True Colours of the SDGs
In a little over a year, at the SDG Summit in September 2027, the world will gather again to debate the future of the global goals. But long before anyone walks onto that stage, someone is already shaping the script for what the world will debate next.
Photo by Katja Ano on Unsplash
To understand where we’re heading, it helps to remember where we began. Two decades ago, the global conversation revolved around eight simple, urgent promises: the Millennium Development Goals. It was a time when HIV/AIDS loomed like a shadow across continents, and when the UN struggled under the weight of its own fragmentation. There was even a moment when leaders imagined a single, unified UN presence in every country. A bold idea of the One UN that dissolved quietly, filed away as too idealistic. Now, as the SDGs approach their final stretch, the UN stands at a far more precarious crossroads. Not just fragmented but also underfunded, it faces existential questions about its future.
The MDGs were signposts in the development discourse and central to measuring the sector's progress. Although donor-driven, they did contribute to a more coherent understanding of what was the role of international development cooperation in contributing to a better future. The later editions of the 17 goals have been harder to grasp, and the results of the SDGs, beyond the cry "we are not on track", have been difficult to hear. The truth is, dividing the ambitions of humankind into 17 distinct, colourful boxes is, of course, quite absurd. Goals overlap, collide, and sometimes undermine each other when pursued in isolation. And yet, the idea of a shared structure for debating the global goals, a place where the world gathers to imagine its future, is worth defending.
But who is now setting the agenda for the beyond 2030? At least one group has already stepped forward. Deafening a universal rights-based agenda, and the civic space as a key enabler of the equitable transformation. Forus, a global network of national civil society organisations and regional coalitions, has gathered its members' aspirations in the Forus Post 2030 Vision Paper. Forus’ vision pushes beyond the old development vocabulary and ODA-based development discourse. For instance, it points to the failures of the International Financial Architecture that shape the lives of billions, yet remain far removed from the democratic ideals of the SDGs and global commitments. While we do not need 17 colourful boxes of unrelated ambitions that everyone can pick from, we need a space for a debate on the direction of humanity, and the more diverse, open, and equitable it is, the more courage we have to learn from past mistakes. Kudos to Forus for being early to set their parameters for that debate!
