Only a special kind of person would pick up and start reading a book on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Few people have ever heard of the goals and even fewer know much about them (Hudson et al. 2020; Tedeneke 2019).

This immediately points to a major challenge. The SDGs were launched as part of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, accompanied by an official video entitled “We the People”. There are 17 goals of which the first, No Poverty, is the focus of this volume (Figure 1.1).

The agenda and video offered “a globally shared development program, involving the whole population in a common mission aimed to put an end to any form of poverty, to fight against inequalities and to face climate change” (Smaniotto et al. 2020: 2). The 2030 Agenda is approaching its halfway stage but, seemingly, without many of us – “we the people” – being aware of the need for our involvement.

The goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030 truly do present a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision”, one that is relevant and should be important to everyone. They aim:

Unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the SDGs replaced, they are “universal goals and targets which involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike. They are integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development [economic, social, and environmental]” (UN 2015a: para. 4). Even so, each country is required to assume “primary responsibility for its own economic and social development” and each government must set “its own national targets guided by the global level of ambition but taking into account national circumstances” (UN 2015a: para. 55).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) did not simply replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they were a reaction to them.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (Table 2.1), introduced with the signing of the Millennium Declaration at the United Nations headquarters in September 2000 were described by some as being “revolutionary” (SDGF 2022). Supported by the leaders of 189 countries, the goals seemed to offer “a common language to reach global agreement”. Not only were the goals generally considered to be realistic, but they also came with an approved mechanism for measurement and monitoring. Moreover, by 2015, the world seemed to be inching towards attaining several of the goals; it was even possible to claim that the goal of halving extreme poverty had been achieved five years ahead of schedule. For 15 years, therefore, the MDGs helped keep poverty and world development, if not in the public eye, at least as a focus for potential global collaboration.

However, by 2011, when the planning for the SDGs began in earnest, a large body of opinion considered that the MDGs were too narrowly focused and had therefore prevented poverty from being tackled in the round (UNEP 2012; Ivanova & Escobar-Pemberthy 2016). Some even suggested that the goals were fundamentally flawed ignoring the underlying causes of global poverty (Bello 2013; McCloskey 2015). The SDGs were therefore intended to take forward the collective energy inspired by the MDGs but to rectify at least some of their deficiencies. Hence, to understand the SDGs it is necessary to understand the MDGs.

The origins of the MDGs and the thinking behind them are considered before examining the extent to which they were truly successful. Viewed as an example of global international governance built around consensus, they stand as beacons of hope given previous failures. However, when the focus shifts to performance in relation to targets, and beyond to consider the impact on individual lives and the well-being of communities, the achievements begin to look more mundane, if not truly disappointing.

A signature characteristic of the Covid-19 pandemic has been its unpredictability. While sophisticated epidemiological models have proved invaluable in short-term planning and national leaders have very publicly relied on “the science” to justify policy responses, politics has necessarily driven the choice and timing of interventions with less predictable outcomes. Moreover, the ability of the virus to mutate into more virulent and contagious variants has undermined the value of horizon projections of the diffusion of the disease. Furthermore, attempts to assess the likely economic impact of the pandemic have been hindered by the prevalence of equilibrium models used in forecasting and the difficulty of accounting for disruptive events such as a pandemic. This has left forecasters scrambling to draw lessons from previous economic shocks of equivalent scale and from earlier pandemics most of which occurred in a noticeably less integrated global economy.

Writing anything about the implications of the pandemic while it continues is, therefore, full of attendant risks. To accommodate the uncertainty, the chapter is divided into two sections with a brief postscript included in the conclusion. The intention is to assess the impact of the first two years of the pandemic, although many of the necessary facts are unavailable. The lack of evidence is mostly due to the inevitable delay in assembling comparable information necessary for global analysis but is sometimes a result of the pandemic disrupting the collection of reliable statistics. Even so, the accumulation of evidence points to the very inequitable impact of the pandemic discussed in the first section, and to a sizeable increase in poverty which is considered in the second.

