Welcome to the United Nations
Agenda 2030
In 2015, all of the UN's 193 member countries, after many rounds of negotiations, agreed on a Master plan for the survival of humanity and our planet, entitled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. It is an extremely ambitious plan with 17 sustainability goals and 169 targets. What this Agenda 2030 provides is a unique, global, national, and local investment plan in three central dimensions of survival – the social, the environmental, and the economic. These goals and targets can only be achieved by a political system that has the ability to coordinate decision-making using a holistic and long-term approach.
For Agenda 2030 not to stop at a lot of beautiful words, effective implementation is of course required. It presupposes the will and ability for critical, ethical, systemic, and ecological thinking and acting. And not just being based on, e.g., gut feelings, or on the content of our wallets, or economism.
Higher education targeting tomorrow´s decision-makers
Today's students are tomorrow's decision-makers. But the education system worldwide is still not well adapted to these needs. Instead, one could argue, with only a slight exaggeration, that we have organized our higher education to bring about just competence for a variety of professions. Added to this is the fact that the political system is still organized according to the so-called silo principle. This appears to be the main cause of the current energy crisis and also of the severe shortcomings in the handling of the covid pandemic that the Swedish Corona Commission so clearly laid out.
Lack of coordination
Our own, in other respects highly developed country, Sweden, is organized into 11 government departments + the cabinet committee, 15 parliamentary committees, 343 authorities under the government, 21 regions, and 290 municipalities. All of these are expected to cooperate for the implementation of Agenda 2030. Approaches to cooperation both horizontally and vertically exist, but they are undeveloped and insufficient.
This fact has been pointed out by the Swedish Government´s coordinator of Agenda 2030 implementation, former public health minister Gabriel Wikström. In his 2022´s interim report to the government, he writes that application is slow, even though Sweden has a much better-starting position than most other countries. Wikström calls for a transformation of our society, adapted to the conditions of the future. And he finds that the politicians have not yet decided on one. His conclusion is gloomy: "On the contrary, current developments point to the fact that, among other things, we will not reach the majority of the national goals, that economic and social inequality is not decreasing, and that we are far from consuming and producing sustainably."
If humans as a species were unambiguously rational and guided by reason, we would not have exposed our existence to all these threats, or at least be fully occupied with averting them according to Agenda 2030. But this is done insufficiently, and piecemeal, as Gabriel Wikström and many with him point out.
Obstacles
This is primarily so because of several obstacles to integrated implementation. Many of the central actors:
- do not see the needs because they are technology optimists, or are skeptical of the Agenda;
- feel they are already doing enough;
- want to act, but don't know how;
- do not make use of the leeway they still have;
- want to do everything by themselves, without coordination with others;
- do not have time to look away from short-term or urgent work.
Many actors seem overwhelmed and discouraged by the gravity and complexity of the challenge. But what many see as a challenge of overwhelming magnitude and complexity should also be able to trigger an urgency and a drive to act that overcomes the short-sightedness and silo mentality that, possibly genetically, seems to be hardwired into our consciousness, perhaps because it promoted survival in our early ancestors' existence on the Savannah.
Nothing new
Solving these large complex coordination problems requires, in our opinion, major educational efforts. This has also recently been jointly called for by the three umbrella organizations of the international university system – the International Association of Universities (IAU), The Francophone University Agency (AUF), and The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), which together represent over 2,000 universities worldwide (IAU, 2020).
Are these thoughts brand new? Not really. Over 30 years ago, Sweden had a deputy prime minister whose task was to think and act "across the silos", to coordinate the many task-specific actors both horizontally and vertically -- into a functioning whole. His name was Odd Engström.
But one can also go back to Axel Oxenstierna's form of government from 1634, where it was emphasized that the Government´s five councils should "reach each other's hand", and that it was permitted "to interfere in the service and affairs of the other" so that “all the affairs of the kingdom may be carried out properly and without neglect or interference".
Present Swedish politics
Present Swedish politics, however, is based on a negotiated document that will guide the current Swedish government's policy, the so-called Tidö agreement. This document, unfortunately, contains nothing to indicate that such very serious coordination problems will be dealt with. Agenda 2030 is neither mentioned in this agreement, nor in the prime minister's declaration for his new government. The silo approach in policy is alive and well. Considering the global challenges that the world must deal with, we find this extremely remarkable.
A new Lancet commission
A reasonably holistic Lancet Commission on 21st-Century Global Health Threats has recently been established (Kanem et al, 2022) to examine the broad set of threats facing the world over the rest of the century. This longer perspective is needed since threats such as climate change, food systems, antimicrobial resistance, or inverted population pyramids require many decades for actions to alter future trajectories. The Sustainable Development Goal focus on 2030 is an important motivator for immediate policy action, but a longer-term perspective is needed to fully assess and respond to emerging threats.
Governments, international organizations, and local communities will need to manage multiple threats at the same time. Many of these threats interact and lead to complex health, economic, social, and geopolitical consequences. Climate change, population growth, and political fragility may coincide leading to large-scale migration. Food systems can be designed to improve health, reduce poverty, and slow climate change, or the reverse. Specific and cross-cutting technologies and policies are needed to reduce the risk of emerging threats or to decrease the harm from threats as they unfold. The most important strategies for risk and harm reduction are unlikely to emerge if each threat is examined in isolation from the others.
Teenager Greta Thunberg told the world leaders some 3 years ago: Don´t listen to me. Listen to the science.
Last year Antònio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations emphasized: “We have a choice – collective action, or collective suicide.”
This is why we should be in a great hurry to start our transition -- now!
By Lennart Levi, Emeritus Professor of Psychosocial Environmental Health, Karolinska institute, and Bo Rothstein, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Gothenburg