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Welcome to the [Re]Group Weekly. Inside today:
Slaying the Dragon: From the Frankenstein Agenda to the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, more on where next for the Global Goals.
The SG Roundup: The Security Council will soon have taken longer to decide than its pick will get for the transition.
Partner Reads: Regional perspectives from the Global South on the next Secretary-General.
Slaying the Dragon
The Endless Audit
“Of the 139 targets with sufficient trend data, only 15 per cent are on track.”
If I’d had any sense, I’d have skated over these words from the 2026 SDG Report and got on with my life. Instead, I wanted to know more about the 21 targets that make up that 15%. What can we learn from the 2030 Agenda’s shining stars?
This has been an “ongoing investigation,” undertaken one target at a time in gaps between more pressing tasks. Also, to be honest, a slog through a series of messy tables, incomplete commentary, and methodologies beaten into the very thinnest of ice.
Yesterday, I finally made it to the 19th of the success stories: SDG 17.6. To get a green light (on track or target met) for “international cooperation on science and technology,” it seems you just need people to… upgrade their internet.
Yep, according to the latest UN assessment, this target is one of the 2030 Agenda’s winners because “fixed-broadband subscriptions continue to grow steadily, at an annual growth rate averaging 5.9% between 2015 and 2025.”
If that made you do a double take, then good. This is a proxy so empty you can hear it rattle. It’s the equivalent of declaring world peace “on track” because noise-canceling headphone sales are up 6%.
Sadly, this is not an isolated example. The pollution target (SDG 3.9) is assessed as on track despite 8.1 million deaths each year. Finance is supposedly flowing in satisfactory amounts to the countries that need it most (SDG10.b), even though aid flows have collapsed. It’s left me wondering whether the SDG measurement system itself is fundamentally broken.
But more on that when we’ve finished the audit and turned a mass of material into something readable. Which will be soon. I promise.
Today, though, I want to explore something else learned from slogging through these targets. The 2030 Agenda has never actually been a unified framework. Instead, it’s a web of weakly connected ecosystems, each with its own rules, life forms, and culture.
Which, as it turns out, is probably a good thing.
The Frankenstein Agenda
When the world’s leaders signed up to the 2030 Agenda in 2015 (and promised to work “tirelessly” to deliver it), they were so enamored by the idea that the framework is integrated and indivisible that they told us so 11 times.
Except it wasn’t true then, it isn’t true now, and it never will be. Stare at these 21 targets for long enough and you begin to see exactly how this Frankenstein agenda was stitched together. Take three examples from Goal 15:
In SDG15.6, we have a push for systems that share the benefits of genetic material, compensating provider countries for supplying the world’s biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and agricultural industries with the raw materials they use to generate billions of dollars in profit.
Then we have frameworks that aim to stem the proliferation of invasive alien species (SDG 15.8), which play a role in 60% of recorded global extinctions, inflict $423 billion in economic costs annually, and are projected to cause worsening damage between now and 2050.
And finally, there’s a challenge to traditional systems for presenting national accounts (SDG 15.9), with the aim of going “beyond GDP” to allow governments to treat natural assets with the same rigor as physical capital and financial assets.
Each of these targets a world that stands largely on its own.
Grey Goo
These worlds operate on their own legal foundations, such as the Nagoya Protocol or the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. They have targets that were aligned with the SDGs back in 2015, but which in many cases have already been updated to supersede them.
They are supported by intergovernmental scientific or expert bodies, innovative delivery and financing mechanisms, and a policy “vernacular” that has been built up over a generation or more.
And they are building bespoke “operating systems” of instruments and infrastructure to deliver outcomes that are only possible through international cooperation.
This is real work. Take the recent bunfight over how to port genetic benefit-sharing into the Pandemic Agreement, where negotiators have had to “master the finer points of how laboratories, databases and product R&D work” before they could even figure out what they disagree about.
You can’t just feed all this complexity into a blender labelled “integrated delivery” and expect to get a nutritious shake that will bulk up implementation capacity. And if you insist on doing it, prepare to spend the next 15 years sipping on a grey goo.
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
In their recent op-ed for Devex, Susana Malcorra and Elizabeth Cousens called on the UN to “embrace the new cooperation ecosystem.”
Look closely at those 21 on-track targets, however, and you won’t find just one ecosystem, you’ll find a dozen or so. You’ve got Sendai on disaster risk reduction, the sustainable cities cluster around UN-Habitat, the 10-Year Framework on sustainable consumption, and the clean energy push led by the World Bank Group, the African Development Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and SEforALL.
Traditional ‘development’ is just one piece of this wider picture, even though it continues to dominate the debate about what should replace the 2030 Agenda.
This is a sector that entered the SDG era on a high, but — as we covered in our Future of Development primer — will be leaving it in a state of despair. The MDGs, drafted by a small group in a mood of “relative casualness,” managed to align the international system behind a common language for delivery, driving what Ban Ki-moon called “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history.”
But after a brief debate over whether the new goals should just focus on finishing the job, the SDGs were launched to do much more, much faster, in many more countries. That hasn’t gone so well, leaving us with a framework that the development sector has largely fallen out of love with.
Take the World Bank as an example. In 2015, its annual report led with ringing endorsements for the SDGs from the President and Executive Directors. The 2026 equivalent ignores the goals almost entirely, barring a pair of citations in internal taxonomy codes.
