A Critical Look at the SDGs

After the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were brought up in our last class discussion, I ran across an article in Lancet that attempted to quantify early progress in the health-related SDGs (GBD 2015 SDG Collaborators, 2016).  Measures from the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) of 2015 were used to quantify 33 SDG health indicators.  As you may know, the SDGs are composed of 17 primary goals, with 169 targets and 230 indicators, and will serve as the framework for development from 2015-2030.  In this study, an SDG index was developed to give an overall picture of health in each nation; the highest scoring included Iceland, Sweden, and Singapore, while the lowest were Central African Republic and Somalia (GBD 2015 SDG Collaborators, 2016).  Factors that could severely impact the SDG index score in a positive way included universal health care, family planning, and hygiene.  When comparing the SDG index (for health) to the Socio-demographic Index, a few countries proved surprising, either by having worse SDG progress than expected (Russia, India, and the U.S.) or better (Uruguay, Maldives, and Morocco) (GBD 2015 SDG Collaborators, 2016).

While these numbers and indices and statistics can show interesting trends, criticism abounds for the convoluted structure of the SDGs.  William Easterly suggested SDG may as well stand for “senseless, dreamy, garbled” (Easterly, 2015).  He complains that much of the content is too vague and full of wishful thinking, and that by attempting to make such a wide range of topics a “priority”, it turns out that nothing is a priority.  Another slant of criticism is articulated in Devi Sridhar’s comment in response to the Lancet article I described above.  Sridhar realizes the importance of statistically significant results for the sake of maintaining aid funding, but she challenges the notion that the numbers always spell out the answer for developing nations, who all have their own development priorities that are not always reflected in the numeric representation of their struggle.  As she beautifully articulates, “This view raises a larger question of why heavily modelled numbers exported from Seattle or Washington, DC, USA, are taken as the benchmark for what poor people require, over their own voices, and whether global health has moved to such abstraction that statistical models, imputations, and programming no longer resonate with the reality of people's lives” (Sridhar 2016).

So what do you guys think?  Do the SDGs establish a strong framework for sustainable development, or do they lack clarity or priority?  How do you feel about the reliance on indices and data?  What role do these numbers have to play in relation to the voices of local people?

References:

Easterly, W. 2015. The SDGs should stand for senseless, dreamy garbled. Foreignpolicy.com. Accessible at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/28/the-sdgs-are-utopian-and-worthless-mdgs-development-rise-of-the-rest/.

Sridhar, D. 2016. Making the SDGs useful: a Herculean task.  The Lancet 388;1453-1454.

GBD 2015 SDG Collaborators. 2016. Measuring the health-related Sustainable Development Goals in 188 countries: a baseline analysis from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015.  The Lancet 388;1813-1850.