POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a flagship project of global development, which recasts development issues as for the global North,…
POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a flagship project of global development, which recasts development issues as for the global North, as well as for the global South (UN, 2015). Partly, this recognises that expertise and aid do not neatly flow from the North to South, that there is no global consensus on what it means to be ‘developed’ and that inequalities are also significant in the global North (Horner, 2020; Oldekop et al, 2020; Hope et al., 2022). The newly global SDGs are also a policy response to climate change and attempt to reorientate the global development project towards a more sustainable future. However, whilst climate change is a shared and global challenge (IPCC, 2022), the causes and impacts are unequally shared across North and South (Sultana, 2022). Reparations are being demanded by many southern states precisely because the global North is more responsible for climate change – because of carbon emissions, consumption, and the ongoing socio-environmental legacies of colonialism.
At the mid-way point, the SDGs are not on target (UN, 2023). Research reveals that they have been a key vehicle for increasing the role of the global private sector (and financialised logics) within development (Mawdsley, 2018; Mawdsley and Taggart, 2022), as well as championing forms of consensus between states, the private sector and civil society that invisibilize and neutralize contentious resource politics (Hope, 2021). Yet, perhaps the crucial work of the SDGs been to open up governments and publics in the global North to the idea that development goals are for them too. If so, is the next step to formulate new sustainability goals for the global North only?
In this panel in LUND, we will propose and debate a new set of sustainability goals, post 2030, for the global North. We seek collectives, institutes and individuals to propose one goal each, as well as ideas for how we could best network and implement these (media? think tanks? government? an NGO?). You will have ten minutes to pitch your idea and explain why it is an important goal for securing global sustainability. If interested, please send a brief abstract (100-200 words) that sets out your idea to Dr Jessica Hope (jch31@st-andrews.ac.uk) by Wednesday, December 15th, 2023.
References cited:
Mawdsley, E. (2018) ‘“From billions to trillions”’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(2), pp. 191–195.
Mawdsley, E. and Taggart, J., (2022). Rethinking d/development. Progress in Human Geography, 46(1), pp.3-20.
Hope, J (2021). The anti‐politics of sustainable development: Environmental critique from assemblage thinking in Bolivia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46(1), pp.208 222.
Hope, J (2022). Critiquing Sustainable Development as Materially Constituted: Infrastructure, Political Ecology, and Political Ontology in the Amazon. Journal of Latin American Geography, 21(3)
Horner, R., 2020. Towards a new paradigm of global development? Beyond the limits of international development. Progress in Human Geography, 44(3), pp.415-436.
Oldekop, J.A., Horner, R., Hulme, D., Adhikari, R., Agarwal, B., Alford, M., Bakewell, O., Banks, N., Barrientos, S., Bastia, T. and Bebbington, A.J., 2020. COVID-19 and the case for global development. World development, 134, p.105044.
Sultana, F., 2022. The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, p.102638.
United Nations, (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. (available at: https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda accessed 01/11/2023)