The passion is gone and many development actors have moved on. So what would it take to make development goals matter again? The answer might lie in reversing the course set by the 2030 Agenda: unbundling the agenda instead of stitching it together.
On Systems and Silos
I was thinking about this question when reading the first two reports from the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, which is co-chaired by Yemi Osinbajo and Arancha González Laya (the third in the trilogy will set out their final recommendations).
The first report, published in May, audits national development strategies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to create a “balance sheet” of assets (expanding tax revenues, remittance inflows, growing pension funds, vast renewable energy potential) and liabilities (unsustainable debt servicing costs, biased sovereign credit ratings, and $835 billion in annual illicit financial flows).
The second report unbundles development into four buckets. Ending deprivation and protecting people in crisis. Accelerating economic transformation. Advancing the common good by tackling transnational threats. And making knowledge-sharing and innovation an end in their own right, rather than just a tool for delivering everything else.
The Coalition wants countries to set the direction and international actors to stick to what only they can do: rebalance the playing field for societies that have long had the odds stacked against them, while helping them optimize assets, manage liabilities, and grapple with the risks that are created by a big, bad world.
This is a manifesto for structural change. And it needs development actors that build systems rather than create silos, and that can finally make the shift from branded projects towards supporting the capabilities, institutions, and markets that the future needs.
But do we need global goals to do any of this?
Goal or No Goal
When you map the existing SDGs onto the Coalition’s four buckets, all the main points are already there.
Building a social floor for the vulnerable is the MDG legacy project, even if little has been done to honor the 2030 Agenda pledge to reach the furthest behind first. What kind of goal would drive a renewed effort to tackle development’s last-mile problem?
Economic transformation is covered by dozens of SDG targets on trade, technology transfer, and macroeconomic coherence (and is at the heart of the Financing for Development process). Aspirations are plentiful. The willingness of powerful economies to make structural concessions is scarce. How is that going to change?
When it comes to creating global public goods, specialized ecosystems are already doing the heavy lifting. Health security, climate mitigation, and biodiversity protection rely on binding conventions, capital allocation, and scientific infrastructure. If these worlds have their own targets, do they really need to be in the global goals?
Finally, knowledge-sharing and innovation are sprinkled across almost every SDG, but there is little evidence that this has accelerated the spread of cross-border scientific networks, technology-transfer pools, or public research ecosystems. Can you write a goal that forces the world to share knowledge rather than hoard it?
The Wet Tuesday Test
The problem with spending too much time digging into 21 targets is that you end up with more questions than answers. So rather than a firm conclusion, here are a few last things to think about.
First, you have to actually want a goal. Compare it to a puppy at Christmas. It is easy to love when you unwrap it at a diplomatic summit, but are you still going to be tending to it on a wet Tuesday three years later when a budget needs allocating?
Second, you have to want it for the right reasons. Problems may be complex, but delivery has to be simple or it doesn’t happen. That means thinking less about a target itself and more about the engine you’re going to build to implement it.
And finally, a global goal must actually be global. If you accept the Coalition’s point that countries should set their own priorities, we need goals only when they exert transnational leverage: creating regulatory parity, driving global standards, or triggering economies of scale.
The Coalition will publish its third and final set of recommendations soon. I’ll be waiting to see if global goals find a place in its vision for “cooperation that works.”
Read more:
Asking the right question: The Accra Reset says we should stop asking “how much aid can be mobilised?” and instead ask “how can countries be equipped to act on their own terms?” [read here]
The SDGs and UNGA81: UN Foundation’s Julie Garfieldt Kofoed on what needs to be done ahead of the last SDG Summit in September 2027. [read here]
What next for the SDGs: The Starling Institute sketches out scenarios for the future of the Sustainable Development Agenda, along with their implications. [read here]
The SG Roundup
If there’s another straw poll as expected next Friday, it will be 78 days since the Security Council started voting. That means the Council will have spent more time voting than the incoming Secretary-General will have for their transition (even in the unlikely event that next week’s vote is definitive).
We don’t have much new to report after Tuesday’s newsletter, but with existing candidates refusing to drop out, at least one Security Council member is pushing back on growing calls for a latecomer to break the deadlock. Let’s see.
Partner Reads
Reading List
Where you stand depends on where you sit, as the cliché goes. So, over the past months, we have been working with our partners at CEPEI (a leading Colombian think-tank) to gather regional perspectives on what the next Secretary-General’s priorities should be.
Here’s a selection of voices and reporting from CEPEI and some of its partners:
Dr. Julienne Mesumbe (On Policy Magazine) questions whether the UN is capable of adapting to today’s realities or is doomed to reflect a world that no longer exists. [read here]
Giovanna Kuele (Estadão) of the Igarapé Institute warns that a divided Latin America and Caribbean must coordinate diplomacy and converge around clear demands on reform to successfully capture the SG seat. [read here, in Portuguese]
Premium Times reports that Nigeria’s backing for the next SG will hinge on a candidate’s commitment to equity, stronger multilateralism, and increased African representation. [read here]
The EastAfrican asks why the African Union has not consolidated behind a single candidate, with both Macky Sall and Olara Otunnu still actively in the running. [read here]
CARICOM and the Nordics signal the Caribbean’s cross-regional reach by jointly welcoming the CARICOM-endorsed candidacy of Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett at UNGA81. [read here]
