The SDGs: A new politics of transformation?
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The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) potentially offer an inclusive, integrated approach to development, centred on social justice, for all of humanity. But how are they being implemented in practice? Too often a piece-meal, sectoral approach is adopted, rooted in modernist assumptions of linear transition and control. Ian Scoones, IDS researcher and co-director of the STEPS Centre
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The SDGs: A new politics of transformation?
- 1. The SDGs: a new politics of transformation? Ian Scoones ESRC STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
- 2. The SDGs: a new politics of transformation? Ian Scoones ESRC STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
- 7. environment plural frames Systems: knowledges and pathways…… ‘system’ under-determined realities local people time ‘effect’ ‘cause’ diverse pictures ‘focus’‘pathway’ ‘scope’
- 9. Low Maize High Maize Low- External Input High- External Input 1 – Alternative dryland staples for subsistence 2 – Alternative dryland staples for market 3 – local improvement of local maize 5 – Assisted seed multiplication of maize 4 – Assisted seed multiplication of alternative dryland staples 6 – Individual high-value crop commercialization 7 – Group-based high-value crop commercialization 8 – Commercial delivery of new DT maize varieties 9 – Public delivery of new DT maize varieties Typology of Pathways
- 12. • Who does what? • Who gets what? • Who owns what (or who has access to what)? • What do they do with it? • How do social classes and groups in society and within the state interact with each other? • How do changes in politics get shaped by dynamic ecologies and vice versa?
- 16. Transformations
- 18. A politics of transformation for the SDGs?
- 19. Controlling Transitions Caring Transformations Linear, predictable transitions Multiple, complex, uncertain transformations Technocratic, modernist development Diverse, alternative development pathways Top-down, planning blueprints Open-ended, deliberative, participatory Singular theories, concrete categories Plural perspectives, relational understandings Narrow, disciplinary expertise Diverse, transdisciplinary knowledges Dominated by technical intervention Social, cultural innovation Motivated by fear and urgency Embracing hope, conviviality, creative action Routine, instrumental policy and implementation Unruly, emancipatory politics, diverse coalitions
- 23. Photo credits: CYMMIT, STEPS Centre, IIED, IISD, nationsonline.org, UK Parliament, United Nations, Ian Scoones, John Thompson
Editor's Notes
- Thank you etc. In this talk, I want to draw on work at the ESRC STEPS Centre – estd in 2006 and based at Sussex and working across IDS, SPRU and GS - on the politics of transformations to sustainability This is a theme we’ve been investigating with collaborators globaly, and in particular the network of STEPS global sustainability hubs in Argentina, China, India, Kenya, Mexico Sweden, the US and the UK. With the launch of the SDGs, these questions become esp pertinent. I want to ask: can the SDGs offer a new platform for the sort of radical transformations in economy and society that are needed to achieve sustainable devt? I want to focus in on how we might think about the challenges of the SDGs esp around food and agriculture, but more broadly too. And through this, I want to introduce you to some of the arguments for politically –informed livelihoods and sustainability approaches, themes I have worked on for many years.
- Thank you etc. In this talk, I want to draw on work at the ESRC STEPS Centre – estd in 2006 and based at Sussex and working across IDS, SPRU and GS - on the politics of transformations to sustainability This is a theme we’ve been investigating with collaborators globaly, and in particular the network of STEPS global sustainability hubs in Argentina, China, India, Kenya, Mexico Sweden, the US and the UK. With the launch of the SDGs, these questions become esp pertinent. I want to ask: can the SDGs offer a new platform for the sort of radical transformations in economy and society that are needed to achieve sustainable devt? I want to focus in on how we might think about the challenges of the SDGs esp around food and agriculture, but more broadly too. And through this, I want to introduce you to some of the arguments for politically –informed livelihoods and sustainability approaches, themes I have worked on for many years.
- So as you know, the SDGs launched in 2015 w great fanfare. They were v different to the MDGs that preceded them. Unlike the MDGs which were geared very instrumentally towards aid targets, and focused on the developing world. Very much a post colonial aid agenda. The SDGs are universal. For everyone. And at least rhetorically they seemed to offer a brave, inclusive, cross-sectoral challenge for all of humanity, focused on social justice and leaving no one behind. But there are challenges. There are 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 indicators, and 169 countries signed up. Much effort is taken up in data collection and reporting, rather than seeing the bigger political picture. The siloed, sectoral default is very strong. And you see this in the national voluntary reviews, and much of the discussion around particular goals. The grip of narrow sectoral, instrumental concerns is strong So, How have the goals fared in the subsequent 3 ½ years? Have they been the lowest common denominator bureaucratic box ticking exercise that some feared? Or have they unleashed a radical, universal vision for development that some – including me - hoped?