Covid-19 and income inequality

From the very earliest days of the pandemic, the expectation was that it would most disadvantage people who were already poor. That, after all, was the experience with previous pandemics (Alfani 2020; Furceri et al. 2020).

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the first cases appeared to be clustered, was frequented more by migrant workers than by Wuhanren with urban residency. The Wuhan lockdown initially hurt daily labourers, denying them income. Then, when the lockdown was quickly extended nationally in China, poorer migrant workers who were caught at home because of the New Year festival were prohibited from returning to work in the cities.

Reading this sentence from Transforming our World, the UN declaration announcing the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, one could be forgiven for assuming that they are simply the MDGs Mark 2 (UN 2015a: para. 16). The reality, however, is very different. While homage is paid to the MDGs, it is only as relics belonging to an earlier civilization. Although SDG1, like MDG1, relates to poverty, the real action in negotiating the SDGs took place elsewhere, leaving SDG1 poorly specified.

This situation arose for several reasons to be elucidated in the first part of this chapter. In summary, the momentum behind the SDGs came, not from the poverty lobby, but from environmentalists schooled in ideas of sustainable development. In addition, state actors from the Global South, reacting to the MDGs drawn up by donor countries, aspired to do things differently. However, governments of many OECD countries resisted fundamental change, making it remarkable that agreement was achieved and that outright confrontation between North and South was avoided. It is generally recognized that this was made possible by skilled leadership operating in a new consultative way that weakened pre-existing alliances and power structures. It must be noted, however, that this recognition rests heavily on the writings of the main protagonists who shaped the negotiations and brokered the outcome (Kamau et al. 2018).

The influence of the sustainability lobby is evident in the expansion of the goals to embrace environmental, economic and social objectives and in the emphasis given to the interconnectedness of goals. The SDGs also differ from the MDGs in that they include targets relating to the “means of implementation”. Given that these targets necessarily allude to resources, they emphasize the need for global partnership and transfers in cash and in kind to assist less developed nations.

The five substantive and two means of implementation targets associated with SDG1 are examined in the second section along with the most important of the 13 indicators. Taken together, the targets and indicators appear as casualties of the confusion between the different concepts of poverty discussed in Chapter 1.

While poverty is continuously being generated by the global economic system that simultaneously produces great wealth, the biblical notion that “the poor are always with you” does not need to be true. The world is rich enough to eradicate poverty and the policies introduced in Chapter 6 provide means of doing so.

Even so, the United Nations is correct to stress that the SDGs and eradication of poverty offers the world a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision” (UN 2015a: para. 39). They require national governments to accept “primary responsibility for [their] own economic and social development” but also call for “a global partnership” to “work in a spirit of global solidarity, in particular solidarity with the poorest”. Without the proactive support of richer nations, the least economically developed states will not attain SDG1 and eradicate extreme poverty, while some lower middle-income countries will have difficulty halving poverty with the threshold set at poverty US$3.20/day (Figure 7.1).

While the composition of any global partnership needs to be wide-ranging and to include civil society and representation from labour and employers, the scale of the venture, as explained in Chapter 6, needs to be driven by intergovernmental organizations. Only they have the resources and authority to support national governments and the ability to cajole or even to direct them. Moreover, as nation states were necessarily the sole signatories to 2030 Agenda, the United Nations General Assembly resolution establishing the SDGs in 2015, the required global partnership can only be achieved by national governments working together through existing intergovernmental organizations or ones that are specially created.

Returning to the metaphor of the national welfare state introduced in Chapter 6, there is no international equivalent to central governments with the authority to affect the primary distribution of incomes through market regulation or to influence the secondary distribution by means of taxation and spending. Insofar as the necessity of curbing the inequality generated through the symbiotic relationship between powerful firms, financial institutions and states is recognized, it falls to a host of international organizations to achieve it (Cimadamore 2016).

While books may end, history does not. Stories need to be continuously retold and often revised.

