12. And what about the Sustainable Development Goals?

The United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved December  11, 2019 from https://news.un.org/en/story/2015/12/519172-sustainable-development-goals-kick-start-new-year

And what about the Sustainable Development Goals?

In my very first blopost, I introduced the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I argued that water and gender in Africa is related to the following SDGs:

At the beginning, I was planning to give an overview which shows to which SDGs each blog post is mostly related to. However, whilst writing the blog posts I realized that giving such an overview would actually undermine the message the SDGs try to convey; during my studies I learned that there is no such thing as achieving sustainability by targeting only one SDG. In fact, all SDGs are interlinked and do interact with each other (International Council for Science, 2017). Clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), requires for example quality education (SDG 4) in order to acquire the knowledge on water management and engineering; climate action (SDG 13) since climate change might negatively impact water flows and might increase desertification or flooding in certain areas; and peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG 16) since sustainable and reliable water provisions requires stable governance. And likewise, all other SDGs could be related to the achievement of the targets of SDG 6. I hope that whilst reading the blog posts, it became clear that the issues related to water and gender are not one-sided and thus need interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to be solved in a sustainable way. 

During the process of writing my blog posts, I also realized that the SDGs might be a western conceptualization on how to reach sustainability. I realized, that in African societies other values might constitute sustainability. Besides, for example for SDG 8 about decent work and economic growth, GDP is still used as an indicator. In local African communities' culture, however, GDP might not be an indicator of growth in the first place.  Maybe it would be interesting to develop a framework like that of the SDGs together with African societies, or with local societies all over the world. In this way, a framework is more likely to convey messages in the same socio-cultural and economic language of the local context. It might be a timely process, but could also be involved during Participatory Action Research projects. I am not trying to undermine the SDGs as a framework, because it certainly functions as a shared language between different actors and stakeholder in different countries to discuss sustainability. But, I see the potential of extending the framework and the application thereof into a more local context; think global, act local.