- Let’s briefly think about the UK, which has to present its voluntary national report in July at the UN. The UK process is led by DFID but is notionally a cross-govt exercise with coordination coming from the Cabinet Office. This website shows the corporate position. It’s a rather desultory affair. Lots of initiatives, listed goal by goal, with little vision and imagination. There’s a new consultation summary, which has a bit more in it, but it’s still very goal specific, listing data and activities, without any wider vision. I am not against collecting data, monitoring and evaluating, but it has to be in relation to something. With a couple of months to go before the report has to be submitted, there are a number of reviews on-going. Last week the International Devt Committee cross-examined the Sec of State and the minister responsible. Soon, the Environment Audit Committee will do the same. It’s very clear that the UK govt has not given this high priority: the data is patchy, the consultations have been late and limited and there is overall a lack of direction about how a more integrated, transformational approach might be applied. I want to argue that the sort of responses = and the UK is certainly not alone - miss the potentional of the SDGs, But also I want to argue that all is not lost. There are plenty of experiences out there – and I want to share some from the STEPS Centre – that offer ways forward, both analytically and practically. This however suggests a very different ways of doing things, and of conceptualising sustainable development.
- Let’s go first to Zimbabwe,, where I have worked on rural dev and ag issues since the 1980s. What are some of the key elements that would be needed to think in an integrative, policial way about sustainability and development – and so envision mulitple future pathways? LR of 2000 transferred about 10 million ha to about 175k hh – it opened up many potential rural futures, highlighting some very clear ineractions between SDGs. Here are three from our research:
- First, A vision of smallholder agriculture, driving poverty reduction, livelihood protection and support for many. It’s based on a low input, low pollution system, but largely dependent on dryland farming, and so vulnerable to CC. It offers accumulation opportunities for some and a basic livelihood for many, yet set within an often patricarchal setting. Second, a vision of medium scale, commercial farming, linked to markets, upgrading technically and economicaly, such as (as in this case) linking into local horticultural markets, selling to supermarkets and traders, earning income to pay labour and invest in the farm, generating growth and employment in the local economy.. And, third, a vision of large-scale commercial estate agriculture (here sugar estates), linked to industrial mills and based on export markets. Potentials for tax revenue and Forex earning, and creating jobs – w employees supported by health and education facilities on estates. Perhaps also linked to biofuel production and alternative energy. Yet, downsides, high water requirements, long value chains and negative health effects from sugar consumption. So which one - or which ones in what combination - make for sustainable devt? Not obvious. In the descriptions of 3 photos I have mentioned 14 of the 17 goals, but in v different contexts. Bottom line - Not just a technical debate about economics, envt, efficiency etc. – it’s a political one too. About the directions of devt – about justice, recognition, distribution. A broader idea of sustainability.
- How to think about this? I want to introduce – very briefly – the STEPS pathways approach. For any system (say food and ag in Zimbabwe after LR) - we are concerned with how plural framings of the world, create diverse pictures of an under-determined complex reality. CLICK Pathways emerge linked to narratives about these relationships. Pathways are co-consitututed social, technical, environmental, economic processes of change. There are dominant pathways – pushed by powerful interests – and there are alternative pathways – promoted and practised by those who are less powerful. If we are to think about what’s sustainable we have to think about different framings. How people see the world. So, in respect of Zimbabwe farming….. It’s certainly a complex reality – ‘the system’ - with diverse pictures and plural frames As we’ve seen here are very different framings- support of poor people’s rural livleihoods, vs local markets and economic development vs export agric and forex earning. And there’s an important politics of knowledge at play in all this – what is farming? Who are farmers? What is a successful, viable farm? …. And so on And so a politics of interests – between different types of farmers, the state, donors, corporate agric, the media etc. Thus different framings are associated with different narratives – linked to interests and actor networks – which constitute pathways. And so negotiations between pathways are always political
- Let’s think about this in relation to some other STEPS Centre work, this time in Kenya. Led by Hannington Odame, John Thompson (IDS), Erik Millstone (SPRU), among others. Kenya highly reliant on maize for food security. Different regions with different levels of food insecurity, depending on rainfall – and increasingly the impacts of climate change. Depending on how you frame the problem, different responses. CLICKS x 3 Some say working with indigenous varieties can increase resilience; Others say a focus on hybrids makes sense to boost yield and allow a more focused production, with irrigation and increased management; Still others say that genetic engineering can enhance drought resistance, and produce the ideal variety for changing environments. It depends though on how you understand the problem: the effects of climate on cropping; the value of yield growth vs stability, the perspectives on risks to genetic resources, dietary preferences,, health impacts and so on
- The work in Kenya looked at the typology of pathways that emerged. There are a range of maize pathways, as just discussed – but there are also other pathways if we take a broader view of ‘the system’. If we are concerned with livelihoods not just individual crops, then our scope expands. - Which crops articulate best with changing opportunities for off-farm income? - With changing gender roles on farm linked to male outmigration, are there other labour saving options available? - Despite the dominance of maize today, are there other crops (like small grains) that might be more resilient, and fit with changing market and dietary demands? Each pathway – has different social, technological, economic and environmental implicaitons. Which have to be thought about together. In other words, it’s not just about Goal 2 around ‘no hunger’, but many others…..
