WS04 - What Next After the SDGs?
Convened by Prof Andy Sumner, Kings College, UK; Prof Arief Anshory Yusuf, Padjadjaran University, Indonesia; Dr Iliana Olivie, Elcano Royal Institute, Spain; Dorine van Norren, University of Leiden, The Netherlands
Mindful that the era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is drawing to a close, this workshop aims to provide an opportunity for participants at the EADI conference to engage in an open and critical debate on what comes next. Much has changed economically and politically since the SDGs were agreed in 2015. At the same time, research and discourse on international development has become dramatically refocused in the context of efforts to decolonise development. As a result, new lenses are being applied to development and the ideas of ‘progress’.
Chair: Dr Tewodaj Mogues, EJDR co-editor
The workshop aims to provide an open forum to discuss what the SDGs have achieved and what should (and is more likely) to emerge post-2030. Some of the key questions to be discussed will include:
- What have been the impacts of the SDGs: positive and negative; intended and unintended; anticipated and unanticipated?
- In which areas might the SDGs be judged to have been less or more successful and how are such judgments influenced by the international development context of today?
- How have the impacts of the SDGs been influenced by how and who financed them, and what are the implications for the viability of future international development targets?
- Should there be another era of international development targets and, if so, what should and/or might these look like?
Three speakers have been asked to provide their perspective on the subject of the workshop; they have been asked to be critical and provocative, to provide the basis of an open discussion among workshop participants.
We are hoping that the workshop will be the start of an ongoing discussion, among members of the EADI community, about the SDGs and what comes next. More specifically, the European Journal of Development Research (EJDR), which is hosting this workshop, hopes that it will generate ideas for a series of papers to be included in a special issue of the journal in 2024. Participants wishing to contribute papers will be asked to submit abstracts soon after the workshop.