The Idea of Universality in the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

A new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) are currently being negotiated at the United Nations, and there is a widespread consensus that these goals must be “universal.” This article analyses what universality might mean in this context, and its normative significance as a guiding principle for the goals. After briefly introducing the Sustainable Development Goals as found in the current stage of the negotiations, thearticle proceeds in three sections that consider three different senses of universality. In the first, I outline the most intuitive or straightforward sense of universality as a claim about the scope of the goals, with limited import for the content. In the second section, I expand on this idea by noting a widespread understanding of the content of the goals which might also be thought universal and which reflects a moral cosmopolitan constraint on the ambition of each goal. Universality is paired with, and contrasted against, the need fordifferentiation. In the final section, I examine this idea of differentiation, asking how and how far, the goals should allow for country context. From this discussion arises a third account of universality which incorporates a demand for fair burden-sharing. I consider, and ultimately caution against, this account of universality, even though the demand forfairness is crucial in its own right.