If all Member States of the United Nations (UN) shall abide with their commitment to work for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also called Global Goals, the world shall indeed be a transformed world by 2030. There will be universal peace. Zero poverty and hunger everywhere. Healthy and decent life for all. All nations, rich and poor, sharing the Planet and its resources in an inclusive, peaceful, prosperous/productive and, yet, sustainable way. Thus, instead of issuing a New Year “red alert” to warn countries on the divisions and tensions the world is now facing, the UN Secretary General shall be waving a global olive branch to affirm that a “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development” is holding and transforming every region of the world.
The SDG vision is clearly like no other in the scale of global aspirations for humanity. The SDGs seek to halt and reverse the unrelenting march of the world towards resource exhaustion and global warming, the exclusionary or unequal economic processes happening at the global and national levels, and the social divisions pitting peoples against peoples based on nationality, ethnicity, gender and so on.
How can the SDGs do this? The framers of the 17 SDGs listed 169 “targets” that Member States must deliver. For example, to end poverty in all its forms under SDG 1, governments shall not allow anyone to live under extreme poverty, meaning living at less than $1.25 a day. Another target under the same SDG states that there should be ample coverage of the poor under the social protection scheme of a country, “including floors”.
The “floors” here refer to the new consensus in the International Labor Organization that every country can afford to have a comprehensive social protection system that covers everyone, rich and poor alike, and provides minimum basic benefits such as universal health insurance and protection against various risks in life. In the case of the Philippines, this means a review of the coverage and services of PhilHealth is necessary to determine if PhilHealth is able to provide truly universal coverage and minimum ample protection to the disadvantaged segments of society. Also, there is a need to come up with policy measures to supplement the SSS-GSIS social insurance system with social protection schemes for those incapable of making social insurance premium contributions because they happen to be jobless or earning marginal incomes such as those in the farming, fishery and informal sectors.
The challenge clearly is how to develop the capacity of each country to meet all the 17 SDGs and 169 targets. One simple approach is to list down all these SDGs and targets and come up with a matrix of what governments are already doing and see what can be done further.
Doing a matrix is obviously unavoidable given the numerous concerns of government. However, reducing SDG compliance to a “checklist” matrix approach alone can be narrow and can even subvert the spirit of the SDGs. For example, to ensure that no one lives at less than $1.25 a day, one simple solution offered is give the jobless and those earning very little with additional cash through the Conditional Cash Transfer or CCT. It then becomes a question of budgetary allocations. However, if this is the only solution given, important issues such as social and economic reforms (for example, access to land and other economic opportunities) and the quality of growth which is benefiting only a few may be sidelined, ignored and forgotten. A good alternative proposed by some NGOs is to retain CCT as a transition measure while the social-economic reforms that are being developed are not yet bearing fruits. The point is that CCT should only be made part of a broad anti-poverty package, which includes programs empowering the poor and raising their capacity to get decent jobs and earn decent incomes. Ultimately, the ideal is for the CCT to become part of the social welfare museum by 2030.
This brings us then to a difficult target under SDG 1, which can spawn more policy and economic debates: “Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions.” Are these not the frameworks that have divided the world since the 1980s and 1990s with the ascendancy of neo-liberal economics or Washington Consensus ideology in market-oriented economies?
Recently, the WTO Ministerial Conference in Argentina collapsed because agriculture officials from developing countries, the Philippines included, could not accept the terms of the developed countries, which continue to ignore the Doha development targets (2000) to provide developing countries more elbow room in global trade such as the special safeguard mechanisms (SSMs) that is being pushed by our own Department of Agriculture. The United States also insists on maintaining subsidy protection for their rich country farmers while asking poorer countries to open up their food and agricultural markets. If the American trade negotiators will see the targets under SDG 2, they will be appalled to see SDG2 giving special attention on “small-scale producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers” and even asking governments to correct “distortions in world agricultural markets” and eliminate “all forms of agricultural export subsidies”. The latter happen to contradict the practice of the United States and the European Union, which provide billions of support to their rich farmers.
The foregoing are just samples of the numerous issues that a serious implementation of the SDGs would entail. Clearly, so much has to be done, beyond the listing of the SDG targets and checklist doables.
For the Philippines, there is a need to review the 17 SDGs and 169 targets in relation to the new Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 and the Ambisyon 2040 crafted by NEDA. Do they blend? Do the development strategies match?
The reality is that the 17 SDGs, 169 targets (not including yet the proposed monitoring indicators of over 300), PDP 2017-2022 and Ambisyon 2040 are all heavy reading materials and cannot be absorbed in one or two sittings. Translating them into coherent development programs is another challenge, especially for policy makers who are crafting programs on federalism that is not even reflected in the NEDA blueprints. If approved, the federal system of government will affect everything in the SDG/target checklist, not to mention what NEDA has already drawn up for implementation.
For the UN system, the SDG translation challenges are even more numerous and forbidding. The global trading system needs an overhaul in the light of the ill-functioning WTO, weakening of some regional trade pacts such as NAFTA and EU (think of Brexit) and the general loss of working people’s confidence or trust on economic globalization processes. As it is, it is mainly the Davos World Economic Forum, run by an elite from the corporate world, that is trying to define the terms of the economic debates and the directions of economic development the world must follow.
There are other difficult areas: limited progress of the world in addressing climate change because of the filibustering done by America in the Conference of Parties (COP) and the lack of dedicated efforts by a number of UN Member States to pursue all-around environmental renewal and protection. In global politics, the situation is even murkier, as correctly pointed out by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The deadly ISIS global network is still in place despite reverses in Syria and Iraq, genocides or ethnocides are still happening, xenophobia and racism are on the rise in many places, threats of war (even nuclear) are being flagged by the mass media, and border and resource sharing disputes are pitting countries against one another.
It is abundantly clear that so much strategizing needs to be done by the UN and its development arm, the UNDP, to make SDGs – based on the framework of economic, environmental and social sustainability – work. By 2030, humanity might witness either of two possible scenarios — an era of SDG civilization or an era of more economic, environmental and social uncertainty.