From the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were the eight international
development goals for the year 2015. The Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) mark a historic and effective method of global mobilization to achieve a
set of important social priorities worldwide. MDGs express public concern about
poverty, hunger, disease, unmet schooling, gender inequality, environmental
degradation. SDGs are the United Nations global development goals was adopted
by 193 countries of United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2015.
SDGs focus on two considerations: global priorities and lessons from the MDGs.
The idea of the SDGs has quickly gained ground because of the growing urgency
of sustainable development for the entire world.
SDGs divided into the three broad categories of economic development,
environmental sustainability, and social inclusion. Traditional measures of
economic performance— gross domestic product and household income—capture
only a small part of what determines human wellbeing: human happiness, life
satisfaction, and the freedom. Many countries are adopting new metrics to measure
these determinants of wellbeing and to measure their ultimate bottom line: life
satisfaction of the population.
Sustainability requires the leadership and responsibility of the private sector
alongside the public sector and civil society. The private sector is the main
productive sector of the world economy and the holder of much of the advanced
technologies. Private-sector companies should support the SDGs in practical and
measurable ways, in their policies, production processes, and engagement with
stakeholders.
The SDGs can benefit from both the successes and the shortfalls of the MDGs.
First, the MDGs were reasonably easy to state—eight simple goals that fitted well
on one poster. Second, the MDGs were not a legally binding set of commitments,
but rather a set of moral and practical commitments. Third, the MDGs could be
pursued through practical and specific measures adopted by governments,
business, and civil societies worldwide.
The MDGs have also had their share of weaknesses, and these should be
recognized to improve the performance of the SDGs. The success of the SDGs will
need societies worldwide to invest adequately in their success. Sustainable
development is the only viable path for humanity, but it will not be achieved unless
a small part of consumption spending is turned into investments for the long-term
survival.
The SDGs need the identification of new critical pathways to sustainability. The
world will need new technologies and new ways to organize. The SDGs will
therefore need the unprecedented mobilization of global knowledge operating
across many sectors and regions. New social media and information technology
have given the world an unprecedented opportunity for inclusive, global-scale
problem solving around the main sustainable development challenges. Scientists,
technologists, civil society activists and others are increasingly turning to online
networks for collaboration, crowdsourcing, group problem solving, and open-
source solutions such as for software and applications.

SDGs differ from the MDGS in purpose, concept, and

politics
First, the MDGs were a North-South agenda. The goals and targets were mostly
relevant for developing countries only, labelled ‘Minimum Development Goals’. In
contrast, the SDGs are a global agenda for sustainable development. Second, the
MDGs focused on poverty – understood as meeting basic needs – and its
alleviation. Third, MDGs were drafted by technocrats who undertook limited
consultations with other sources of knowledge and expertise, a process widely
acknowledged as a major weakness.
The MDGs presented a simplistic vision of meeting basic needs for all without
recognising the root causes of poverty embedded in power relations and
exacerbated by current economic models of neoliberal globalisation that prioritise
corporate profit over human rights. MDGs were misdirected, and did not challenge
the neoliberal economic model that was failing to produce enough decent work and
exacerbating inequalities, and ignored the key issues of systemic reforms in the
global economy. The MDG agenda was extraordinarily narrow, reflecting a top-
down process of elaboration that was untethered from the consultative and
reflective process. Some of the most pressing contemporary challenges were left
out by inequality, unemployment and stagnant wages, climate change, financial
market volatility, migration, the ineffectiveness of global institutions to manage
globalisation, to name a few.
 Compared to the MDGs, the agenda of the SDGs is broader – with respect to
gender as well as overall – and potentially more transformative. The goals and
their targets address and incorporate many issues that civil society groups or the
developing countries advocated for that address power structures that produce and
reproduce poverty and inequality, including shifts in economic models.
Departing from the principle that global goals should be short and memorable,
the SDGs include 17 goals and 169 targets. Some SDG goals and targets are
focused on complex concepts and the quality development processes such as
‘sustainability’ and ‘inclusion’, rather than tangible and measurable outcomes.
However, these ‘strengths’ of the MDGs acclaimed by their defenders – simplicity,
measurability, and consensuality – are also their weakness. The MDGs
communicated as implified concept of development as meeting basic needs,
stripped of the challenges of inclusions and sustainability and remained silent on
the need to reform institutions. They framed development discourses and debates
in this narrow vision. The SDGs also reverse another MDG approach, to set a
global goal that is also to be achieved by all countries, neglecting national contexts,
and against which governments would be held accountable.
There is a risk that the most transformative goals and targets would be
neglected in implementation through selectivity, simplification, and national
adaptation. The carefully negotiated language of the 17-goal agenda, emphasizing
intangible qualitative objectives of equitable and sustainable development, has led
to a complex language. Another risk is the process of national adaptation. This
reduces the political pressure on national governments to address the political
causes of poverty and inequality. It can then be an invitation to water down the
ambition of the SDGs.
The SDGs are a politically negotiated consensus that has no enforcement
mechanism built in. The onus falls on civil society groups to leverage the SDGs as
course correction by putting pressure on governments and other powerful actors to
account for the commitments made.