10 SDGs: Quotations

Postdevelopment. The introduction to Pluriverse: A Postdevelopment Dictionary offers the following critique of the SDGs:

• “No analysis of how the structural roots of poverty, unsustainability, and multidimensional violence are historically grounded in state power, corporate monopolies, neo-colonialism, and patriarchal institutions
• Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance with accountable decision-making by citizens and self-aware communities in face-to-face settings
• Continued emphasis on economic growth as the driver of development, contradicting biophysical limits, with arbitrary adoption of GDP as the indicator of progress
• Continued reliance on economic globalization as the key economic strategy, undermining people’s attempts at self-reliance and autonomy
• Continued subservience to private capital, and unwillingness to democratize the market through worker-producer and community control
• Modern science and technology held up as social panaceas, ignoring their limits and impacts, and marginalizing ‘other’ knowledge
• Culture, ethics, and spirituality sidelined and made subservient to economic forces
• Unregulated consumerism without strategies to reverse the global North’s disproportionate contamination of the globe through waste, toxicity, and climate emissions
• Neoliberal architectures of global governance becoming increasingly reliant on technocratic managerial values by state and multi-lateral bureaucracies.” (Kothari et al. 2019)

Solutionism. “Too often, ideas of transformation and sustainability are framed around particular, expert-defined ‘solutions’, with uncertainties blanked out. Typically asserted with great confidence, burgeoning notions around, for example, ‘smart cities’, ‘climate-smart agriculture’, ‘clean development’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘green growth’ or ‘zero-carbon economies’ act to suppress appreciation of many forms of uncertainty. […] [S]ome highly uncertain issues that should remain open for political debate are imagined in circumscribed, biased and one-directional ways. The loudest voices and most powerful interests thus come to enjoy a disproportionate influence in defining what is meant by ‘progress’. The contrast could hardly be greater with the potentially open arena for political deliberation constituted by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Arguably, for the first time in history, these establish a globally-shared discourse enabling the exercise of agency not only over the possibility of progress but also with regard to its direction. The general orientation is clear – towards equality, well-being and ecological integrity; but the particularities of what these values might mean in practice – and how best to go about realising them – remain deeply uncertain.” (Scoones and Stirling 2020, 1–2)

Colonialism and the UN. “It is increasingly obvious that climate change is a contemporary manifestation of colonialism and arguably a natural outcome of imperial policies from previous centuries. However, what is less often discussed are the historical economic and political patterns that were enshrined through colonialism, and which continue to lead to global warming. The structures and institutions of colonialism also continue to impact our ability to address the climate emergency. The United Nations and its agencies were established well before anyone envisioned the contemporary globalized world with problems such as climate change and pandemics that defy national boundaries because of the fast and frequent global movement of people and emissions. These are problems that require transnational and even international cooperation to achieve solutions” (Oates 2021).

Culture and economic demand. “Culture generates desires — for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings — that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy. A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering. It excites us because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind in our hair; we envision James Dean and Peter Fonda racing toward the horizon; we think also of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov” (Ghosh 2016, 9–10).

Instrumentalizing culture? “Functionality is however not to be confused with the instrumentalizing attitude sometimes found in debates on the role of literature in sustainability or ecological contexts […] Rather, it helps define and bring to bear on educational practice a number of specific literary-discursive affordances which can be summarized and identified in the following points:

• the combination of present short-term concerns with a long-term perspective of culture-nature co-evolution
• a double orientation on past and future, cultural memory, and cultural creativity
• an attention both to life-sustaining diversities and to “connecting patterns” (Bateson 1973) across the boundaries of categories, discourses, and life-forms
• a critical sensorium for asymmetries of power both in cultural systems and in their relations to their environments
• the staging of the multilayered interactivity between self and other, mind and matter, and humans and the nonhuman world as a condition of life and survival on the planet
• the autopoetic dynamics of the text as a complex self-generating system, which turns it into an ecological force in language and discourse
• a participatory concept of sustainability that describes no objectively given set of properties but a potentiality of texts that comes alive in the transactive complexities of the aesthetic experience, in its ever new actualizations within always changing historical, social, and individual conditions

In this sense, imaginative texts are a form of regenerative energy, an ever-renewable source of creative energy across cultures for ever new generations of readers. A creative and sustainable teaching practice can and should use this insight and model teaching sequences and competence expectations accordingly” (Bartosch and Zapf 2021).