Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa water, Sanitation May-June2015 Vol. 10 No.3 | Page 25

Sustainable Development Goals

Why the Sustainable Development Goals Matter
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
ROME – Following the
progress made under the
Millennium Development
Goals, which guided global
development efforts in
the years 2000-2015, the
world’s governments are
currently negotiating a set of
Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) for the
period 2016-2030. The
MDGs focused on ending
extreme poverty, hunger,
and preventable disease, and were the most important
global development goals in the United Nations’ history.
The SDGs will continue the fight against extreme poverty,
but will add the challenges of ensuring more equitable
development and environmental sustainability, especially
the key goal of curbing the dangers of human-induced
climate change.
But will a new set of goals help the world shift from a
dangerous business-as-usual path to one of true sustainable
development? Can UN goals actually make a difference?
The evidence from the MDGs is powerful and encouraging.
In September 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted
the “Millennium Declaration,” which included the MDGs.
Those eight goals became the centerpiece of the development
effort for poor countries around the world. Did they really
make a difference? The answer seems to be yes.
There has been marked progress on poverty reduction, disease
control, and increased access to schooling and infrastructure
in the poorest countries of the world, especially in Africa,
as a result of the MDGs. Global goals helped to galvanize a
global effort.
How did they do this? Why do goals matter? No one has
ever put the case for goal-based success better than John F.
Kennedy did 50 years ago. In one of the greatest speeches
of the modern US presidency, delivered in June 1963,
Kennedy said: “By defining our goal more clearly, by making
it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people
to see it, to draw hope from it and to move irresistibly towards
it.”
Setting goals is important for many reasons. First, they are
essential for social mobilization. The world needs to be
oriented in one direction to fight poverty or to help achieve
sustainable development, but it is very hard in our noisy,
disparate, divided, crowded, congested, distracted, and often
overwhelmed world to mount a consistent effort to achieve
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • May - June 2015

any of our common purposes. Adopting global goals helps
individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide to
agree on the direction – essentially, to focus on what really
matters for our future.
A second function of goals is to create peer pressure. With
the adoption of the MDGs, political leaders were publicly
and privately questioned on the steps they were taking to
end extreme poverty.
A third way that goals matter is to spur epistemic communities
– networks of expertise, knowledge, and practice – into
action around sustainable-development challenges. When
bold goals are set, those communities of knowledge and
practice come together to recommend practical pathways
to achieve results.
Finally, goals mobilize stakeholder networks. Community
leaders, politicians, government ministries, the scientific
community, leading nongovernmental organizations,
religious groups, international organizations, donor
organizations, and foundations are all motivated to come
together for a common purpose. That kind of multistakeholder process is essential for tackling the complex
challenges of sustainable development and the fight against
poverty, hunger, and disease.
Kennedy himself demonstrated leadership through goal
setting a half-century ago in his quest for peace with the
Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. In a series of
speeches starting with his famous commencement address
at American University in Washington, DC, Kennedy
built a campaign for peace on a combination of vision and
pragmatic action, focusing on a treaty to end nuclear tests.
Just seven weeks after the peace speech, the Americans and
Soviets signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, a landmark
agreement to slow the Cold War arms race that would have
been unthinka