Words by Isabelle Zhu-Maguire
Please note that this paper is entirely my personal opinion, and not representative of the organisations that helped me write the mentioned report.
My diplomatic answer to the question posed by the title of this piece would be ‘I don’t know’ or ‘maybe’.
But my real, raw, gut answer is that I find it very hard to believe the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in fact redeemable.
Like many young people, I have lost faith in the SDGs – just like I have lost all faith in neoliberalism to be able to effectively thwart the tsunami of shit the world currently faces.
Having lost their newness and shine, the SDGs have sadly become a tool that states and corporations can use to green-wash their true terribleness. Being able to slap on a colourful tile to hide their dirty deeds.
This opinion is one that I see as being shared by many of the young people that I work with. Hence, in my echo-chamber, I had assumed that most people working in ‘sustainable development’ were also losing faith in the goals. That we were all beginning to advocate for larger systems changes, massive overhauls, and more socialised systems of economics and governance.
However, I have been given many opportunities to work alongside professionals who use the SDGs in their work. Given my aforementioned perspectives, I was surprised (perhaps naively so) that there is still enormous support for the goals. In fact, I have very commonly heard these older SDG advocates say that the SDGs should actually continue post-2030. That we should not stop and start again when they ‘run out’ and rather they believe we should keep using this existing framework.
As I said, this shocked me. It seems so far removed from all the conversations I have about the SDGs amongst young activists. It seems (perhaps unsurprisingly so) completely detached from the people who have to live in the fucked up future that these goals have attempted to secure.
Today’s 18-year-olds were only 10 years old when the SDGs were created in 2015. These same 18-year-olds will only be 25 when the 2030-ambitions set by the SDGs are hoped to be achieved. Despite being too young to contribute to the creation of these goals, these 18-year-olds are the ones who have to live in the future that we’re trying to secure through the SDGs.
Given all of this context, I helped write a report recently which aimed to answer: do the SDGs work for young people today, or are they unable to adequately capture the problems young people face today and into their future?
My thoughts were, if the SDGs are meant to be measurable, then we should be able to use the goals to specifically measure the concerns of youth.
There have been multiple attempts to capture the world’s progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Reports such as the Sustainable Development Report measure progress across countries across the world. These reports are often enormous and thus use the average values from each country. Hence, while these sorts of reports obviously provide incredible insight into progress towards the SDGs, they incidentally miss the nuance that different people experience sustainable development very differently.
One’s class, gender, race, sexual orientation, ability and age all influence the access they have to resources that help them adapt to the sustainable development challenges of our times. These factors also influence how one is perceived and treated by their governments and communities. Hence, this report aims to add to a very important emerging tradition of adapting the SDGs to measure how marginalised populations experience sustainability.
These attempts involve a Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) USA report that (unsurprisingly) found that one’s race significantly alters Americans’ experience of health and access to resources. Similarly, Equal Measures created a SDG Gender Index that measures progress towards SDGs, separated by gender. Once again, the researchers found that people who are not men lag behind on progress towards the SDGs internationally.
My attempt at disaggregated measurement, “Towards a Youth SDG Index”, aims to encapsulate the struggles that they face in Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific.
To capture these varied concerns, our report’s methodology began with a consultation of more than 40 young people from across the Oceania region. We used the SDGs to structure a prioritisation process in which they identified their greatest concerns.This process left us with 20 indicators about numerous challenges such as mental health, poverty, climate change, biodiversity, governance, and employment. We then undertook data-searching and analysis exercises in an attempt to measure youth progress towards achieving these indicators compared to the general population in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa and Fiji.
What we found was hardly surprising. Youth were lagging behind the general population in challenges such as mental health, poverty, rent overburden, homelessness, and unemployment. However what did surprise us was how little existing data there was that disaggregates by age. Issues youth care about, such as food insecurity, access to affordable and clean energy, access to reproductive health care, and access to social services, were all unmeasured (or at least inaccessible) across the region. Hence, this report and our findings are important to researchers and policymakers for several reasons.
Firstly, it begins to extrapolate the ways the youth from our region are lagging behind, and therefore where policies need to be designed to address these challenges.
Further, the significant gaps in data that we found should also motivate organisations to begin to measure more disaggregated data and address the blindspots we uncovered.
Finally, during the aforementioned consultations we undertook, we asked the youth in attendance if they thought the SDGs represented their concerns.
After we had completed the consultations and the attendees had thoroughly gone through the SDG targets, 65% of the young people said they didn’t feel that the current global goals represented their concerns.
This figure is disheartening. How can we expect current and future generations to rally around goals that they think do not represent them or the challenges they face?
Hence, the report also advocates that IF there are any future iterations of the “global goals”, genuine and involved youth consultation needs to occur. Their more radical ideas are not fantastical, they are necessary.
If you want to read my report, you can see it here: https://ap-unsdsn.org/sdsn-youth/ausnzpac-youth-sdg-index/