- How to think in an integrative way across goals for SDGs? The Zimbabwe and Kenya examples suggest that we have to think holistically, systemically, around multiple, competing framings and centre on complex, diverse livelihoods. IN other words across goals. And again at the heart of this are social and political choices, as much as technical and economic ones. What future do we want? This is the core of a politically-informed livelihoods approach, as laid out in this book… Can a SL approach help us think in a more integrated and political way about the challenges of the SDGs? I suggest it can.
- So what is a sustainable livelihoods approach? Who has heard of it. Hands up! OK. No need to worry about the details of this diagram. It was produced in the late 1990s at IDS to help us think about a project working in Ethiopia, Mali and Bangladesh looking at poverty, environment, livelihood connections. Later it became taken up by many aid agencies and others, as a way to integrate rural devt programming. But that’s another story (told in the book). It originated in a long running discussion about the changing nature of rural livelihoods, w many important contributions from IDS. The framework in this slide drew very much from a 1992 IDS paper Gordon Conway and Robert Chambers, who argued that (and I quote) A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base {{Linking the elements, this diagram pushes us to ask a simple yet complex question. How do contexts influence the combination of and access to livelihood resources (or assets or capitals), and how are these combined – as influenced by institutional processes - by different people to result in diverse livelihood strategies, and so influence livelihood and sustainability outcomes? In other words, linking right across the SDGs
- When I wrote the book in 2014-15, 17 years after the SL framework was originally publishted, the limitations of the original approach were apparent. It focused too much on the micro level, and didn’t engage with historical, structural processes of change, except as context. It lacked a conceptual understanding of how change happens. In other words – what was missing was political economy. In the book therefore, I make use of the work of scholars of agrarian political economy to ask some additional questions, as on this slide, and integrate them into the framework. CLICK Taken together, these sort of questions, I’d argue, provide an excellent starting point for any analysis across the SDGs, linking livelihoods with the political economy
- But HAS the debate on the SDGs learned from these discussions on the politics of sustainability and livelihoods ongoing at Sussex and many other places across the world over several decades? Answer: No. The SDG process has not even it seems learned from the UN’s own experience. Following the 1992 UN Envt and Dvt conference in Rio, Agenda 21 was launched. Remember that? Many don’t. Aimed at locating the wider ambitions arund climate, biodiversity and desertification (in the Conventions that followed) in more local concerns. A more grounded, participatory, bottom up process. There were successes and failures back then of course. But in my view bringng debates about SDG implementation to localities is crucial. Sustainable devt is about local negotations, and about competing pathways and diverse livelihoods - in relation to global ambitions. It’s about negotiating across goals around real live issues in situated places involving, deliberation (and disagreement) among diverse people. And so generating practical solutions. And, in the process, building awareness, alliances, and creating a new politics.
