Regardless of the name, the United Nations’ proposed list of Sustainable Development Goals actually reads more like a wish list cobbled together by a committee that could not say no.
The Sustainable Development Goals, which are the heirs to the Millennium Development Goals, consist of a whopping 169 proposed targets under 17 categories. As The Economist recently summarized, “These are ambitions on a Biblical scale, and not in a good way.”
More critically, the Economist article points out:
The proposed sustainable development goals would be worse than useless … The SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] are supposed to set out how to improve the lives of the poor in emerging countries, and how to steer money and government policy towards areas where they can do the most good. But the efforts of the SDG drafting committees are so sprawling and misconceived that the entire enterprise is being set up to fail. That would be not just a wasted opportunity, but also a betrayal of the world’s poorest people … [The SDGs are] a mess. Every lobby group has pitched in for its own special interest. The targets include calls for sustainable tourism and a “global partnership for sustainable development complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships”, whatever that means.
Indeed, the U.N. is repeating past mistakes by its attempts to pursue Sustainable Development Goals. As succinctly pointed out by researchers at The Heritage Foundation:
[Sustainable Development Goals] can be a useful tool to measure progress, but the U.N. has allowed political priorities and slogans to distort the SDGs in a manner that undermines their utility, articulates goals in imprecise language that makes them unmeasurable or subjective, and implicitly endorses a top-down, input-driven development strategy that has not been successful historically.
It is easy to imagine that collectively they will do more harm than good. No one doubts that more progress is needed to reduce poverty and bring improved standards of living to previously untouched corners of the globe. But it would be a serious mistake to think these kinds of convoluted development goals, orchestrated by a bloated U.N. bureaucracy, could lead to measurable and meaningful development and progress.
It is no coincidence the increase of economic liberty over the past two decades has coincided with a massive reduction in worldwide poverty, disease and hunger. As documented in the “Index of Economic Freedom,” a benchmark study that demonstrates why economic freedom matters to human empowerment, the link between economic freedom and development is clear and strong.
As the Index has shown over the past 21 years, there is no single cookie-cutter path to development. Rather, there are as many as the ingenuity of humans can produce when policies that promote freedom, whether through improvements in the rule of law or the promotion of competition and openness, take firm root.
If the U.N. is really about helping developing and underdeveloped countries to advance, it should underscore the importance of economic freedom, accountable governance and the effective rule of law—and not, as the Economist bluntly concluded, a set of “stupid development goals.”
