Critiquing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals

Jason Hickel writes a fairly scathing critique of the United Nations' recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which has been the subject of criticism from a variety of sources.

After cataloguing some of the more pointed criticisms of the SDGs, Hickel raises his concerns: "The real problem is that the SDGs are profoundly contradictory, to the point of being self-defeating."

Hickel acknowledges that goals addressing water-related ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, overfishing, deforestation, and desertification all "[reflect] an emerging awareness of the fact that something about our economic system has gone terribly awry – that the mandatory pursuit of endless industrial growth is chewing through our living planet, producing poverty at a rapid rate, and threatening the basis of our existence."

Here comes the "but": "Yet despite this growing realization, the core of the SDG program for development and poverty reduction relies precisely on the old model of industrial growth — ever-increasing levels of extraction, production, and consumption." 

The article goes on to note similar contradictions in the SDG's approach to growth. Although the article proposes a socialist strategy in response, which some readers might find radical, the point about just how much the United Nations might expect to achieve with these goals is a question worth asking.