Are the UN Sustainable Development Goals SMART?
As mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Report 2024, “In 2023, only 65 percent of countries had fully funded and implemented national statistical plans.” In low and lower-middle-income countries only 35% have sufficient funding for national statistical plans. To make things worse, it is the low and middle-income countries that drive the divergence among countries in reaching the SDGs and as such they should be prioritized accordingly for collective efforts and provision of additional support in that regard.
While researching the topic these days, as I am writing a book chapter on happiness and sustainability with a colleague of mine, I came to wonder whether the 17 Sustainable Development Goals 2030, set forward in 2015, represent an example of wishful thinking or, even better, wishful dreaming. Or whether they represent an agenda of policy makers sitting in their offices imagining what this world should look like, on a 15th floor air-conditioned office in a large metropolitan area, in some developed country, justifying their high-paying salaries, without engaging in what seems to be the real issue. If what we put forward as a priority, and thus as a goal, cannot be measured, because we don’t have the means and/or the resources to measure it, then what is the purpose of following up with it every year? If we didn’t have primary and secondary schools, would we be hiring university professors and equipping university labs? Shouldn’t we be doing things in the right order?
If what we put forward as a priority, and thus as a goal, cannot be measured, because we don’t have the means and/or the resources to measure it, then what is the purpose of following up with it every year?
Today’s story reminded me of the common practice of families exerting huge efforts to have their daughters married as soon as possible once they graduated high school (or oftentimes sooner) in the 1950s and 60s in Greece and elsewhere. At that time (hopefully not anymore) daughters were generally considered a “problem.” Since they couldn’t contribute to the family income because they were either not qualified to work or work was not socially acceptable for girls, but they only consumed, the family had to find a husband for them and push them in the marriage market. For a successful match, families would have then to orchestrate strong and smart marketing policies (i.e. generous dowry) to get them married.
The main argument used for that purpose was the happiness of the daughter. However, everybody quietly knew that the family was simply getting rid of the problem.
The 17 SDGs were put forward in 2015 by the United Nations along with narratives about how they would be achieved by 2030. If the UN did not safeguard or implement some strategy for the data used to quantify these goals to be collected (even 10 years later), then was the 2015 setting of SDGs a strategy for (temporarily) getting rid of the problem without being honest about what is it that we are actually doing?
In graduate school, the latest students are taught that any goal should be SMART – that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Do we just care that they are measurable in theory or do we actually need to check that they are measurable in reality? I’m still confused…
Marina Selini Katsaiti is associate professor and chair of the Department of Economic and Regional Development at the Agricultural University of Athens.