- This is the sort of process that the STEPS Pathways Network has been convening – led by Adrian Ely (SPRU) and Anabel Marin (CENIT, Argentina) together with the STEPS global hubs. These pictures on the slide are of what we call Transformation-labs in different sites – clockwise from the top left in Mexico, Kenya, India, Argentina, the UK and China – bringing local people, policy makers, businesses, researchers and others together in a transdisc dialogue about pathways to sustainability.. Don’t have time to go into all cases, but each aimed to develop solutions to locally defined sustainability challenges, around food and agriculture, low carbon energy, water resources and more. Check out the website Collective, participatory, political. Opening up, plural pathways. It’s been a fascinating experience – and shows the potential for grounding the SDGs, beyond the focus on high level tick box reporting……
- So to give an example. Together w the STEPS America Latina group, farmers in Argentina identified the issue of corporate control of seeds, and limited choice (and high expense) of seeds for poorer farmers. The CENIT team worked with farmers, seed producers, regulators and policymakers to come up with a new, practical transformative innovation - an open source material transfer agreement for seeds. Transforming property and knowledge relations in fundamental ways towards an open, collaborative economy in agriculture. It was launched as Bioleft last year, and different processes have been combined – instrumental shifts policy and legal frameworks and contracts, mobilisation by social movements and wider challenges to the power of monopolistic capitalist seed firms wedded to a restrictive IP approach). And, as Anabel Marin explained in a recent STEPS seminar, it’s been having quite some success.
- These experiences across the world from the PATHWAYS network have helped us think about what this much used and abused word transformation means. We’ve distinguished between 3 processes – all of which may have to happen together (as in the bioleft case). Structural shifts – deep, radical transformations in incumbent power; systemic transformations More instrumental shifts in policies, regulations and bureaucratic procedures; And enabling change – from the bottom up, often unruly, uncertain and evolving through coalitions and alliances. All are political, and all are needed – usually in tandem.
- As we discuss in these two publications, across all the cases, the Pathways Network Transformation-lab approach was rooted in some key principles: Diverse knowledges – expert, lay, formal, tacit, local, global, all given weight in the joint framing of problems and solutions. No hierarchy of expertise, and an acceptance of the value of hybrid knowledge. Transdisciplinarity – going beyond the narrow data driven approach of the SDGs. Plural pathways – an acceptance that there is not one solution; there are multiple pathways to sustainability, depending on who you are, where you live, what your priorities are. Accepting that there are not singular goals and solutions, disrupts and challenges much of the more bureaucratic/technocratic framing of the SDGs. And – of course - politics are central. Transformations require challenging incumbent power. In the terms of Mike Watts and Nancy Peluso, challenging regimes of truth, of rule and accumulation all together. And so creating a new politics of mobilisation for change. This is not the easy instrumentalism of most of SDG discourse. All of these pples challenge the mainstream way of thinking about and implementing the SDGs.
- So what might such a transformatory politics for the SDGs look like? When the SDGs were launched in 2015, the world looked a different place. It was hopeful, full of possibility. The Paris Accord for climate change demonstrated a big shift, just as did the remarkable negotiation of a consensus around 17 global goals. Today it’s rather different. The rise of nationalist, authoritarian, nativist, right-wing populist political narratives the world over has seemingly rejected this hopeful internationalism, committed to social justice, progressive sustainable development. One of things the STEPS Centre has been doing this past two years, together with a wide network of others from across the world, has been tracking this change, and thinking about emancipatory alternatives – particularly in rural contexts – as spaces close down. What might an alternative emancipatory politics look like that confronts authoritarian populism and provides a platform for realising the more radical ambitions of the SDGs? Here are two books published in the last year that offer some directions. First from Chantal Mouffe, who argues that the post 2008 period, following the financial crash, has seen the end of a global liberal consensus around a post democractic, technocratic neoliberalism (perhaps what some still wish the SDGs represent) and opened up space for regressive, nationalist populism. She argues that this can be challenged through new alliances of ‘the people’, rooted in social action across issues and affective identities. Creating a progressive left populism, drawing on emotional responses and radical democracy. It is a return of the political that re-constructs the people as in opposition to oligarchic capital, exclusionary racism and environmental desruction. An ‘agonistic’ struggle between - in our terms – pathways to sustainability. She points to the experiments of Podemos in Spain, early Syriza in Greece, Melenchon’s France Insoumise and to some extent in Momentum in the UK – and esp in Spain draw on her work with her late husband Ernesto Laclau. But can such change only arise from the bottom, what about the connections between movements and political parties in representative democracies? How can new political arrangements be forged, bringing in diverse tacit, pracitical, experiential knowledgeds from across open, grassroots collaborative experiments in new ways of living and doing? How can diverse knowledges be mobilised as transformative power? These are the questions of Hilary Wainwright in her book, which we discussed with her last year in this room, which unlike Mouffe’s offers multiple tangible examples of how transformations can happen. These are just 2 examples, and there are many others who I could add to the list of new – and indeed old - thinking on transformatory politics – all with direct relevant to the SDGs. The challenge is to link them to the practicalities of doing development and rethinking the SDGs – realising transformations to sustainability in practice.
