Abstract
Achieving sustainable development has been hampered by trade-offs in favour of economic growth over social well-being and ecological viability, which may also affect the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the member states of the United Nations. In contrast, the concept of inclusive development emphasizes the social, ecological and political dimensions of development. In this context, this paper addresses the question: What does inclusive development mean and to what extent is it taken into account in the framing of the SDGs? It presents inclusive development as having three key dimensions (social, ecological, and relational inclusiveness) with five principles each. This is applied to the 17 SDGs and their targets. The paper concludes that while the text on the SDGs fares quite well on social inclusiveness, it fares less well in respect to ecological and relational inclusiveness. This implies that there is a risk that implementation processes also focus more on social inclusiveness rather than on ecological and relational inclusiveness. Moreover, in order to de facto achieve social inclusiveness in the Anthropocene, it is critical that the latter two are given equal weight in the actual implementation process.
Highlights
The literature on, and politics of, sustainable development shows that achieving strong sustainability, which implies no trade-offs between the economic, social and ecological goals, is rare; politics tend to make trade-offs in favour of the economy at the cost of social and ecological issues (Lorek and Spangenberg 2014)
While sustainable development has ecological, social and economic aspects, the difficulties in optimizing all three aspects for present and future generations has led to the rise of concepts that embody dualities of this trinity—green economy/growth, green society, inclusive growth and inclusive development (Gupta and Baud 2015)
This section draws on the theoretical work on inclusive development which builds on the following intellectual roots (Gupta et al 2015a, b, c): social roots which lead to the articulation of social inclusiveness (Sect. 2.2); ecological roots which leads to the articulation of ecological inclusiveness (Sect. 2.3); and political geography roots which argue
Summary
The UN document, ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ includes a declaration of the 17 SDGs and their respective targets along with follow-up and review measures (for other approaches to these 17 Goals, see Chasek and Wagner and Boas et al in this issue). Sustainable growth implies growth that takes social, economic and ecological aspects into account, but ‘sustained growth’—the term used nine times in the document, often in relation to inclusiveness and sustainability—has a different meaning. This reflects the view of some development economists that growth is needed to reduce inequality, a vision we contest. The emphasis on economic growth reflects the type of dualities mentioned above and undermines more ecocentric goals This confirms our fear that there is a risk that the SDGs will go the way of the sustainable development discourse and make trade-offs in favour of growth over social and ecological issues. Beyond the use of terms, we assess whether the SDG document is truly transformative by assessing it in relation to our inclusive development principles (see Table 1)
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