In
the same week U.S. presidential candidates take aim at each other for the first
time on the debate stage, negotiators from 193 U.N. member states reached
consensus on the sustainable development agenda that world leaders will meet to
adopt at September’s U.N. General Assembly in New York.
 |
U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. President Barack Obama
meet
on Aug. 4 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C
|
After more
than two years of negotiation and deliberation, the post-2015 agenda — covering
17 sustainable development goals and 169 individual indicators — is unabashedly
ambitious. The first goal, for example, is “end poverty in all its forms
everywhere.” The second? “End hunger.”
The
sustainable development agenda is something else too: universal. It is meant to
apply to developing and developed countries alike. And with so much ambition on
the table, the post-2015 agenda could raise some tricky questions about living
standards, environmental sustainability, and what exactly rich countries like
the United States are agreeing to do over the next 15 years.
Any
discussion of global goals, especially those determined and championed by the
United Nations, risks raising hackles within America’s polarized political
atmosphere. It’s worth wondering whether anxieties about global governance and
national sovereignty might throw a wrench in the gears of U.S. support for the
SDG launch and implementation process.
Indicators
associated with goal 10, which deals with reducing inequality, venture into
territory that is full of political minefields in the U.S. and other rich
countries. Target 10.7, for example, directs signatories to “facilitate
orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people,
including through implementation of planned and well-managed migration
policies.”
One of the
education targets is to “ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality
early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are
ready for primary education.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, preschool enrollment rates in the United States have
dropped to around 69 percent, and vary widely according to
socio-economic status.
At the International Conference on Financing for Development in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, U.S. Treasury Sec. Jack Lew responded to a question from
Devex about whether the United States would commit to implementing the SDGs at
home.
“I think that
there’s no comparison between the standard of living in the United States and
the standard of living in many developing countries. So I think to treat them
as if they’re comparable doesn’t reflect reality,” Lew told Devex at a small
news briefing on the sidelines of the conference.
The secretary
listed a number of areas where the administration has championed programs to
lift Americans out of poverty and expand the middle class: raising the minimum
wage, and jobs and skills training programs, for example.
“We’re seeing
incomes rise again, and we have a safety net in place that protects people from
the worst ravages of poverty, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare the United
States to a developing country,” Lew said.
A U.S.
government official, who wished to remain anonymous to avoid a lengthy
clearance process, told Devex the SDGs are meant to be aspirational for all
countries, and that it is unlikely any country, after a thorough evaluation of
national performance against the indicators, will meet all of the goals,
including the United States.
In response
to a question about whether the U.S. would put in place a plan to achieve the
SDGs, the official said the administration would likely do an assessment when
the goals are finalized, but that poverty in developing countries and poverty
in the United States do not present a fair comparison.
Extreme
poverty is notoriously difficult — and contentious — to measure, especially
when you venture beyond a set of developing countries with relatively
harmonized data. Some have attempted to measure the prevalence of extreme
poverty in rich countries though, including the United States. An article in
Stanford University’s Pathways magazine, “The Rise of Extreme Poverty in the United States,”
concluded that, among other things, “1.17 million children were in extreme
poverty in mid-2011 under our most conservative measure.”
Subsequent findings from the Brookings Institution challenged that
report, noting that “if we used the exact same criteria to measure poverty in
the U.S. as is used by the World Bank to obtain official poverty
estimates for the developing world, we would conclude that no one in the U.S.
falls under the $2 threshold,” according to the paper’s co-authors, Laurence
Chandy and Cory Smith. One main reason being that extreme poverty in the U.S.
is often a temporary condition, “accounted for by life events such as moving
between jobs that are not necessarily indications of diminished welfare,” they
write.
It is likely
more indices will emerge that do harmonize poverty rates and other standard of
living measures across developed and developing countries as the post-2015
process unfolds. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative is leading
an effort to do exactly that with its Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a
data set that expands standard of living measures beyond gross domestic product
to include things like education, health and “lived environment” indicators.
This year
OPHI expanded its index to include 101 countries, or 75 percent of the world’s
population. It may be that soon poverty in the United States and poverty in
developing countries will, quite literally, be comparable.
For the most
part, the SDGs haven’t attracted much political vitriol from those who question
U.S. involvement in a globally convened development agenda. In fact, supporters
have been fighting to get them noticed at all by the general public. But with a
U.S. presidential campaign gearing up and candidates grasping for ways to
separate themselves from a historically crowded field, what one Fox News pundit described as the U.N.’s “multitrillion-dollar
... bid to reshape the planet along largely socialist or progressive lines”
could present easy prey for skeptics of multilateralism, eager to land a
political punch against the Obama administration.
U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with U.S. President Barack Obama a day after
the latter’s clean power announcement, and told him: “This is a top priority
now as we have successfully agreed on a sustainable development agenda with a
set of 17 sustainable development goals. This is hugely ambitious and encouraging
news. … On all these matters, we really count on your strong support.”
Some experts
advocate for a more nuanced understanding of what it means for an agenda to be
“universal” in the 21st century, and Obama’s action on climate change is
illustrative of what they have in mind. While each country might face unique
challenges in aspiring to achieve the goals at home, “universality” implies a
recognition that the SDGs provide a framework for tackling problems that
require global cooperation.
Issues of poverty,
environmental change, migration and health are globally interdependent. Solving
them requires attention to systemic challenges that are beyond any single
country’s capacity to solve, Nancy Birdsall, founding president at the Center for Global Development, told Devex.
“The fact
that the Treasury secretary [attended the Financing for Development conference
in Addis Ababa] … suggests a little bit more emphasis on seeing the SDGs as
part of a global system,” Birdsall said, noting that it was not the U.S. Agency for International Development administrator
leading the delegation, but a high-ranking cabinet official with domestic
policy clout.
“On the other
hand, at the sort of working level in the U.S. government the SDGs are still
thought of as mostly about where can we find more money for aid,” she added.
“It’s not something that’s about money. It’s about the U.S. taking leadership
on fixing the global system in the direction of development and shared
prosperity and sustainable growth.”
Birdsall
pointed to global public goods like clean energy technology, where research,
development and market building by the U.S. could have a profound impact on the
availability of new technologies in the developing world.
“The U.S. has
huge assets … and domestic investment in clean energy is really very low, and
it’s an area where domestic investment ... could generate new technologies or
speed up the rate at which existing renewables become affordable … in other
countries,” Birdsall said.
CGD has
produced a new series
of policy recommendations for the next administration to
consider, but the think tank chief remains skeptical that questions about
universality — and what it implies about U.S. obligations toward a global
agenda — will feature prominently on any of the debate stages this year.
“I think it
would be really healthy if issues of global governance came up,” Birdsall told
Devex.
The rise of
new actors like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and New Development Bank, both of them
convened and created as alternatives to the Western-led Bretton Woods
institutions, lend a sense of urgency to discussions about the role the United
States is — or should be — playing in helping to finance and to achieve the
SDGs.
But for now —
for better or for worse — most U.S. candidates appear content to grapple with
each other, not yet with the implications of a global sustainable development
agenda they might be expected to implement.
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