Agenda 2030: Australia’s Disappearing Development Goals

By 2015, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon announced that “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.” In short, they were hailed as “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history.”

Even before they began, the MDGs were an historic achievement. Positioning global poverty in a human rights framework, and getting buy-in from 192 nations, was a consensus the likes of which had never been achieved before.

William Easterly, aid critic and author of White Man’s Burden, wrote in 2015 that “the MDGs were so appealing because they were so precise and measurable.” Indeed, their initial success was in avoiding theoretical differences over the sources and nature of human rights, and of the genesis of injustice; focusing instead on concrete, undeniably ‘good’ and importantly, achievable goals.

[The SDGs] include 17 goals, made up of 169 targets, tracked by 230 key indicators, and with an achievement horizon of the year 2030.

Sequels are never easy, but the steps to take after the MDGs were at least clear. The prevailing opinion was that the MDGs had had their biggest impact in stable nations already on a positive path. Whatever followed would need to tackle the harder question of how life may be improved for those in fragile contexts, or in the midst of conflict, those with disability or otherwise marginalised, those in rural and remote areas, and of course, for women, whom “progress tends to bypass.”

In his report on the effectiveness of the MDGs, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon concluded that to do that more complex work, future programs would need “to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.”

If that weren’t already a more complex task, Ban’s key advisor in the development of the MDGs, economist Jeffrey Sachs, described the next difficult chapter of development sitting within the context of a collision course between an ever-expanding global economy, population and consumption, and the very finite boundaries and resources of the earth itself.

As we know, the subsequent set of global goals was named the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They include 17 goals, made up of 169