Are the SDGs up to scratch?
Jason Hickel makes the case that in order to solve poverty and ecological crisis we need to tackle endless growth head on.
The international development community has been building up to this moment for years. The final Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and post-2015 agenda will be adopted during a United Nations Summit from 25-27 September 2015.
The high-level plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly will take place in New York and signals the end of a long period of deliberation. The SDGs will take over from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in setting the development agenda for years to come.
Over the last few months, the Eldis blog has been running a series of responses to the SDGs from a range of development experts.
The latest blog post, written by anthropologist Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics and Political Science, explains why he thinks the SDGs will fail in their aim to eliminate poverty and protect the planet, due to the focus on GDP growth.
‘How can they expect to succeed with such a profound contradiction at their root?’ he asks, warning that growth is not the solution to poverty.