The role of governments in enabling change: From low- and middle-income economies to the 2030s, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
The world won’t eradicate poverty, end hunger or provide quality education for all by the year 2030, because the rate of progress is too slow. Instead, by the end of this decade, our world will have 575 million people living in extreme poverty, 600 million people facing hunger, and 84 million children and young people out of school1. There is a 1.5 C guardrail on average global temperature rise as part of the Paris climate agreement. It will take nearly 300 years to get gender equality.
Many instruments for enabling change are well known. For example, government investments in research and development (R&D), and in subsidies and incentives for sustainable technologies and practices, have brought down the cost of renewable energy hugely; the price of solar cells, for example, has declined 100-fold. This has been going on for four decades. If the world is to accelerate progress, governments need to play a more active part, by stimulating innovation, shaping markets and regulating business. How is determined by local contexts.
To break the logjam, scientists need to find out what is impeding system-wide changes in different places and sectors, and identify rapid ways to overturn those obstacles. Most research of the dynamics of transformations has so far focused on a few sectors, such as energy, and predominantly on high-income nations. It is difficult to transfer the lessons to low- and middle-income countries or to other goals.
It is more politically feasible in service-based economies such as Switzerland and Singapore to transition to net-zero emissions than in large fossil-fuel-based economies like Australia and the Middle East. Governments of LMICs might be ready to support a clean-energy transition if it provides better access to cheap power, but might lack the finance, supporting infrastructure or institutions needed to make it happen.
For example, to shift societies towards a diet that is also healthy for the planet6, one approach could be for governments to invest first in R&D to develop cost-effective alternative foods, then use public money to buy them, and deploy market incentives and awareness campaigns to encourage uptake and boost commercial viability. They should also use market interventions such as taxes and regulations to scale up adoption quickly.
For example, countries such as Norway have managed to bring forwards the price-parity tipping point for electric vehicles through targeted subsidies, including tax and other cost exemptions7. The success of these measures has also relied on large investments in charging infrastructure to improve reliability and accessibility. The market share of battery electric vehicles in Norway rose from less than 1% in 2010 to 80% last year.
There will be ongoing obstacles to change. Uptake of electric vehicles might stall if supporting infrastructure is lacking or policy support is withdrawn owing to a backlash from change-averse car makers. More-stringent policies such as phasing out fossil-fuel cars or coal-fired power stations can face resistance from powerful interest groups. Incoming technologies and practices in one SDG area can have downsides in others. For example, mining critical minerals for batteries damages the environment, and the decline of jobs in fossil-fuel sectors can affect livelihoods in some communities.
Scaling up investments in social policies could help with human-development goals. Over the course of 20 years, by doubling budgets for public health, social welfare, education, R&D and infrastructure along with improving governance and control of corruption, the number of people living in poverty could be lifted to over 120 million.
It has been hard to translate analytical exercises into policy advice due to the fact that the studies have not always included policymakers and the methods and results are notlinked to policy processes. One way to bridge the gap would be to include theSDGs in assessments of major policy reforms, new legislation or public investments. For example, guidelines adopted in Denmark require that new government bills be screened and assessed to evaluate their consequences for achieving the SDGs.
In the Netherlands, for example, national supreme audit institutions evaluated and gave recommendations to the governments on what to do with the information from the assessment. A multi-stakeholder sustainable development commission and an annual citizens’ panel on sustainable development are two mechanisms that Finns use to increase accountability. Popularizing the goals can also increase government interest and social accountability.
Jolly has worked for a number of UN agencies. He co-edited the UN Intellectual History Project — 17 volumes on how research and analysis drove UN policymaking and how the researchers gathering evidence hit obstacles that were not necessarily political.
Two examples of policy influenced by knowledge stand out. The System of National Accounts, created by the United Nations, is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. The UN recognized the necessity of bringing together disparate work on economic indicators to create an international statistical standard for measuring and comparing economies large and small. The GDP is one of the most famous measures that affects the national economic policies and financial markets.
The original HDI ranked countries according to three variables: income, education and life expectancy. To do well in the HDI, nations needed to invest in things beyond those fuelling growth, such as education and health care. The HDI has been established for a long time, it was directed by Hq in 1996 as its annual report. The originators intended the HDI to replace GDP. The SNA team at the time didn’t like the indicator, he told Nature.
And so Haq persuaded the UN that the organization needed to create a new indicator — the HDI — which he then developed with Indian economist Amartya Sen and other colleagues. Sen later recalled in an interview how Haq told him: “I want you to help me to do an index, which is just as vulgar as GDP, except it will stand for better things.”
In 1983 he and his colleagues tried to convince the International Monetary Fund that these policies were hurting children. Two years later, to support their argument, UNICEF, under Jolly’s leadership, commissioned a two-volume study called Adjustment with a Human Face (published in 1987). Despite this and later evidence that adjustment programmes have no positive effects on growth, and can even hamper it (see go.nature.com/3p7jazj), the UN economists failed to sway their counterparts.
The designers of the earlier indicators were replaced by the authors of Redefining Development. Theirs is a remarkable story of how two representatives of Colombia’s government created the conditions for the SDGs as a set of universal indicators for all countries; and how they achieved this against the odds and despite a mountain of political pressure from more powerful nations. Few outside a small group of experts know of their story.
But they persevered, identifying other officials who they could work with and building coalitions to support their objectives. Some politicians demanded political oversight of the scientific work that would be needed to define the goals and targets, but the Colombian team stood firm, insisting on a participatory process that would be led by experts.
Caballero and Londoño’s quest to rally nearly 200 countries to agree to something completely new has echoes of how Canadian diplomat Maurice Strong successfully chaired the 1972 Stockholm environment conference, which resulted in the creation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and of environment ministries around the world. In her 2021 book The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution, UNEP’s historian Maria Ivanova summarizes Strong’s approach to diplomacy as “never to confront, but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield”.
The books show the roles of individuals and teams in creating change. They provide recognition of how the interplay of ideas and inspiration from people, evidence from research and the building of coalitions are all necessary to create change.
With the SDGs nowhere near to being achieved, the other lesson that UN delegates must take with them is to prepare their political strategy now, because evidence on its own is unlikely to change minds.