It was clear, even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that the chances of the world being able to eradicate poverty by 2030 were reducing by the minute. The pandemic added substantially to the challenge and underlined the difficulties that national governments confront in working together for the common good (Chapter 5; Case Study 8). Politicians feel compelled to serve their own populations first, others second if at all.

Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with yet incalculable consequences that include a possible tenfold increase in US5.50/day poverty in Ukraine during 2022, together with a 75 million increase in extreme (below US$1.90/day) poverty globally (World Bank 2022b). Although unexpected, the invasion is explicable in terms of a failure in statecraft and the impotence of the United Nations discussed in Chapter 7.

The origins of the war are traceable to euphoria in the 1990s concerning the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy that encouraged the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to author The End of History and the Last Man (1992). In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's pleas to join the European Union were rebuffed and the United States sought to contain the growth of a potential economic rival, financially supporting its former satellite countries at the expense of Russia (Walker 2022). With the eastwards expansion of NATO and with US bases in countries to its east, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, under pressure from failures in domestic policy, found reason to ignore international law and attempt a full takeover of Ukraine, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

While the invasion of Ukraine is understandable in terms of neorealist theories of international relations, they say little about how the world can lessen the consequences of the war for the world's most disadvantaged citizens. At the time of writing, it seems likely that global economic growth will collapse due to surging inflation, with rising energy and food prices directly attributable to the war compounding increases arising from economic dislocations following the pandemic.

Reading this sentence from Transforming our World, the UN declaration announcing the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, one could be forgiven for assuming that they are simply the MDGs Mark 2 (UN 2015a: para. 16). The reality, however, is very different. While homage is paid to the MDGs, it is only as relics belonging to an earlier civilization. Although SDG1, like MDG1, relates to poverty, the real action in negotiating the SDGs took place elsewhere, leaving SDG1 poorly specified.

This situation arose for several reasons to be elucidated in the first part of this chapter. In summary, the momentum behind the SDGs came, not from the poverty lobby, but from environmentalists schooled in ideas of sustainable development. In addition, state actors from the Global South, reacting to the MDGs drawn up by donor countries, aspired to do things differently. However, governments of many OECD countries resisted fundamental change, making it remarkable that agreement was achieved and that outright confrontation between North and South was avoided. It is generally recognized that this was made possible by skilled leadership operating in a new consultative way that weakened pre-existing alliances and power structures. It must be noted, however, that this recognition rests heavily on the writings of the main protagonists who shaped the negotiations and brokered the outcome (Kamau et al. 2018).

The influence of the sustainability lobby is evident in the expansion of the goals to embrace environmental, economic and social objectives and in the emphasis given to the interconnectedness of goals. The SDGs also differ from the MDGs in that they include targets relating to the “means of implementation”. Given that these targets necessarily allude to resources, they emphasize the need for global partnership and transfers in cash and in kind to assist less developed nations.

The five substantive and two means of implementation targets associated with SDG1 are examined in the second section along with the most important of the 13 indicators. Taken together, the targets and indicators appear as casualties of the confusion between the different concepts of poverty discussed in Chapter 1.

The SDGs are a quest for human progress. They symbolize the call that all recognize a shared humanity, acknowledge human failure and accept responsibility for together building a better world. They are equally products – some would say tools – of global politics and the gulf between the aspiration for a better world and the political reality is enormous. The intention in this chapter is to identify means of bridging this gulf.

In the 2000s, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) served to protect the United Nations (UN) when under attack by powerful nation states that view intergovernmental organizations as threats to their sovereignty (Chapter 2). The SDGs continue to give the UN credibility: no politician will be elected on a mandate to increase poverty; hence, it is difficult to criticize the UN for seeking to reduce it.

However, each SDG is a compromise in which the influence of powerful nations is writ large. SDG Targets 1.1 and 1.2 were intended to engage the rich world in obligations that they avoided during the time of the MDGs (Chapters 2 and 3). However, the targets are inherently divisive, referring to different conceptions of poverty: absolute and multidimensional. The former target is internationally prescribed for the developing world and the poverty must be eradicated; in the latter case, the target is nationally determined by developed countries and poverty needs only to be halved (Chapters 1 and 3). While both targets are affordable when set against global wealth, that applying to the poorest countries is considerably more ambitious (Chapters 4 and 5).

