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Defining goals draws us toward success
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Following the progress made under the Millennium Development Goals, which guided global development efforts in the years 2000-2015, the world’s governments are negotiating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the period 2016-2030.
The MDGs focused on ending extreme poverty, hunger, and preventable disease, and were the most important global development goals in the United Nations’ history. The SDGs will continue the fight against extreme poverty, but will add the challenges of ensuring more equitable development and environmental sustainability.
But will a new set of goals help the world shift from a dangerous business-as-usual path to one of true sustainable development? The evidence from the MDGs is powerful and encouraging. In September 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted the “Millennium Declaration,” which included the MDGs.
Those eight goals became the centerpiece of the development effort for poor countries around the world. Did they really make a difference? The answer seems to be yes.
There has been marked progress on poverty reduction, disease control, and increased access to schooling and infrastructure in the poorest countries of the world, especially in Africa, as a result of the MDGs. Global goals helped to galvanize a global effort.
Setting goals is important.
First, they are essential for social mobilization. The world needs to be oriented in one direction to fight poverty or to help achieve sustainable development.
A second function of goals is to create peer pressure. With the adoption of the MDGs, political leaders were publicly and privately questioned on the steps they were taking to end extreme poverty.
A third way that goals matter is to spur epistemic communities — networks of expertise, knowledge, and practice — into action around sustainable-development challenges.
Finally, goals mobilize stakeholder networks. The multi-stakeholder process is essential for tackling the complex challenges of sustainable development and the fight against poverty, hunger, and disease.
Continuing loop
But there is nothing inevitable about achieving large-scale results after stating a goal or goals. Stating goals is merely the first step in implementing a plan of action.
Good policy design, adequate financing, and new institutions to oversee execution must follow goal setting. And, as outcomes occur, they must be measured, and strategies must be rethought and adapted in a continuing loop of policy feedback, all under the pressures and motivations of clear goals and timelines.
Just as the world has made tremendous progress with the MDGs, we can find our way to achieving the SDGs.
Despite the cynicism, confusion and obstructionist politics surrounding efforts to fight poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation, a breakthrough is possible.
The world’s major powers may appear unresponsive, but that can change.
Ideas count. They can affect public policy far more profoundly and rapidly than detractors can imagine.
Jeffrey Sachs is Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015. www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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