Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Backgrounder
Members of the United Nations voted unanimously to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in September 2015. Its supporters billed the 2030 Agenda as a blueprint for peace and prosperity that aimed to unite the UN’s disparate environment and development activities under seventeen aspirations known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The United Nations portrayed the seventeen SDGs as being universal and indivisible. Advocates for the SDGs subsequently pushed governments, businesses, international organizations, and civil society groups to pursue the integrated treatment of social, economic, and sustainable development at the global, international, domestic, and local levels. The 2030 Agenda and the SDGs ultimately sought to reinforce the liberal international economic order, including the institutions of global economic governance and the pursuit of economic growth. The goals were buttressed by numerous targets that endeavoured to ‘green’ the global economy, assure more robust governance, and cultivate more inclusive social outcomes. However, by the time that the UN Secretary-General offered his midpoint analysis on the SDGs in 2023, it was clear that little progress had been made on the goals (UNSG 2023). A confluence of crises had undercut progress on most of the SDGs, and opinions on the goals themselves had polarized as increasing numbers of experts and commentators identified the political limitations of the SDG project (UN 2023). Progressives and greens advocated for stronger indicators of social and environmental progress, and nationalists pushed back against all aspects of the 2030 Agenda (Sneyd 2024). In March 2025, the United States administration rejected and denounced the SDGs while most other UN members continued to pursue the 2030 Agenda (USMUN 2025).
There is no doubt that the SDGs were a novel and unifying approach to development challenges at the UN. From the 1960s, UN institutions and processes related to the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of development problems had emerged independently of each other (Bexell and Jönsson 2021). Some were laser-focused on the economic dimension, such as the UN Development Decades or the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Others, including the UN Environment Programme and the UN Conference on Environment and Development, pursued agreements on the environment dimension. Similarly, the day-to-day work of the UN Development Programme and the UN Research Institute on Social Development prioritized social concerns. By the late 1990s, the profusion of initiatives that were exclusively attentive to specific aspects of development came to be considered a problem (Niklasson 2019). Many UN officials and representatives subsequently called for more integrated treatment of development, and eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed in the year 2000. The MDGs included a handful of social objectives, and one goal did underscore the need for sustainability. That said, these goals were not a concerted attempt to unify all UN development cooperation. The MDGs did not integrate economic development, and their treatment of sustainable development was at best peripheral to their primary focus on health, gender, and education-related social objectives (Dalby et al. 2019).
The SDGs represented a radical departure from the UN status quo, and also from standard economic approaches to growth. The inclusion of seventeen goals that were each associated with an extended list of targets and progress indicators was certainly innovative and unifying (UN 2015). Goals that appeared on the surface to focus on one dimension of development, such as ‘no poverty’, included targets related to environment and climate-related stresses. Similarly, while the goal on ‘industry, innovation, and infrastructure’ clearly emphasized economic development, SDG 12 injected the 2030 Agenda with an equal focus on ‘responsible consumption and production’ (Gasper et al. 2019). Moreover, goals including ‘life under water’ and ‘life on land’ put the spotlight on human-environment relationships. Perhaps most significantly, SDG 8 on ‘decent work and economic growth’ radiated the idea that growth can be made to work for the environment. This endorsement of so-called ‘green’ growth was as controversial as it was consequential (Sneyd 2024). The SDG project was animated by the idea embedded in SDG 8 that there is no necessary contradiction between the pursuit of growth and environmental despoliation.
This perceived symbiotic relationship between the environment and economic growth and the believed non-contradictory nature between them was very much tied to the actors that were involved in developing the goals and, more importantly, the targets (Persaud and Dagher 2021). Each goal was developed by a small group of experts and actors. Specifically for SDG 13 on ‘climate action’, the initial actors that were most involved in developing the goal and the targets were primarily experts on the environment and on indigenous issues. Their initial work highlighted contradictions between economic growth and the protection of the environment, including the fact that GDP goes up when environmental disasters occur (Hickel and Kallis 2019). Indigenous and environmental experts hoped to develop strategies to draw back climate change in a manner that went beyond green technology and targeted the consumption part of the equation. However, over time, these experts were replaced by industry representatives and green industry enthusiasts. Consequently, the targets that were ultimately agreed on SDG 13 portrayed a positive relationship between environmental protection and economic growth.
Studies on the overall development of the SDG targets and the indicators - the aspects of the 2030 Agenda that more clearly defined the essentials of what was to be achieved and how - have identified similar political problems. Status quo ideologies and powerful stakeholders came to dominate the proceedings of the various SDG working groups (Persaud and Dagher 2021). A major study of the various actors involved in the these processes and their influence found that:
Western individuals and organizations were overrepresented.
