On 13th November, Director of UNRISD Sarah Cook delivered SIID's Annual Lecture on “The ‘Universal Framework’ for Sustainable Development: A new global paradigm or business as usual?”, in collaboration with The Exchange

1. SDGs: A transformative
framework for Sustainable
Development ?
Sarah Cook
Director, UNRISD
University of Sheffield, 13 November 2014

2. Outline
• From Millennium Vision to Development
Goals..
• .. To Sustainable Development / SDGs
• The ‘social question’ in development contexts
– Goals: Holistic, integrated and coherent
– The challenge of inequality
– Universality and global public goods
• Can the SDGs be socially transformative?

7. 17 Focus Areas

8. Sustainable Development Goals
• Goal 1. Poverty eradication
• Goal 2. Food security and nutrition
• Goal 3. Health
• Goal 4. Education
• Goal 5. Gender equality and women’s empowerment
• Goal 6. Water and sanitation
• Goal 7. Energy
• Goal 8. Economic Growth and Decent Work for all
• Goal 9. Infrastructure and Industrialization
• Goal 10. Reducing inequality
• Goal 11. Sustainable cities and human settlements
• Goal 12. Sustainable Consumption and Production
• Goal 13. Combatting Climate Change
• Goal 14. Marine resources, oceans and seas
• Goal 15. Ecosystems and biodiversity
• Goal 16. Promoting Peace, Justice and Accountability
• Goal 17. Strengthening Means of Implementation and Global Partnership

9. A ‘social turn’ in public policy?
• Policy innovation
• Institutional innovation
• Social innovation (+ technology)
• Conceptual and discursive innovations
• Examples of social policy change – new
directions, towards universalism, new social
contracts?

10. Our Common Future
 Brundtland Commission (1987)
Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

12. The Oxfam ‘doughnut’ –
planetary boundaries & social floor
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/dp-a-safe-and-just-space-
for-humanity-130212-en.pdf
9 planetary boundaries
- if we go beyond these
we will not have any
social development or
a functioning economy.

16. Universality and Global Public
Goods
• ‘outcomes (or intermediate products) that tend towards
universality in the sense that they benefit all countries,
population groups and generations’ or at a minimum the
‘benefits extend to more than one group of countries and do
not discriminate against any population groups or any set of
generations, present or future’. (16)
• Final global public goods may be tangible (environment) or
intangible (peace); intermediate GPGs include international
regimes that contribute to final GPGs (Kaul et al.:13).
• Kaul et al. (1999)

17. Today international mechanisms to achieve a global social
balance persistently elude us… The challenge of designing
transnational policies to achieve social balance in different
countries with quite different political and economic
histories… will only bear fruit if democratic nation-states
with a concern for social balance invest in the construction
of international institutions.
(Maureen O’Neil, 2008:viii)
)

18. UNRISD gratefully acknowledges support from
all its funders.
www.unrisd.org