Decision time for Agenda 2030: Can public participation revitalise SDG progress?

The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) need bold new thinking to be rescued by 2030. That’s the message from SDG Watch Europe, Europe’s largest civil society coalition for ambitious SDG implementation, ahead of this year’s highly anticipated UN Summit of the Future. The coalition’s members argue that new systemic economic thinking and institutional reforms at UN and EU level will be necessary to succeed. With tired UN diplomacy failing to drive real progress on the SDGs, Jeffrey Moxom, SDG Watch’s Senior Coordinator, asks, can public participation and deliberative democracy offer new ideas to turn things around? 

Who is driving the SDG Agenda?

It’s not a secret that the SDGs have fallen seriously behind in implementation, with the UN’s own projections stating a meagre 17% of targets are on track for 2030, with over one third stalled or in reverse. Following a summer of extreme climatic events, war and destruction in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine and beyond, the stakes for those displaced could not be higher. We’ve heard politicians aplenty blaming the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine for SDG backsliding, and thousands of references to accelerate SDG implementation. We hear little about class, civil liberties, democracy or power. 

As the world becomes locked in to ever increasing GHG emissions, civil society and citizens have been locked out of meaningful participation to raise their voice at multilateral Summits, with minimal access to the negotiating table. The political trajectories defining the years to come are now being set at the UN Summit of the Future.This includes reforms to the international financial architecture, the future of AI, and how to solve the debt crisis of the majority world, where around 3.3 billion people now live in countries that spend more money repaying the interest on their debts than on education or health. Despite strong mobilisation from civil society, the fact is that the politics of the SDG Agenda are neither neutral nor democratic, with a clear lack of decision-making power or fiscal autonomy for the world’s majority.  

A Global People’s Assembly 

But as policy-makers gather behind closed doors, civil society has been bringing citizens together to explore what public participation can contribute, by discussing the environmental and social issues that are closest to them. The EEB and SDG Watch Europe are bringing the results of this new research on deliberative democracy to the 2024 Global People’s Assembly, which takes place on the sidelines of the UN Summit of Future, to demonstrate to EU and global decision makers why public participation and deliberative democracy must be strengthened, and how it could be a booster for SDG implementation.

This new research on democracy is a core part of the Real Deal project, where the EEB and its partners have held mini citizens deliberations with inspiring results. Citizens from all over Europe come together to discuss the future of green and social policies, placing the perspective of nature, or the perspective of future generations in the centre. Citizens were asked to consider what policies they might like to put in place for their grandchildren, or what policies they would choose for nature, which typically lacks legal personhood and therefore is not always taken into account when making environmental decisions. 

The value of democratic innovation 

These innovations in deliberative democracy offer a new approach. The recommendations can support decision-makers in implementing citizen’s policy recommendations. They could be picked up by governments, international institutions and municipalities at local level, to ensure that the voices of those left behind, of nature or of future generations, can be adequately heard by decision makers when discussing the future of the 2030 Agenda.

Deliberative democracy is a powerful tool in the national or supranational toolbox, offering new answers to solving complex and challenging societal problems. The direction of travel is clear. For example, in Europe, 84% of people support a global tax on millionaires, whilst, 71% of people support democratising international institutions such as the UN and IMF with population-proportionate voting shares. At present, the negotiated Pact for the Future, the key outcome document of the UN Summit, does not contain a strong reference to either, nor commitments to ensure redistribution of wealth and decision-making power. Perhaps if Member States drew lessons from deliberative democracy or placed the pen in hands of the most vulnerable or marginalised, the outcomes could tip the scales from SDG backsliding and regression towards wellbeing for people and planet.

A legal obligation

The EU has not only been falling behind on the SDGs, but also on ensuring real public participation at European and international level. Its legal responsibility to do so is enshrined under the Aarhus Convention, which ensures the rights of participation in decision making, access to information and justice regarding the environment. The Aarhus convention is an international legally binding instrument, and these rights are emphasised in the outcome document of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development and the Almaty Guidelines, which cover guidance for international conferences. However, despite these legal guarantees, there is currently a clear lack of leadership from the EU at international level to ensure that these dual commitments to sustainability and democracy are upheld. As democracy and civic space become increasingly threatened by autocratic governments around the world, the EU has an opportunity to advance the sustainability agenda by renewing the social contract, protecting citizens and handing them greater decision-making power.

Transformative democracy

And what if we could go one step further, combining the power of global economic reforms with the potential of deliberative democracy? For example, if countries had more democratic control over how we allocate our global resources, rather than those decisions being driven by private capital investment, we could choose to direct our common resources towards collective social and ecological goals. Perhaps then, the SDGs and Agenda 2030 can accelerate, by bringing citizens’ ideas and recommendations to the forefront in a vision of hope, not fear.