How effective will global development targets be in securing the sustained engagement of the private sector? Are expectations of the private sector's developmental role running too high?
It is October and we are somewhat past now the UN fanfare around the long-negotiated 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace to 2000-2015 MDGs.
Much has been written around the SDGs, including in relation to what is portrayed as a revolutionary recognition of the private sector's role.
In view of this mountain of opinion this post has the limited ambition of querying whether this is so (game-changing scope for private sector engagement), and a related general observation querying the utility of the SDGs as ordering principles to guide development generally.
One thing to note is that the private sector is mentioned only once in the SDGs, in Target 17.17 of Goal 17, and then only in terms of formal partnerships (which are not the only way for business to up its developmental impact, or for policymakers to harness that).
The enthusiasm around the Private Sector Forum accompanying the SDGs process and summit, and the fact that there is these days a forum for business at all, can be misleading in this sense. Unreasonable expectations around the private sector's development role feature in a number of past posts on this blog (here).
Business is not about to simply 'step up' and finance pro-poor development, and to observe this is neither to criticize business nor turn away from the scope for harnessing commercial resources in support of development targets.
We do need to do more work on what incentives might exist for firms to become more explicit in partnering for development and otherwise becoming more explicit in their developmental contributions. See this recent Gaurdian event (a summary of which is out soon).
Yet those that call for business to 'step up' on the SDGs (see here, for example) must also acknowledge the huge complexity involved in all but the most well-resourced firms in trying to track SDG-related impacts. The answer is not to say 'various tools now exist to help in this'.
This relates to a second, too-late-but-anyway reflection on the SDGs.
It comes from re-reading, if you would, the sentence above 'Target 17.17 of Goal 17'. Many have commented how a key to the MDGs' relative success was their brevity and (for a very complex subject-matter) their simplicity.
The same cannot be said of the SDGs. Quite apart from poorly-resourced states, how are major firms really going to find the development agenda a compelling phenomenon with which to engage, if it has proliferated into such detail? Yes, goals need measurable targets alongside, but I wonder whether the SDGs will sustain corporate interest in sustainable development in the way they might have had their drafters' had the grace to keep things a little simpler.
I have written / ranted before on how to sustain sustainability and problems of compliance fatigue (here).
Related to regulatory and policy proliferation is the risk that SDG-related activities (by states, by firms, by civil society) become a process of tracking and compliance-style activities, rather than strategic thinking about how to promote more peaceful and prosperous societies overall.
In 2012 I wrote this post about the ordering, motivating power of simple ideas in thoroughly transforming society (here).
I am still reading all the fallout from the SDGs summit, but my own first impression is that their ambition to be comprehensive has meant a missed opportunity to present a compelling, clear, relatively simple set of ideas for a better world.
This will surely hamper the narrower objective of engaging business in meeting these goals.
Jo
