Politics stands in the way of development goals

Berkeley

THERE are 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to tackle problems including poverty, hunger, disease, inequality, climate change, ecological degradation and many others in between. Clearly, 17 is a number too many. As Frederick the Great supposedly said: "He who defends everything defends nothing." Similarly, those who emphasise everything emphasise nothing.

This points to the problem of forging goals through consensus: they can end up being a wish list for everything short of heaven on Earth. But to be effective, goals should operate like turnpikes, which allow you to make progress towards a specific destination much faster than if you had taken the scenic route. The purpose of consensus building, then, should be to get us to the on-ramp, after which it becomes harder to make a wrong turn or reverse course.