily influenced by processes and policies outside of their borders. Clear examples include the way in which increasing prices as a result of drought or trade policy in a country can increase poverty in many others through global economic links, or where international investments transform land use at local levels. This is something that Liu and others have written on as ‘telecoupling’, where, for example, changes in land use in one place are driven by changes elsewhere through price, investment or trade (Lenschow et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2013, 2015).

Since I wrote the original paper, there has been considerable growth in literature on development goals, although little of it by geographers. My colleagues in the Earth System Governance Project have compiled a volume ‘Governing through Goals’, which critically examines goals as a strategy for global governance and the challenges of implementation (Kanie and Biermann, 2017). They identify the limits of the SDGs because of their detachment from the international legal system and binding obligations and their weak institutional status and lack of oversight. They call for more formal commitments and benchmarks, the mobilization of resources to achieve and govern the SDGs, and the need for integration with other international agreements. They identify research needs that include relating SDGs to genuine progress on the ground and for critical examination of trade-offs. Journal special issues on the SDGs include Current Opinion in Sustainability, Forum for Development Studies, Globalizations, International Journal of Human Rights, and Sustainability Science (Bexell and Jönsson, 2017; Brondizio, 2017; Saito et al., 2017; Stafford-Smith et al., 2017; Weber, 2017; Winkler and Williams, 2017).

My own interest in the SDGs has been renewed through my role as a lead author for the forthcoming IPCC special report on 1.5C (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/). In this report—where geographers are well represented among the authors—we have been asked to examine the impacts of a global warming of 1.5°C in the context of sustainable development and the pathways that could allow us to keep warming below 1.5°C. Work on the report has made me realize the enormity of the challenge in achieving the SDGs, especially reducing inequality, while also responding rapidly to the risks of climate change. Furthermore, the year 2017 has been difficult for those of us in the United States who care about social and environmental justice at home and in other countries. The new US administration is taking us out of the Paris Agreement on climate, is undoing environmental protections, has insulted other countries and migrants, appears to be against science and diverse voices, and has cut budgets for development, social, and environmental programs. How the ‘America First’ policy affects the achievement of development goals, or social and environmental rights and conditions more broadly, is under discussion by geographers and other scholars (Association of American Geographers, 2017; Clarke, 2017; Ferrarello, 2017; Harris et al., 2017; Konyndyk, 2017). Of course, the world of development goes on without the United States, and the new policies have prompted many forms of resistance.

Thinking about the problems with measuring development through goals has brought me to a greater awareness of the prevalence of goals and metrics in the everyday life of education and science under neoliberalism (Berg et al., 2016; Dowling, 2008; Mountz et al., 2015). Every month, we are asked to produce more and more quantitative data on teaching outcomes, research productivity, attendance and response to outreach events, and citations and journal rankings. This data-driven valuation of work in the university has many parallels to development goals. When will we be given a list of 17 Academic Development Goals that will redirect our everyday practice to meeting the goals rather than more complex and profound markers of success and commitment?