Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters

Abstract

This transdisciplinary review of research about international cooperation on social and environmental change builds the case for replacing Sustainable Development as the dominant framework for an era of increasing crises and disasters. The review is the output of an intentional exploration of recent studies in multiple subject areas, based on the authors’ decades of work in related fields since the Rio Earth Summit 30 years ago. It documents the failure to progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Consequently, scholarship critiquing the conceptual framework behind those ‘Global Goals’, and the economic ideology they arose from, is used to explain that failure. Although the pandemic set back the SDGs, it further revealed the inappropriate strategy behind those goals. This suggests the Global Goals constitute an ‘own-goal’ scored against people and nature. Alternative frameworks for organising action on social and environmental issues are briefly reviewed. It is argued that a future framework must relate to a new eco-social contract between citizen and state and engage existing capabilities that are relevant to an increasingly disrupted world. The case is made for an upgraded form of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) as an overarching framework. The proposed upgrades include detaching from economic ideologies and recognising that a wider metadisaster from climate chaos may reduce the future availability of external support. Therefore, self-reliant resilience and locally led adaptation are important to the future of DRM. Options for professionals continuing to use the term sustainability, such as this journal, are discussed.