Hrithik Roshan has taken on the task of teaching the “world’s largest lesson”, UNICEF announced this week, and in doing so he will be joining an army of celebrities endorsing the Global Goals campaign. Everyone from Beyoncé to Stephen Hawking, from David Beckham to Malala Yousafzai, from Standard Chartered Bank to Yash Raj Films has been roped in to spread the word about the global goals in videos, pop-up radiocasts, social media. The campaign claims to have reached almost 3 billion people in seven days since September 25th.
Indeed, even before 193 heads of state signed the declaration adopting the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs at the United Nations on that day, people were already talking about “global goals”. In cities around the world, people were asked to take selfies with placards or raise flags of their favorite global goals. The result is a beautiful and energetic campaign on how to end poverty, fight inequality and fix climate change by 2030.
Here’s the problem. By replacing the words “sustainable development” with the pithy and more tweetable “global”, the campaign is tweaking the original message of a very important document of a very serious, and carefully agreed upon international agenda.
The SDGs are a set of 17 goals that have set out by the UN for its member states to be achieved by 2030. The goals will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were set out in 2000 and which expire at the end of this year. For each goal is a set of targets and soon the indicators of performance will also be decided. As opposed to the MDGs, the SDGs were framed after comprehensive discussion with government representatives, international organizations and civil society. Few documents have come as close to a universal consensus as the SDG declaration.
Playing with words
The decision to draft the SDGs came out of the Rio+20 summit in 2012. The first SDG draft was ready the following year and after two years of negotiations and careful deliberation of each word in the document, the goals were adopted at the 70th anniversary of the UN last month.
It is ironic, then, that aggressive campaign to popularize the goals hardly mentions the phrase “sustainable development”. Swapping “global” for “sustainable development” isn’t the only change. The SDG message has also been changed in the 17 icons – one for each goal- that the campaign has created.
In a letter to the UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon the Women’s Major Group, one of nine important groups in international negotiations that is responsible for bringing civil society input to public policy, protested the change in language.
Take, for example, goal 12. The UN document states that the goal is to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. The initial Global Goals icon simply said “responsible consumption” and seems to ignore the onus on industry when it comes to production. The icon was updated to “responsible consumption and production”, still missing “sustainable”.
SDG 16 calls for building “inclusive institutions” but global goal 16 asks for “strong institutions”.
In the UN declaration, goal 17 speaks of “the global partnership” that is a reference to engagement between the rich countries of the global north and the poor ones of the global south for finance, technology, capacity-building and trade. The Global Goal icon refers to “partnerships for the goals” and the campaign changes talks of “partnerships of all kinds”. Instead of focusing on the responsibility of developed countries to developing ones as in SDG 17, “global goal” 17 evokes the prospect of some sort of partnerships between public institutions and private organizations.
“Of course any communicator is free to take a complex document and ‘translate’ it in ways that are understandable by their constituency,” writes Barbara Adams, senior policy fellow at the Global Policy Forum in its blog post. “But this simplification is a misrepresentation of the SDGs themselves.”
Furthermore, Adams points out that while the goals should belong to the global public, the Global Goals have been copyrighted not by the UN but by a private company registered in London called Project Everyone founded by British filmmaker Richard Curtis.
UN too dependent on corporate money?
The growing role of private companies in UN processes is a growing concern for Adams and others at the Global Policy Forum. In a report released just before the SDG summit, Adams and her colleagues chart out the growing trend of UN dependence on corporate-led solutions to global problems. This trend has left the world body with little flexibility to use funds as it sees fit and at the same time allowed big corporations an easy image boost as being associated with a UN cause.
The various agreements that the UN has signed with multinational companies are great bargains for the latter, feels Sameer Dossani, international advocacy coordinator with ActionAid. "The companies put in very little into a specific project and they are getting a lot of brand recognition from it. Their brand is next to the UN brand giving them some sort of validity that they do not deserve. Public institutions belong to the public. They don’t belong to private profit-making companies," he said.
Picking goals?
The Global Goals initiative of allowing people to pick their favorite goal to promote or vote up is a great gimmick but is antithetical to the idea that the SDGs are universal. In the end, the success of the SDGs will depend on how effectively national and sub-national governments will implement all goals and achieve all targets, not just the ones that are easy.
To find out how hard the SDG journey will be from how the world is currently situated to where it wants to be in 2030, the Overseas Development Institute in London assessed 17 targets, one from each goal. The toughest targets to meet that will require a complete reversal of our present systems and policies, according to the report, include crucial ones on reducing income inequality and combating climate change.
