The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) just turned ten. In human terms, that’s old enough to know better. In development terms, it’s old enough to be assessed. And the assessment is not pretty: only one in six targets on track, a third going backwards and a deadline in five years that everyone has in the diary and nobody has prepared for. Call it the international development equivalent of a midlife crisis.
So, happy birthday. We need to talk. What, exactly, have the SDGs been doing? The question is not academic. As aid budgets face their sharpest cuts in a generation and multilateral frameworks come under sustained political attack, the SDGs’ record of aspiration without accountability has become a liability – providing exactly the kind of ammunition that critics need to argue the whole enterprise should be dismantled.
To answer that question fairly, it’s worth starting with what the SDGs did get right.
The world’s biggest group project
The SDGs gave development a shared global language at a scale we hadn’t really seen before. Everyone – from governments to NGOs to corporates – suddenly had a neat colour-coded wheel to point at and say, “yes, we’re doing that”.
In many ways, it became the world’s biggest group project. Everyone signed up, everyone agreed on the topic(s) and everyone had their name on the cover page. Which, as anyone who has ever done a group project knows, is both impressive… and slightly concerning.
Because group projects are great for alignment. Less great for delivery and accountability. There’s always someone doing the heavy lifting, someone free riding and at least one person who only shows up at the end to say, “we should really bring this together”.
The SDGs made it easier to signal intent and to be seen to be doing something. The Voluntary National Reviews, the High-Level Political Forum and the proliferation of SDG-aligned reporting all created spaces for engagement, dialogue and polished PDFs.
In that sense, the SDGs didn’t so much drive development as choreograph the performance around it. They designed the T-shirts, the hashtags and the finish line banner – and made sure everyone knew where to stand for the group photo.
That’s not nothing. It’s just not quite the same as doing the work.
Goal setting ≠ Goal getting
However, once you step away from the narrative and look at the evidence, things get less impressive.
The major reviews all land in roughly the same place: the SDGs have been good at changing how we talk about development but much less good at changing how it actually happens. They’ve influenced language, reporting and the rituals of international development. But when it comes to the things that really matter – how governments spend money, how decisions get made – the needle barely moves.
The machinery built around them hasn’t helped much. Forums, reviews, reporting cycles – there has been no shortage of activity. But activity isn’t the same change. If the SDGs were supposed to redirect resources at scale, the evidence suggests they’ve been remarkably polite about it. The goals are everywhere. The budgets, less so.
Meanwhile, the world has continued to make progress – on health, education, energy and more. Which is great. But also, slightly inconvenient. Because when you look closely, most of these trends were already in motion before the SDGs arrived. The framework didn’t start the engine. It didn’t even press the accelerator. At best, it added a dashboard and a set of indicators to tell us how fast we were already going. And, occasionally, to tell us we were going backwards, which is helpful – albeit uncomfortable – for getting to where we need to go.
And then there’s the design. Seventeen goals. One hundred and sixty-nine targets. It was always going to be a stretch. More importantly, it was never entirely coherent. Some goals undermine others. Economic growth versus sustainable consumption, for instance, a contradiction so fundamental it has its own academic literature. The SDGs’ response was to give both goals a number and hope for the best.
It turns out that agreeing on everything is not quite the same as doing anything.
Goal-free growth
Step back from the SDGs entirely, and the historical record becomes hard to ignore.
The countries that successfully developed over the last 150 years did so without anything resembling a global goal framework. Their trajectories were shaped by industrialisation, by the movement of capital and labour into more productive sectors, by sustained investments in science and education, and by the gradual strengthening of state institutions. None of which is to romanticise the process: development history contains plenty of colonialism, coercion and environmental vandalism. But it did not contain many internationally agreed colour-coded frameworks. The contrast with the SDGs is not subtle. Voluntary, internationally agreed, monitored through self-reporting and devoid of consequence: the SDGs represent the opposite of what drove development when development happened. This is not a marginal concern. It is rather the central one.
So, do the SDGs matter?
Would we notice if the SDG disappeared? Do we think about them much in our day-to-day work, even as we pursue – without a single pastel hexagon in sight – many of the same ends?
Perhaps the SDGs do matter but not in the way we assume. They provide a shared script, a signalling device, a way of organising attention and agreeing what “good” looks like across a diverse cast of actors. But that is largely where it ends. They have not meaningfully reshaped investment decisions or redirected public spending.
It’s less a dramatic failure and more a kind of institutional quiet quitting. The goals are still there, still cited, still colour-coded – attending all the right meetings, contributing minimally and waiting for their pension. In a more generous political era, that might have passed largely unnoticed. In today’s climate, however, highly visible frameworks with fuzzier links to delivery risk becoming convenient symbols of everything critics think is wrong with aid.
Post 2030: renewal or reckoning?
With 2030 looming, the conversation has already shifted to what comes next. It all feels familiar. Fewer goals, sharper language, tighter integration with climate and biodiversity frameworks; even embedding the whole thing more formally into existing agreements to give it a bit more institutional heft. In other words, SDGs 2.0: tidier, more integrated and just realistic enough to feel like progress.
Which may be fine. The SDGs were never entirely useless. Shared language and visibility matter. The problem is that development has always depended on something harder: political bargains, firms innovating and sustained investment. None of those things emerge automatically because the international community agrees on a framework.
After ten years, that is perhaps the uncomfortable lesson the SDGs leave behind. They helped create a shared language for development and made it easier to coordinate around broad aspirations. But aspirations are easier to agree on than the political and economic choices that drive change.
A midlife crisis, handled well, can prompt a serious reckoning: what is working, what is not and what needs to change. Handled badly, it becomes largely cosmetic. The post-2030 agenda is that moment. If it amounts to sharper language, refreshed branding and another round of institutional self-congratulation, we will know exactly which path was chosen.