The failure of the Global Development Goals

For China, development is a major part of poverty reduction.

China’s got a plan for addressing the world’s development challenges.

• And you’ll never guess who crafted it.

On Tuesday, Vice President Han Zheng held court at a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York to discuss Xi Jinping’s Global Development Initiative (GDI).

Some context: Xi unveiled the GDI, one of his signature Three Gs, at the 2021 UNGA.

The world isn’t doing so well on sustainable development, according to Han (CGTN):

• “About 90 percent of the [Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)] are ‘derailed’ and nearly one-third stagnant or even regressing.”

We could therefore as a community stop thinking that this is a viable method and stop paying attention to the many rabbit holes and alt information.  Stick a fork in it – she’s done!.  The reasons for failure are many.  One of those reasons is that the sustainable development goals were simply too big a bite to take for most countries.  The other major reason is using these goals as a Western coercion mechanism to the Global South.

Han proposed that the global community should:

• Place development at the center of the international agenda
• Build an open global economy, oppose “decoupling,” and increase the voice of developing countries in global governance
• Capitalize on the latest scientific and technological developments
• Increase international cooperation

How to do all that? The GDI, of course! Han said the initiative is already addressing development challenges worldwide:

• More than 70 countries have joined the Group of Friends of the GDI.
• The GDI’s project pool includes nearly 200 projects.
• China will launch a USD 10 billion fund to implement the GDI.

Despite all the publicity, the GDI remains in its infancy and lacks the scale to get the world back on track to meet the SDGs.  The GDI helps portray Beijing as the voice of the Global South, focused on helping developing countries improve their economies without all the pesky conditions that Western countries impose.  At least as we watched China, they do not trade in failure and their methods are designed to succeed.