Rich and powerful people with connections to major corporations, private sector foundations, or private sector-funded philanthropic organisations had a significant presence in the SDG working groups. These included a significant number of private sector actors (55 companies and multiple business associations and business-linked foundations) from the gas and oil industry (11) as well as chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology companies (8). There was only one alternative energy company that was included.
Actors who were critical of the liberal international economic order and/or neoliberal economic models and governmental systems were sidelined, including climate activists and Indigenous and other change-oriented social, economic, and political activists.
This highly consequential over-involvement of the rich and powerful was not an accident. Recognizing the need to raise significant funds to achieve the SDGs, the United Nations employed a pay-to-play tactic. Financially endowed actors were offered the chance to significantly influence the approach to each of the Global Goals in exchange for important financial commitments. In so doing, the UN favoured and empowered private sector actors vis-a-vis public interest nongovernmental organizations and movements in the development of the SDGs.
Given this history, it is unsurprising that SDGs aimed to reinforce the economic, social and environmental ideologies that have underpinned the power of the West/Global North and bolstered the liberal international economic order. In essence, the SDGs represented an attempt to reform market-oriented economic systems and reinforce the legitimacy of governance institutions. Instead of important and necessary changes to the economic orthodoxy, especially as it related to the impact of this orthodoxy on climate change, the SDG targets and indicators became a system maintenance project. Put another way, Agenda 2030 was an attempt to humanize and ‘green’ a decades-old blueprint for the global management of economic development. As our research strongly suggests, this revised template failed to address the underlying structural economic drivers of persistent poverty, food insecurity, poor sanitation, and planetary despoliation (Persaud and Dagher 2021; Sneyd 2024). This blueprint was protected by processes that were not fully participatory, collaborative, or transparent. SDG aspirations or feedback that did not reinforce the established order - proposals that would have disrupted entrenched patterns of investment, production, trade, and consumption - were filtered out. Those with more critical viewpoints on what development and economic systems should look like were silenced or excluded.
The United Nations nonetheless deemed the SDGs and their associated targets and indicators of progress to be ‘universal’ or somehow above political contestation. The hard reality is that the SDGs were never apolitical. Their ambition to build a greener and more socially inclusive global economy was shaped and constrained by a politics of exclusion and ignorance. The Global Goals were also agreed at a time of rising belief in corporate social and environmental responsibility, and in better environmental, social, and governance practices more generally. They were infused with and reflected a core pillar of the doctrine of stakeholder capitalism: that businesses can and must do more for people and the planet. By 2025, the ideological climate that had fostered the adoption and uptake of the goals had shifted. The idea of stakeholder capitalism was no longer ascendant when the US administration repudiated the SDGs. Moreover, progressives and environmentalists continued to highlight the limitations and contradictions at the core of the 2030 Agenda. Even so, many people with stakes in the idea of development continued to support the SDGs as progress on the goals faltered. Many governments also remained heavily invested in the success of this project.
References
Bexell, M., and K. Jönsson. 2021. The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Legitimacy, Responsibility, and Accountability. London: Routledge.
Biermann, F., T. Hickmann, and C-A Senit. (eds.). 2022. The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance through the Goals? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blicharska, M, C. Teutschbein, and R.J. Smithers. 2021. “SDG Partnerships May Perpetuate the Global North-South Divide.” Nature: Scientific Reports 11.
Dalby, S., S. Horton, and R. Mahon. 2019. “Global Governance Challenges in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.” In Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges, edited by S. Dalby, S. Horton, R. Mahon, and Diana Thomaz. London: Routledge.
Gasper, D., A. Shah, and S. Tankha. 2019. “The Framing of Sustainable Consumption and Production in SDG 12,” Global Policy 10(51): 83-95.
Hickel, J. and G. Kallis. 2019. “Is Green Growth Possible?” New Political Economy 25 (4): 469-486.
Niklasson, L. 2019. Improving the Sustainable Development Goals: Strategies and the Governance Challenge. London: Routledge.
Persaud, N. and R. Dagher. 2021. The Role of Monitoring and Evaluation in the UN 2030 SDGs Agenda. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sneyd, A. 2024. Hidden Politics in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Halifax and Rugby:
UN (United Nations). 2015. Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: UN. sdgs.un.org/2030agenda.
———. 2023. Global Sustainable Development Report: Times of Crisis, Times of Change. New York: UN.
UNSG (United Nations Secretary-General). 2023. Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Towards a Rescue Plan for People and Planet. Report of the Secretary-General (Special Edition). New York: United Nations General Assembly and Economic and Social Council.
USMUN (United States Mission to the United Nations). 2025