SDGs

Abstract

Gender equality, the MDGs and the SDGs: Achievements, lessons and concerns blogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2015/10/05/gender-equality-the-mdgs-and-the-sdgs-achievements-lessons-and-concerns/ Following the formal announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals, Naila Kabeer reflects on lessons from the Millennium Development Goals through a feminist lens, which she argues were weakened by their very narrow interpretation of women's empowerment. She writes that much more is needed to dismantle the more resilient structures of inequality, and while the SDGs offer some grounds for cautious optimism, there is a continued lack of emphasis on rights. For feminists in general, the MDGs came as a disappointment. After the enormous progress made on women's rights during the major conferences of the 1990s, particularly the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 and the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, and after the stirring declaration of the Millennium Declaration that men and women have the right to live their lives and raise their children in dignity, free from hunger and free from fear, the MDGs were an anticlimax , offering a very narrow definition of human capabilities as its vision and no reference to human rights at all-for men, women or children. Nevertheless, many feminists opted to take a pragmatic approach-'we have to work with what we've got'-and get involved with the gender politics of the MDGs. There was at one major advantage to this strategy which was that it brought feminist issues into the mainstream of development. This was an agenda to which the world's heads of states had signed up, rather than the heads of sector-specific or women's ministries, not always the most influential in government. To a certain extent, their pragmatism was justified. As Sanjay Reddy and Ingrid Kvangraven point out, the adoption of a common development agenda has demonstrated the ability to coordinate and mobilise international development efforts to an extent hitherto unknown. Thanks to a major global monitoring effort, we now have a far better knowledge base on how different countries have fared on selected aspects of poverty and wellbeing than would have been the case in the absence of the MDGs.