In June, the United Nations Sustainable Development Network published its Sustainable Development Report 2026 (SDR). It reviews progress on 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that were adopted by all UN member states in 2015. These goals are further broken down into 169 targets (with 231 unique indicators), all of which must be achieved to reach the overall goal by 2030.
The report says that with less than four years remaining for the 2030 sustainable development agenda, progress is significantly off-track. Only 16% of the targets are projected to be achieved by the deadline. On another 16%, the world has gone backwards; and there is limited progress on the rest (about two-thirds).
The conclusion: we are where we started in 2015. The report has focused, therefore, on what is wrong with the ‘how’ of achieving what all countries agreed to together. It lists eight lessons.
Lesson 1 is that “peace is the foundation of every goal.” It begs the question of ‘how’ peace is to be achieved.
Lesson 2 is more useful. “The SDGs are about transformation, not business as usual.” We must transform our approach to achieving the goals. We cannot carry on the way we are doing.
Lesson 3 and 4 are that transformations require long-term investments, which in turn require long-term plans. This is not the ‘market’ approach recommended by economists who insist markets have solutions for all problems and want governments to desist from long-term planning and budgeting as these ‘distort’ how markets work.
Lesson 5 is that “the scale of action required is regional and local, not only national.” (Therefore, not international either). This requires a fundamental change in the way the SDGs have been developed and implemented. So far, the call has been for global action for specified goals (which is the approach underlying the SDR itself).
Lesson 6 is that “global public goods require public finance.” So far, however, the approach has been to mobilize more private finance and restrain public expenditure, which is considered a ‘socialist’ idea.
Lesson 7 is that “dangerous technologies require global governance.” This challenges the economic ideology that the private sector’s freedom to innovate must not be restrained.
Lesson 8 is that “the UN must be for all.” This sets the cat among the pigeons. If the scale of action should be local (lesson 5), then what role can UN agencies play within countries on the ground? Should they even be directing and monitoring local actions?
The fundamental problem with the way that SDGs are being implemented is that it is overly mathematical and compartmentalized into goals requiring narrow, scientific knowledge. Progress towards each goal is managed by teams of scientific experts, with government agencies and private enterprises focused on narrow objectives.
The overall approach is to break complexity into small parts. These parts are assigned to dedicated teams that race to achieve their goals unaware of their impact on the condition of the whole system. This approach was refined with the development of theoretical economics in the 20th century.
The very first Nobel Prize for economic sciences was awarded in 1969 to Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch for pioneering work in econometrics, which is the application of mathematics, statistics and data analysis to economics. Tinbergen’s “targets and instruments” framework established the foundational rule that a government with an ‘n’ number of independent policy targets must wield at least ‘n’ independent policy instruments to achieve them.
This is the framework underlying the UN’s SDGs. It is the wrong approach for improving the well-being of complex living systems.
A human body is composed of many complex interdependent sub-systems such as the cardiovascular, digestive and neurological systems. All these must be sufficiently healthy. The human body will cease to live if any system fails, even as all others are perfectly healthy. Their average condition cannot be a good measure of the health of the whole.
Modern medical specialists prescribe treatments for different organs of the body. Their treatments have side-effects on other organs. Patients must run to other specialists. Medical bills pile up. Anxiety and depression rise. So it is for the world, with its lack of progress on SDGs.
The fifth lesson is the most crucial. Local solutions are required for systemic problems, not universal prescriptions of their components. The environment, livelihoods, health, education and incomes are integral components of a complex living system. The system has different shapes in poor and rich countries and also in different districts within each country. A top-down ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is likely to fail.
The only way the UN’s SDGs can be achieved is with “local, systems solutions cooperatively developed and implemented by communities.” Economists and scientific experts must get off their pedestals and stop measuring complex systems in numbers with people as numbers within them. They must listen to people. That is the only way to make the world better for everyone.
The author is the author of ‘Reimagining India’s Economy: The Road to a More Equitable Society’