Abstract
This essay examines epistemological tensions inherent in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) project. The clash between the totalizing logic of the SDGs and growing populist antipathy for expert governance can be better understood and potentially mediated through a critical pragmatist view. For the SDGs, technocratic fundamentalism not only serves the ambition for universality but also ensures epistemic stability in problem framing and protects the interests that benefit from it. However, technocratic fundamentalism also undermines the mechanics of SDG localization, working against their stated aims of justice, transparency, and institutional equity; in this way, a global development agenda shaped by myopic epistemics does itself no favors on elements by which it proposes to be measured. Compounding these epistemic tensions, anti-expert and anti-intellectual populism is confronting the credibility of technocracy and governance more generally, with possible implications for national and local policymaking informed by the SDGs. The concept of critical pragmatism, as articulated by Forester, presents both a provocation to the SDG project and a vision for imparting a more participatory orientation to it. This essay elaborates on these points.
Highlights
This essay examines epistemological tensions inherent in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) project
For the SDGs, technocratic fundamentalism serves the ambition for universality and ensures epistemic stability in problem framing and protects the interests that benefit from it
Technocratic fundamentalism undermines the mechanics of SDG localization, working against their stated aims of justice, transparency, and institutional equity; in this way, a global development agenda shaped by myopic epistemics does itself no favors on elements by which it proposes to be measured
Summary
Anti-expert and anti-intellectual populism on one side of the political spectrum, and anti-capitalist sentiment on the other, is confronting long-entrenched forms of governance includ-. 6 — https://sdg-tracker.org/ (accessed 30 March 2020). Power imbalances and epistemological rigidity endure amidst the (often perfunctory) exercise of stakeholder engagement, suggesting underlying tensions at the confluence of the SDGs’ high-concept goals, more detailed targets, and actionfocused indicators. As products of a high-modern technocratic exercise, are coercively imposed across politically distinct micro-contexts through the institution of localization. To explore this dynamic, this section discusses the conceptual provenance of technocracy as a backdrop for understanding the politics of epistemic disruption and pushback
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