Post-2015 Development Agenda: Human Agency and the Inoperability of the Sustainable Development Architecture

Abstract

Although the post-2015 development agenda is commendable in several ways, I content that it pays inadequate attention to human agency and, therefore, to human development and capabilities, which are necessary to meet sustainable development goals. First, I critique the post-2015 UN development agenda and associated sustainable development goals. I focus those critiques on the notions of development as if it were charity and associated illusion of human rationality, and the partial conceptualization and operationalization of human agency as if agency depended only on contexts. Through these critiques, I illustrate human irrationality and the consequent unsustainability of the charity approach to development. I identify and characterize the development architect and the development agent, to facilitate necessary understanding and operationalization of the behavioral attributes of psychological agency, which I argue to be fundamental to human development and capabilities and, therefore, to sustainable development. For development to materialize, people have to behave in certain ways, and for people to act voluntarily, they have to be motivated. It also follows that for development to be sustainable, the motivation to be developed has to come from within the self—intrinsic to the individuals and social collectives to be developed. Thus, substantial efforts must be made to thoroughly understand and operationalize human agency, critical for achieving individual, and social—including institutional—behaviors that enable self-organized development, a key attribute of sustainable development.