Recursive Shifts: Manifestations of the Sustainable Development Goals in Contemporary Development Practice

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by United Nations member states in 2015 is cast as a historic decision that enfolds long-held social, environmental and economic concerns into a single agenda, and enrols all countries as subjects to (sustainable) development. This is said to be unprecedented in the history of goal-setting in global governance, reflection a contemporary shift in the ways in which sustainable development is imagined and pursued. The universal application of these global goals, some suggest, might do more to unsettle the 'North-South' binary in development thinking and practice than decades of scholarly critique and advocacy. Yet, although the SDGs have ushered new ways of doing development, the promise of sustainable development for all seems all the more distant. This thesis is an inquiry into what ‘doing’ development in the post-2015 era entails and what it does, even if it fails in its own terms. Through case studies spanning the ‘South’ and the ‘North’, it explores manifestations of the SDGs in contemporary development practice. Situating these cases in the unfolding financialisation of development and changing ‘North-South’ dynamics, it traces how the SDGs are used and articulated; the matters of concern SDG interventions form, occlude and sustain; the logics and techniques on which they are built and what they, in turn, recast. It advances an approach to understanding contemporary development that privileges neither change nor continuity. It attends, instead, to recursive shifts in how development is now imagined and pursued; contending that change is not diametrically opposed to continuity, but is in fact necessary for the reproduction of development as a project always waiting to be accomplished. Weaving together underexplored empirical materials with an eclectic range of scholarly debates, the thesis charts ‘new’ ways of doing designed to ‘unlock’ finance capital and build coherence for the SDGs, from planning, prototyping and pipeline-building in Indonesia; mapping, prospecting and brokering in Ghana; disclosure and audit in Australia; to coherence-building in the Netherlands. In all cases, these interventions fall short of doing what they are supposed to do, not least because they occlude contextual complexities and frictions that nevertheless affect what these interventions are able to do. Yet, they perform in other ways, including in circulating and reproducing their own premises and promises. Their shortcomings justify their (re)iteration. Here, the ‘newness’ of the SDGs provide the grounds for this project of iterability (and scalability), engaging forms of expertise and collaboration that are different and particular to what came before them, but replicate the underlying logics and knowledges that make development ceaselessly anti-political. The findings of this thesis are relevant not only for theorising beyond the ‘failure’ of development in the current moment. They also trouble the distinctions that still influence many public and academic discussions – public/private, local/global, before/after and continuity/change. This thesis, then, follows a long-existing call to acknowledge the porosity of these conceptual containers, to attend to what otherwise might be lost in understanding the effects of the SDGs, and contemporary development more generally, within these binaries.