To achieve SDGs, we need to get local people on board

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aspire to be universal, addressing globally relevant issues through earnest objectives. Despite the common good that they represent, fundamental problems exist with the goals. They fail to explicitly align with what we know is vital for sustainability: local people’s participation.

Also, the process of how the 17 SDGs were conceived was not based on the totality of local communities’ needs worldwide. As a result, the people whose lives the goals are meant to improve remain largely unaware of them even though it is essential that they feel vested in them in order to use them as helpful guides for action.

One of the features of the goals is their global applicability in a vast range of contexts, including that of a pandemic. Given our endless cultural variation, it is difficult to prescribe an approach that can be appropriate and effective in all situations. Yet they need to be more than detached visions. They need to be actionable objectives at a community level.

Decentralising decision-making and management to their beneficiaries promotes the most important cross-cultural factor in sustainable development. The goals therefore need to be adapted to local conditions based on locally-led research and data gathering that allow for variation in culture, politics, environments, etc.

Such ethnographic methodologies and participatory research help illuminate local conditions and local people’s needs. Through this research process, community members are in a better position to identify viable projects that directly relate to their needs.

From vision to action

The goals’ universality is generally a positive thing. They touch all aspects of their lives and reflect commonly held ideals. However, that does not totally translate into people’s willingness to accept them as a motivational or actionable framework. They will be more inspired by and invested in implementing the goals if they feel they have participated in their design and development.

While they may be adopted to some degree because of the values they encapsulate, many people’s lack of emotional connection to them may hinder their use as an applied benchmark.

Multiple goals in single initiatives

Implementation will also be boosted through using single development initiatives to achieve multiple SDGs. Take the following example from Morocco, which is indicative of socio-economic and environmental conditions around the world.

In many societies and cultures, fruit tree farming is traditionally carried out by men. Unfortunately, evaluations have shown that when agricultural projects are implemented without the full integration of women, the revenue and benefits generated typically stay within men’s control and the indirect benefits, such as the promotion of women’s literacy and their growth opportunities, remain unfulfilled.

Therefore, the integration of women from the outset including building their capacities – such as confidence, self-belief and entrepreneurship – results not only in greater gender equality (SDG 5), but also enhanced food security (SDG 2), adaptable water and environmental management systems (SDG 6), education (SDG 4), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), and reducing poverty (SDG 1).

In fact, sustainable development is a function of the extent to which multiple needs and interests are met and benefit local communities. The UN should therefore regularly endorse multifaceted development initiatives that accomplish wide-ranging outcomes and, in so doing, fulfil not only the goals but also ensure their long-term success.

The role of universities

Another action that crosses cultures and expands sustainable development is the integration of experiential learning programmes, especially those coordinated by education centres and higher education institutions.

Through these, students sharpen their abilities to catalyse and facilitate local change and in so doing hone their skills in communication, management, evaluation and other productive capacities. They work to further the development that people need in their lives.

Experiential learning is therefore powerfully efficient. It impacts increasing numbers of people by training people to help enhance local people’s lives and improve the environment and public health.

Higher education is generally the best way of applying learning-by-doing and it therefore plays a fundamental role in fulfilling the SDGs around the world. University researchers have vital knowledge regarding activism, justice and the national and global issues that, if shared with groups of people who are less aware of them, can play an essential role in achieving the SDGs.

It would be helpful if more higher education institutions – or rather specific departments – embraced qualitative participatory research methodologies.

For instance, embedding actions as part of research design that beneficially impact the subject or concerned people should be a major part of academic research evaluations rather than just investigating the explanatory causes of social and environmental conditions.

Implementing social change reveals real-life issues that would otherwise remain hidden when untested. We lose opportunities to improve people’s lives and gain deeper understanding of different societies when building knowledge is divorced from the direct experience of advancing sustainable human development.

Meeting community need

Just as the 17 SDGs are relevant across societies and nations, so too are the guiding principles for their implementation. People’s participation in development should be emphasised whenever we talk about the SDGs. Decentralisation is vital.

Finally, if partnerships, including and especially those with higher education institutions, aim to meet community needs they will bring better outcomes and garner more support from a broader range of stakeholders.

The SDGs ought to make this local participation explicit. In doing so, they will not just embody where we, collectively, need to go, but also how we get there. The where and what are not enough and are not as inspiring as they could be without the how being defined in a way that is relevant to every community.

Dr Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.