This month, the United Nations (UN) will formally launch the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of pledges that aim to build on the progress in global development since the millennium. Coming from a human rights perspective, the SDGs offer both reasons for hope and concern. On one hand, the SDGs are being set not by a small group of Northern elites but by a wide range of actors—rich and poor countries, public and private actors—who were able construct in the SDGs a complex philosophy of development. This participatory approach to setting development goals may have been “complex and convoluted,” but the hope is that the inclusive negotiations, over several years, increase the chances that developing countries will feel ownership of the new SDGs.
On the other hand, if everyone is included, and, as the UN puts it, “everyone and every country should be regarded as having a common responsibility,” then no one actor can be held accountable for development failures. Provided with so many options, donor governments and developing states will do what they would have done anyway, and the time needed to forge real cooperation will be spread quite thin.
Successful human rights advocacy carries lessons for how best to realize development targets like the SDGs. These lessons become increasingly relevant as the development community embraces the language of human rights. In 2000, the Millennium Declaration laid out a vague commitment to “making the right to development a reality for everyone.” Despite this claim, the development and human rights communities remained largely disconnected under that declaration’s set of targets – the MDGs. The new SDGs offer the chance to bring these two communities closer together. The new agenda for the period 2015-30 states that the goal of the 17 SDGs and their 169 targets is to “realize the human rights of all.”
