Book Review
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Some years ago, long before the SDGs and even before the Millennium Development Goals, the NGO I was with had a campaign to eradicate poverty, which I objected to as it was unachievable unless by an autocratic declaration such as in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China, but more importantly, it tended to trivialise the issue and make it about the “other”. The book Hidden Politics: The UN Sustainable Development Goals by Adam Sneyd raises similar questions about the SDGs, which also use absolutist language and guide us towards unworkable solutions that maintain the status quo. Sneyd’s basic argument is that the SDGs are a liberal view of global issues used to buttress international organisations and governance frameworks, which are being challenged by rising nationalism and populism. The other important point the book makes is that the devil is in the detail. While an SDG itself may seem a worthy aspiration, the chosen indicators for success in meeting them narrow that aspiration considerably. Mostly, these indicators leave out any commitment to addressing structural issues and tend to lead to what Sneyd refers to as “policy shrinkage”. The other broad issue that is raised is the lack of discussion of the level of interconnection and possibly conflict among the various indicators for the targets.
The book takes us through all 17 goals,1 and looks at what they say and the disjuncture on how they would be achieved and assumes the beneficence and political challenges inherent in each. This review will look and handful of the SDGs to highlight the overall point. The first SDG takes us back to eradicating poverty: but it rests on a dollar value related to income and absolute deprivation. Discussions on central issues of capability, basic needs, and the like are left to government. Access to basic services skirts the issues of informal settlements, land access and tenure, customary practices, and the informal sector, which is often unsafe and oppressive. On top of this, government policies, which prioritise extraction and foreign investment, decide what is productive and what is not. These inherent conflicts are left to government to resolve, and the SDGs offer no guidance or even reference to human rights conventions.
The ending hunger goal, likewise, is beset with fundamental difficulties based on inherent assumptions. Poor governance, state fragility, wars, and conflict, are not mentioned as factors. While productivity is important, so is the reference, “particularly women farmers”. In terms of indicators, women are left out, despite the change in overall productivity that would occur if women had the same access as men to agricultural resources such as credit, extension services, inputs, and land.
On health, while the targets are interesting, they ignore the poverty-related mortality due to mal-nutrition-related morbidities, access to health services, and the lack of indicators of the coverage rates of various programs, and the SDG avoids the language of public health care, “ … reifies the liberal economic order and this has become a political lightning rod” (36). Education, likewise, has well-intentioned targets but weak indicators focused on literacy, numeracy, and completion rates. Sneyd argues that these are hardly aspirational and avoid the issue of free and equitable education for all, which, at the level of basic education, is a human right. The focus tends to be on the parent rather than the government system that underpins education access, fairness, and equity. It focuses on education for economic growth rather than social contributions and creativity. Apart from gender, there are no targets for parity for other marginalised groups. Adult literacy is ignored, and the suggestion of scholarships to Global North institutions smacks of colonialism and leads to a brain drain.
Gender may be ambitious but, at the end of the day, meets local inaction at a policy and practice level. Collecting data is fraught so reporting on indicators has its own set of barriers and serve circumscribe the ambition. Access to technology is not about farm equipment and the like for women farmers, but the ubiquitous mobile phone, which may or may not be controlled by the men of the household.
The clean water SDG likewise skirts the issue of clean water as a human right and what this means for the increasing use of user pays and privatisation, which, by definition, challenge the goal of universal access; instead, the indicator focuses on individual responsibility. Transborder conflicts around water are put into the too-hard basket. As Sneyd argues, they are “aligned with maintaining and bolstering the liberal international economic order [under which] these political assumptions are trou-bling at a time of emerging right-wing nationalism” (62).
The inequality goal has a fundamental weakness in that it focuses on the bottom half of the inequality distribution and says little about the wealthy, retributive and global taxes, international regulation of wealth transfers, and intergenerational inequality. “Indigenous and racialized peoples, religious minorities, ethnic groups and those with a status related to caste” are all ignored (93).
The book concludes with “The political myopia of the 2030 Agenda, and the political inadequacies of the targets and indicators [which] require a course correction” (173). It is a harsh critique of the SDGs and points to them in effect being wedges by social activists on the one hand, who argue they do not go far enough, and the rising nationalists who rail against international agendas of the UN and anything that smacks of global governance.
This book is a comprehensive analysis of the SDGs and the main critiques of them. It is set out in a systematic manner – the particular SDG and then a list of the indicators and targets, followed by an analysis of the critiques for each. This review has only scratched the surface of this comprehensive analysis and used a handful of SDGs to lay out the key points being made. If I have any criticism, it is that the book could emphasise some more the relationship, or lack thereof, of the SDGs to the Human Rights Conventions, and the inherent contradictions that sit within them.
— Patrick Kilby (12 Dec 2024): Hidden politics in the UN sustainable development goals, Development in Practice, DOI: 10.1080/09614524.2024.2436504