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Despite significant progress in some areas, the world is still far from achieving most of the 169 goals of the Sustainable Development Agenda. With six years until the 2030 deadline, it is critical to develop and implement ambitious, inspiring and achievable solutions to the greatest challenges facing humanity.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were unanimously adopted by all UN Member States in 2015. They constitute an ambitious 2030 agenda based on 17 goals and 169 targets to address global challenges such as poverty, health, equality and gender, work, education and climate change.
With six years until the 2030 deadline, the world is still far from achieving most of the goals. While there has been significant progress in some areas, progress has been painfully slow in many others.
While the funding gap is often and rightly cited as a key factor, the biggest barrier to achieving the SDGs is the lack of a systematic approach to creating scalable solutions.
Slow and steady progress can lead to significant improvement over time, but if progress is too slow, the sense of accomplishment and hope for the future will be lost.
Achieving systemic gains requires courage. In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals were launched, calling for transformation. But it is easier to call for transformative solutions than to develop them. While markets are powerful drivers of innovation, we need solutions that serve the broader public interest. Progress often requires new forms of collaboration between public, private, scientific and civil society institutions.
But many organizations struggle to update their purpose or develop partnership strategies. Isolated professional groups have difficulty uniting, leading to vested interests and inertia that crowd out innovation. As a result, partnership remains more of an aspirational value than a skills-based discipline, and policy debates often prioritize ideology over practical solutions.
Against this backdrop, achieving the SDGs by 2030 requires new approaches that are bold enough to inspire, yet practical enough to be achievable – concepts that capture the imagination while steering the implementation debate towards tangible results.
New technologies, institutions, and approaches have the power to mobilize energy and expertise to achieve common and quantifiable goals. Crucially, the new approaches we envision must convince people to abandon current practices and marshal their creativity and resources to achieve a larger goal.
The development and adoption of big ideas must be connected. Too often, experts create new solutions without understanding the realities faced by those responsible for implementing them. Policymakers, on the other hand, often fail to pursue innovative ideas and are rarely held accountable for failing to do so.
Another issue concerns the need to determine from the outset who will pay and how. Unfortunately, the SDGs were launched without adequate financing agreements, making it difficult to secure even small amounts of funding. Without adequate funding, great ideas will remain just ideas.
By John W. McArthur and Zia Khan (Extratos)
Brookings
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