Successful fulfilment of the SDGs is also contingent on global politics and especially on the willingness of countries to collaborate and to make sacrifices for the global good. However, as the poorly coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates, political commitments to global solidarity and to multilateralism are typically more rhetorical than real (Chapters 6 and 7). The Covid-19 pandemic worsened the relative position of the least developed countries, further increasing global inequalities and poverty (Chapter 5).

The limited commitment to collective working is further evidenced by the lack of quantifiable targets for SDG17 – the all-important partnership goal – which, as a result, is almost purely aspirational.

As explained, achieving SDG1 requires concerted action by national governments and a global partnership that entails the developed world providing financial and other support to less developed countries. However, there is no obligation on national governments to achieve SDG1 nor, as discovered in Chapter 7, much evidence to date that richer countries will actively assist less developed countries in their efforts to eradicate poverty. Aware of this reality, the architects of the SDGs, as noted in Chapter 1, placed their hope in the world's people. The vision was that “We the people” would join in a common mission, demanding that governments put an end to all forms of poverty. A lot, therefore, is resting on “we the people”.

The dependency on the people reflects both the extreme weakness of global governance and the propensity of intergovernmental organizations, when captured by rich countries, to exacerbate world poverty. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres explained to the General Assembly in January 2022: “The global financial system is morally bankrupt. It favours the rich and punishes the poor.”

The United Nations itself, as explained in Chapter 7, although having moral authority as an assembly of nominally equal states, is often riven by divisions and an arena for geopolitical competition with nations vying for the status of “primus inter pares”, first among equals. Launching the SDGs, the hope was that “We the people” could disrupt this competition, disempower the rich nations that have traditionally shaped policies to further their own interests, and demand policies that benefit the planet's majority.

It is far from clear, however, that the people can be relied upon to demand the eradication of poverty. A simple Google search (28 November 2021), “support for the SDGs”, generated some 239 million hits and was headed by paid advertisements by organizations offering support in raising funds or soliciting contributions to support work in relation to the SDGs. Searches have increased over time, which suggests growing interest, but ones relating to specific goals were relatively few in number and characterized by high variability, which does not speak to sustained concern (Figure 8.1).

This chapter marks a turning point. The origins of the Sustainable Development Goals, their form, and the disappointing progress to date have been documented in Chapters 1 to 5. In addition, in Chapter 4 it was established that it is perfectly feasible, in terms of global financial resources, both to eradicate extreme poverty and halve poverty in all its forms – that is to reach Targets 1.1 and 1.2 by 2030. Indeed, it is a humiliating failure of international governance that these targets have yet to be achieved. In this and the remaining chapters, therefore, attention shifts to explore how more rapid progress can be made and whether this is likely. The fundamental causes of global poverty are first considered before discussing the kinds of policies that need to be pursued if poverty is to be eliminated.

6.1 On the causes of inequality and poverty

Poverty, whether conceptualized as being absolute, relative or multidimensional, results from the unfair primary and secondary distribution of resources. The primary distribution is market-driven. It takes place within and between countries through the production and sale of goods at home and/or abroad which generate income in the form of wages and returns on assets and investments.

The secondary distribution is that engineered by governments through taxation and transfers which determine the resources that populations can access and deploy. For the most part, the secondary distribution currently takes place within nation states but does occur between national states in the form of overseas development assistance (ODA), discounted loans made available by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and charitable aid dispensed by non-governmental organizations.

The distributions are unfair to the extent that they lead to, or do not prevent, poverty. In a narrow quasilegal sense, this is the case because it has been internationally agreed that poverty should be eliminated or, at least, reduced by half or more. The distributions may be unfair in the wider sense of structuring patterns of well-being that cannot be justified with respect to commonly accepted moral criteria. Given the context, the focus in this chapter is on unfair-ness narrowly defined.