Climate, Water, and Livelihood Skills: A Post-Development Reading of the SDGs
Climate, Water, and Livelihood Skills: A Post-Development Reading of the SDGs
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气候、水和生计技能:可持续发展目标的后发展解读
DOI:
10.1080/14747731.2016.1173375
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发表时间:
2016
期刊:
影响因子:
2.5
通讯作者:
A. Salleh
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
A. Salleh
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets launched by the United Nations (UN) and heads of state in late September 2015, are described as a universal plan of action for ‘people, planet, and prosperity’ to take effect over the next 15 years. The intention behind the SDGs is to protect the Earth from further degradation including climate change and manage natural resources for sustainable production, in order to support the needs of present and future generations. There is no doubt that the state of the world is dire. The UN Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform, Transforming our world, names disparities of power, wealth, and opportunity; gender and youth discrimination; military conflict, terrorism, health threats, and refugees; resource depletion, desertification, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss (2015). The SDGs aim to end poverty by 2030. In line with the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, equality and the empowerment of women, children, the disabled, migrants, and least developed nations are emphasised. The UN SDGs build on an earlier set of Millennium Development Goals. However, these were unsuccessful, leading veteran Caribbean activist Peggy Antrobus to dismiss the acronym MDG as ‘Most Distracting Gimmick’ (Antrobus, 2009, p. 164). The SDGs now broaden the MDGs by attempting to integrate ‘the three pillars of sustainable development—economic, social, and environment’. Yet already, this statement reveals tendencies that compromise the UN programme. The term ‘sustainable development’ is widely considered an oxymoron these days. Moreover, conventional wisdom and academic disciplines falsely treat the economy as separate from society, or falsely treat the economy and society as separate from ecology. This silo thinking is unhelpful to social change. Ecological feminists point out that silo thinking stems from the old humanity/nature dualism, central dogma of the eurocentric cultural domination that now spreads across the globe under capitalism (Salleh, 1997). The Marxist analysis does not reach as deeply as ecofeminism, but it does see capitalism as an inherently contradictory system of production. The first contradiction shows up in the tension between economy and society (O’Connor, 1998). Thus, the famous