health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development
Note: For the MDGs see www.un.org/millenniumgoals/; for the SDGs see www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/
Source: Adapted from UN UNGA (2015: 14).
(Reproduced with the permission of the United Nations.)
Agenda 2030 aims to mobilise global efforts to transform our world. The scale and ambition of this universal policy agenda and the political commitment has never been seen before, endorsed by 193 countries (UN member states), formulated and supported by the international and global institutions and organizations like the World Bank (2020a) and International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2020), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2019) and world-regional social policy actors. The European Union (EU), for example, was one of the leading forces behind the 2030 Agenda and is fully committed to its implementation. The SDGs thus act as a compass, guiding regional sustainability strategies, reviews and monitoring (for example, ECLAC, 2018; EC, 2019; ECA, 2018; ESCAP, 2019). The long-term development goals are helping to unite policy actors at all levels and across all regions.
In this age, then, we find growing interest in the social dimensions of sustainability. Importantly, we find ideas and contested conceptions of ‘the social’ (which have a long history in the social sciences), now taking centre stage in international and globalizing social policy debates, the focus of this volume. The notion of ‘social sustainability’ can be found at the intersections (a key theme of this volume) of the environment and the ecological, the economic and the social. As such, this new and emerging political agenda invites us to think about the ‘social’ in social + policy, and the emergent field of study – global + social + policy – as well as the related social and ethical dimensions of social sustainability, equity, equality, justice and cohesion, as the influential Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (2013) reminds us.
Global policy perspectives and policy paradigms have been (slowly) shifting to encompass important elements of the social, particularly evident in the work of international institutions, regional actors and agencies in the United Nations system like the IMF.1 The emerging new social spending strategy now taking shape at the IMF is perhaps testimony to this shift. The IMF, for example, is now a leading advocate of social investments in public health, public education, social assistance and safety nets and other key aspects of social infrastructure development.2 The IMF is also promoting sustained economic growth, and ‘inclusive growth’, in order to meet the 2030 SDGs. Full and productive employment (SDG 8) it is claimed will help set the world free of extreme poverty (SDG 1) and social inequality (Goals 5 and 10) (IMF, 2019). This policy positioning by the IMF and many of the other international institutions is perhaps unremarkable in some ways, being the conventional wisdom, as global social policy is ‘framed’ (Bøås and McNeill, 2004) and ‘reframed’ (Deeming and Smyth, 2018). However, in other ways this does seem significant if we recall that the IMF and World Bank were the strong advocates of neoliberal policy prescriptions on the global stage during the 1980s and 1990s. As we find throughout the volume, international institutions and organizations established in the post-war era are constantly under pressure, involved in their own legitimation struggles and contests, increasingly in the realm of global governance and social movements, formations and coalitions for change involved in local, national and global politics and the dynamics of contention (see also O’Brien et al, 2000; Frey et al, 2014; Dingwerth et al, 2019; Tilly et al, 2019).
In the age of sustainability, the ‘social’ is facing multiple challenges and crises, however. In global social policy, Agenda 2030 is heavily contested and progress on the SDGs is slow, uneven and patchy, even before COVID-19 and the economic crises (World Bank Group (WBG) flagship reports Global Economic Prospects (GEP) consider the enormous global shock delivered by COVID-19, leading to steep recessions in many countries, World Bank, 2020b, 2021). Many of the SDGs are either ‘gender-sparse’ or ‘gender-blind’, for example (Razavi, 2016, 2019; UN Women, 2018). Despite the global commitment to gender equality, women still form the majority of the world’s poorest people (Fredman, 2016). Persisting high levels of violence against women, economic exclusion and other systemic inequalities are of deep concern, revealing the lack of political commitment to address gender equality according to the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women, 2019, 2020). Governance and institutional failings, underinvestment and underfunding concerns amid a slowing of the global economy and the climate emergency, all pre-date the pandemic (Sachs et al, 2018; Dalby et al, 2019; IPBES, 2019; IPCC, 2019; UNIATF, 2019; UN, 2020a).3 COVID-19 could now set sustainable development and progress on the SDGs back years and even decades, global poverty is on the increase for the first time in decades (dire warnings are found in the latest editions of the UN flagship reports, Financing for Sustainable Development Report (FSDR) (UNIATF, 2020), World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) (UN 2020a,
