Who gets ‘Left behind’? Promises and pitfalls in making the global development agenda work for sex workers – reflections from Southeast Asia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do, at least on a rhetorical level, tie countries and other development actors to a rights-based vision of development, which expressly includes labour rights, migrant rights and women’s rights. Despite this, sex workers continue to migrate and work in the margins where rights are difficult to claim. In looking for sex work in the SDGs, we ask how the SDGs respond to the rights of sex workers and whether more needs to be read into the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development so that states are able to keep the new promise that no one be ‘left behind’? In investigating this issue, we draw upon research conducted in the Southeast Asian region and in Cambodia in particular. In analysing the commitment that development should be inclusive in ways that ‘leave no one behind’, we raise concerns about the target-driven nature of the SDG development agenda that may well prove incapable of mediating the heated debates over the understandings of sex work that play out at both the international and the local level.