- Some of these discussions coalesced in the collective work produced in this book on The Politics of Green Transformations But what does this mean more broadly? I think all these experiences – whether about framing pathways of development, thinking about diverse livelihoods and exploring the dimensions of an empancipatory, popular politics – point to a very different approach. CLICK This slide is adapted from arguments developed by Andy Stirling of SPRU and co-director of the STEPS Centre, contrasting what he calls ‘controlling transitions’ with ‘Caring transformations’. On the left hand side, you will see many of the frequently articulated critiques of mainstream development from the likes of Jim Scott, Tania Li, Tim Mitchell, our own Robert Chambers, among others. On the right, you can see a range of concepts expressed in the two books I have just mentioned, as well as the core arguments for a politically informed approaches to sustainable livleihoods and pathways to sustainability that I have discussed in this talk. Presented starkly like this, they suggest very different ways of thinking about the SDGs. The approach of the UK govt currently is firmly on the left hand side – as is most of the UN process. The one excpetion may be the newly launched UNDP Accelerator labs for generating SDG solutions in 60 countries, which seek to move to some extent to embrace some elements of the right hand side. But I fear have the tendency to revert to managerial and technocratic styles without connecting to a wider politics. Let’s see. So are we inevitably stuck with the technocratic, instrumental version of controlling transitions? Should we give up on the aspirations for more caring transformations? I think not.
- Where do we see examples of a new politics of transformation, rooted in a more hopeful, caring, approach? One example – student climate strikes. Pics frm the Level the other Friday. My daughter there, w friends. And not alone. Map from across the world. Not just climate – banners about biodiversity, food, lifestyles, and new styles of politics. While not explicitly about the SDGs (didn’t see any banner saying I support the SDGs!), effecitivley connecting across.
- So to conclude…. I’d argue it’s not too late to rescue the SDGs from a graveyard of technocratic-bureaucratic-instrumental approaches, as illustrated earlier by the UK govt approach – but it means injecting a more political dimensions into sustainability transformations. IN part, I think this means moving to the local, to connected issues that people care about, and building alliances for change that linl people in places to issues and instuttions in new ways. Local practical knowledge and agency. Linking together through networks and movements, through struggle, contention and confronting power. A politics of hope and aspiration from below. Emergent, messy, unruly pathways. Drawing from Nancy Fraser, these must connect a politics of redistribution (and issues of class and social difference) with a politics of recognition (and questions of identity and identification), with a politics of representation (and questions of community, belonging, and citizenship) And away from a starting with a top-down approach – of grand challenges, cockpit visions of global control, and modernising notions of progress (even if couched in the nice, seemingly progressive language of the SDGs). I would argue too that the analyitcal and practical tools such as the SL and pathwyas to sustainability approaches can be useful in thinking in integrative ways about the politics of the SDGs. But above all, this means a new style of politics, esp given the closing spaces in recent times, and so a very different way of thinking about and doing development. Being optimistic to conclude, the SDGs, if given the opportunity I would argue, can be a good platform to realise this. THANKS – click to final slide
- Constructing pathways to sustainability and development is inevitably a normative struggle, rooted in political and moral choices. A structural analysis of regimes of accumulation and associated regimes of rule, therefore, must be connected to a deeper analysis of the politics of knowledge—and as such regimes of truth—and how sustainability and development are constructed. It also must relate to a focus on people’s agency and the social relationships that constitute society. For it is through these processes—formal and informal—that transformations are constructed in networks, alliances, and coalitions and connect diverse actors—including state and business actors, scientific-technical elites, and citizens’ movements. regimes of truth (who understands what and in which frame) regimes of rule (who controls what and through which forms of governance) inc hegemonic rule regimes of accumulation (who gets what and how it is distributed, the classic concerns of political economy; Going back to the 1970s, I am thinking about Albert Hirschman on adaptation and complexity in devt projects observed or Fritz Schumacher on economics as if people matter or Ivan Illich on tools for conviviality. Or more recently Pankaj Mishra on the age of anger, Nancy Fraser on the need for a triple movement, Jacques Ranciere on disagreement, Rebecca Solnit on hope in the dark or Paul Mason on post-capitalism and being human. I could go on. And on. There’s no shortage of inspiration. Carlos Alvarado Pres of Costa Rica, IDS Alumnus, Green new deal, decarbonise the economy - not incremental, transformation. FT. 17 March.