The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched in 2016 to address the biggest environmental and social challenges of our time. 160 countries committed to delivering 17 connected goals over 15 years of coordinated global action. With 10% of the goals achieved to date, most targets will likely still be in flux by 2030.
It’s easier to look back and ask, “How will this work?” ten years on than in 2016, when the SDGs were received with enthusiasm. However, this may just be the time to ask whether the UN SDGs remain the right tool to steer the environmental and social ship in their current format or they should be reimagined.
From Babel 2.0:
The UN SDGs resemble another Tower of Babel.
Humanity attempting an edifice larger than itself, against the clock. The framework is a feat of international coordination, nevertheless real-world implementation is separated from the complexity of tackling multiple initiatives, across geographies, in a short amount of time. It’s separated from the complexity of driving targets across cultural and political landscapes, too, especially when the set-up of cultural and political landscapes counters the social and environmental goals being attempted. We’ve enlisted an either – or discourse when it comes to the environment and social change, while policymaking remains the realm of compromise.
We have also brushed aside the fact that our relationship with the Earth we live on and the environmental systems that govern it is of dependence and temporariness. We cannot hold onto time and space, and cannot dictate the behaviour of environmental coordinates, yet this is what the UN SDGs are aiming to do: exert control over space by a certain moment in time.
Meeting the UN SDGs demands we conquer our imperfections, while elevating ourselves to the condition of unfaultable global architects. Hindsight shows we’ve never met this state before.
There’s wisdom here to reinterpret the SDGs in a way that is attuned to the imperfection of our systems and human condition. Congruent with the design of locality. Focused on fewer goals, strategically relevant to each region. Accepting long-term progress rather than demanding results by a fixed moment in time.
And most importantly, accepting the risk of failure.
To humble stewardship:
This reinterpretation of environmentalism and social change is focused on stewardship.
A way of thinking – instead of being another framework, stewardship frees us from the arrogance of thinking we can address all global issues by a fixed moment in time and allows us to act in proportion with our temporary abilities. It’s taking care of the resources we’re given with intent, accepting the sustainable yield may come from maintenance of what we’ve got, before even aligning to sustainable policies.
Local stewardship:
Stewardship leans into the potential for sustainability that every region possesses. It’s a resurgence of simplicity and local action without the burden of unassailable global targets. It unburdens the common folk of goals too big to meet and refocuses them on work within reach, harnessing the ability to innovate as they have naturally done for generations, zoned in on the capacity to push forward, innovate and adapt.
Stewardship is ingenious with local resources, endorsing a blend of the recommended sustainability practices and accepting that some industries should strategically be taken advantage of for the sake of economic development. Some may seem advocating for a blend of sustainable practices alongside the harvesting of fossil fuel as contradictory to environmentalism, but there are economies that have made it work (Brunei, Norway, Saudi). A country that cannot feed its own people in the present because it fears a future that has not yet materialised isn’t acting sustainably to begin with.
Selective stewardship:
Stewardship can be practiced individually and organisationally, tailored to circumstances and capabilities. It offers the opportunity to start small, from the basics – ideally from reimagining our primary needs, as these have reverberations upstream. There’s nothing more sustainable than taking care of the ground (or the water) that gives us our nutrition and protecting its ability to do so in the future. It impacts agriculture, the food system, nutrition, health, food waste, innovation and upcycling, the economy.
Ongoing stewardship:
Stewardship understands the effort we make now towards environmentalism, and social change is a contribution to be continued by generations to come. An ode to actions and goals within our influence, it’s practiced out of genuine consideration rather than enforced.
The flaw in stewardship:
The UN SDGs attempted too much, too broadly, relying on concerted top-down action to meet the 17 connected goals. Stewardship assumes action will be ignited from the ground-up by the connection we naturally share with the world around.
Excepting places that recall this ancestral connection, modern man needs awakening to its memory, the willingness to return to it and cultivate it. We either arrive at it out of our own accord, in search for a better way of doing things, or it needs to be jolted back into our existence by the very tools that demand we pay attention (such as the UN SDGs).
As a result, stewardship is not an idyllic either – or affair either and needs the support of strategic frameworks to activate and support itself.
As for the UN SDGs, they still deserve a place among the tools we use to better our world. However, they need to step away from textbook implementation and embrace selective pragmatism in a bid to make a difference and sustain themselves while simultaneously driving sustainable action. Stewardship – and the tackling of fewer, locally strategic goals, over time, may give them a bridge to do just that.
Irina Gheorghe 
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