The global sustainability discourse has gained momentum with the Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), drawing from the 1987 Brundtland report’s concept of sustainability, considering present needs without compromising those of future generations.
The 2020 Report on the progress in achieving the SDGs does not only show where progress is lacking. It also reveals where the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis have intensified difficulties, e.g., on food insecurity due to disrupted supply chains, violence against women in lock-downs, children deprived of quality education due to missing access to remote learning, reinforcements of mechanisms causing poverty such as job insecurity in the informal economy, or the very unequal access to health services and thus vaccination.
While being widely respected as great achievement of the international community of States that has done much to include different voices, the Agenda has faced criticism from different sides, such as its being dominated by “Northern” and “Western” paradigms. This dominance results in concerns about insufficient inclusion of other worldviews and approaches, such as voices of indigenous populations, and the inability to incorporate other internationally relevant frameworks such as the Agenda 2063 of the African Union.
Science’s voice has often been claimed to have been weak in the negotiation process towards the 17 SDGs of the UN Agenda 2030. Notwithstanding, sustainability science has now proliferated universities and think tanks worldwide. It is concerned with sustainable development at the interfaces of the systems of economy, nature and society. Operating in a field of tension of social discourses and value systems, it refers to diverse actors and their interests. Being application oriented and actionable, it requires cooperation with the private sector, policy makers and civil society. It is structured less by disciplines than by concrete problem settings, and thus requires an understanding beyond historically developed “scientific” disciplinary boundaries, of epistemologies and ontologies, and an operation within a scientific multilingualism. Thus touching the very grounds of different worldviews, academia needs to integrate diverse cultural, religious and philosophical perspectives into the discourse, and help to negotiate between concepts and views, navigating in the same value-laden environment as policy and decision makers.
2030 is not far away. In order to be ready for a “post 2030” agenda, we need to think early about improving existing frameworks and tools, for a system change to incorporate previously neglected themes, perspectives and voices. More importantly, we should explore new ways of thinking about sustainability and the pathways to achieve them.
In this spirit, a series of interactive workshops and dialogue formats will be organized to pave the way for scientific contributions to a “Looking beyond 2030” perspective in sustainability. This program line stands in cooperation with the emerging initiative “Wellbeing, Sustainability and Equity (WiSE) Transformation” at UNU-EHS and invites thematic engagement in future-oriented sustainability.
Source: Bonn Alliance for Sustainability Research, 09 August 2021