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Indeed, even before 193 heads of state signed the declaration adopting the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs at the United Nations on that day, people were already talking about “global goals”. In cities around the world, people were asked to take selfies with placards or raise flags of their favorite global goals. The result is a beautiful and energetic campaign on how to end poverty, fight inequality and fix climate change by 2030.
Here’s the problem. By replacing the words “sustainable development” with the pithy and more tweetable “global”, the campaign is tweaking the original message of a very important document of a very serious, and carefully agreed upon international agenda.
The SDGs are a set of 17 goals that have set out by the UN for its member states to be achieved by 2030. The goals will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were set out in 2000 and which expire at the end of this year. For each goal is a set of targets and soon the indicators of performance will also be decided. As opposed to the MDGs, the SDGs were framed after comprehensive discussion with government representatives, international organizations and civil society. Few documents have come as close to a universal consensus as the SDG declaration.
Playing with words
The decision to draft the SDGs came out of the Rio+20 summit in 2012. The first SDG draft was ready the following year and after two years of negotiations and careful deliberation of each word in the document, the goals were adopted at the 70th anniversary of the UN last month.
It is ironic, then, that aggressive campaign to popularize the goals hardly mentions the phrase “sustainable development”. Swapping “global” for “sustainable development” isn’t the only change. The SDG message has also been changed in the 17 icons – one for each goal- that the campaign has created.
In a letter to the UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon the Women’s Major Group, one of nine important groups in international negotiations that is responsible for bringing civil society input to public policy, protested the change in language.
“It has been a key achievement of the negotiations of the last 5 years from Rio+20 to the Post-‐2015 summit that all governments have finally agreed that development cannot be achieved when people and the planet continue to be exploited, which is why only a balanced “sustainable development” should be the aim of the new 2030 Agenda. By suddenly dropping the SD from SDGs, the United Nations is giving an entirely wrong message to the world.”
Take, for example, goal 12. The UN document states that the goal is to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. The initial Global Goals icon simply said “responsible consumption” and seems to ignore the onus on industry when it comes to production. The icon was updated to “responsible consumption and production”, still missing “sustainable”.
SDG 16 calls for building “inclusive institutions” but global goal 16 asks for “strong institutions”.
In the UN declaration, goal 17 speaks of “the global partnership” that is a reference to engagement between the rich countries of the global north and the poor ones of the global south for finance, technology, capacity-building and trade. The Global Goal icon refers to “partnerships for the goals” and the campaign changes talks of “partnerships of all kinds”. Instead of focusing on the responsibility of developed countries to developing ones as in SDG 17, “global goal” 17 evokes the prospect of some sort of partnerships between public institutions and private organizations.
“Of course any communicator is free to take a complex document and ‘translate’ it in ways that are understandable by their constituency,” writes Barbara Adams, senior policy fellow at the Global Policy Forum in its blog post. “But this simplification is a misrepresentation of the SDGs themselves.”
Furthermore, Adams points out that while the goals should belong to the global public, the Global Goals have been copyrighted not by the UN but by a private company registered in London called Project Everyone founded by British filmmaker Richard Curtis.
UN too dependent on corporate money?
The growing role of private companies in UN processes is a growing concern for Adams and others at the Global Policy Forum. In a report released just before the SDG summit, Adams and her colleagues chart out the growing trend of UN dependence on corporate-led solutions to global problems. This trend has left the world body with little flexibility to use funds as it sees fit and at the same time allowed big corporations an easy image boost as being associated with a UN cause.
The various agreements that the UN has signed with multinational companies are great bargains for the latter, feels Sameer Dossani, international advocacy coordinator with ActionAid. "The companies put in very little into a specific project and they are getting a lot of brand recognition from it. Their brand is next to the UN brand giving them some sort of validity that they do not deserve. Public institutions belong to the public. They don’t belong to private profit-making companies," he said.
Picking goals?
The Global Goals initiative of allowing people to pick their favorite goal to promote or vote up is a great gimmick but is antithetical to the idea that the SDGs are universal. In the end, the success of the SDGs will depend on how effectively national and sub-national governments will implement all goals and achieve all targets, not just the ones that are easy.
To find out how hard the SDG journey will be from how the world is currently situated to where it wants to be in 2030, the Overseas Development Institute in London assessed 17 targets, one from each goal. The toughest targets to meet that will require a complete reversal of our present systems and policies, according to the report, include crucial ones on reducing income inequality and combating climate change.
