“Can SDG’S Achieve What Millennium Development Goals Could Not? Rethinking from Global Context”

Abstract:
The quest for a better world is an ever-prevalent dream. We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, but also unspeakable deprivation around the world. Equitable distribution of resources is the need of the day. Many programmes and policies are formulated in this direction. The year 2016 marks an end of the era of one such programme: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which drove the global development agenda since the new millennium. The MDGs have now paved the way for another set of goals that the world will strive to achieve over the next fifteen years: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG’s are an outcome of the conversation on the intersectionality between economic, social and environmental change. These ambitious and aspirational SDGs call for significant rethinking in development processes across the world. this paper is an attempt to reflect on the MDG era and consider the possible way forward for achieving the ambitious and inclusive agenda of SDGs while reflecting upon the possible role of social workers in making this viable. The emerging relationship between the policy makers and the masses brought about by the mediation of the social worker epitomises the fundamental ongoing changes This paper is an attempt to trace the lofty development goals of the SDG’s juxtaposed against the MDG’s while delineating, the potential significance of the dynamic social relationships between various stakeholders.
Keywords:  MDG’s, SDG’s, Development Goals, Social Workers, Stakeholders, Role.

Origin and significance:
“One must care about the world one will not see”, Said Mahatma Gandhi, the legend who is hailed as the father of our nation. and this spirit has been the guiding concern of India while striding on its path to development now as expressed by our Prime Minister. Indeed, humanity has truly progressed only when it has collectively risen to its obligation to the world and responsibility to the future.

On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at an historic UN Summit — officially came into force.  The Agenda is a culmination of many years of negotiation and was endorsed by all 193 membernations of the General Assembly, both developed and developing—and applies to all countries. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon noted that “the new agenda is a promise by leaders to all people everywhere. It is an agenda for people, to end poverty in all of its forms—an agenda for the planet, our common home.” The SDGs comprise an ambitious 17 goals. Over the next fifteen years, with these new Goals that universally apply to all, countries will mobilize efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring that no one is left behind.

The SDGs consist of 17 goals and a total of 169 constituent targets within these goals. The SDGs, also known as Global Goals, build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and aim to go further to end all forms of poverty. The new Goals are unique in that they call for action by all countries, poor, rich and middle-income to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and addresses a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.

While the SDGs are not legally binding, governments are expected to take ownership and establish national frameworks for the achievement of the 17 Goals.  Countries have the primary responsibility for follow-up and review of the progress made in implementing the Goals, which will require quality, accessible and timely data collection. Regional follow-up and review will be based on national-level analyses and contribute to follow-up and review at the global level.

Objective of the study:
This paper is an attempt to trace the lofty development goals of the SDG’s juxtaposed against the MDG’s while delineating, the potential significance of the dynamic social relationships between various stakeholders augmented by the diverse roles played by social workers.

Rationale:
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which began life at the turn of the century, were the focus of attention among people for different reasons like: A review of the past to measure the progress and to think about the future and how to traverse the remaining distance. The conjuncture is obviously important at a time for an evaluation of progress with respect to the objectives set out in the MDGs.

There were three dimensions to the significance of the MDGs:
1. It was an explicit recognition of the reality that a large proportion of people in the world were deprived and poor. 
2. It was a statement of good intentions that sought a time-bound reduction in poverty to improve the living conditions of those deprived and excluded. 
3. It was an attempt to place this persistent problem, until then a largely national concern, on the development agenda for international cooperation. 

Taken together, these MDG attributes introduced a mechanism, even if implicit, to monitor progress in the pursuit of stated objectives. In fact, some targets were specified in quantitative terms with respect to stipulated time horizons. Thus, in principle, national governments could be held accountable by their people, just as the international community could be held accountable by national governments.

There is broad agreement that, while the MDGs provided a focal point for governments – a framework around which they could develop policies and overseas aid programmes designed to end poverty and improve the lives of poor people – as well as a rallying point for NGOs to hold them to account, they were too narrow.
The eight MDGs – reduce poverty and hunger; achieve universal education; promote gender equality; reduce child and maternal deaths; combat HIV, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; develop global partnerships – failed to consider the root causes of poverty and overlooked gender inequality as well as the holistic nature of development. The goals made no mention of human rights and did not specifically address economic development. While the MDGs, in theory, applied to all countries, in reality they were considered targets for poor countries to achieve, with finance from wealthy states. 

The not so stellar performance of the MDG’s have paved the way for the more inclusive SDG’s. an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the MDG framework viwed through the lens of experience shows some of the potential challenges related to:

(1) Limitations in the MDG development process.
(2) Limitations in the MDG structure.
(3) Limitations in the MDG content.
(4) Limitations in the MDG implementation and enforcement.

A brief review of literature point out to the fact that multiple authors call the goals ‘overambitious’ or ‘unrealistic’ and believe the MDGs ignore the limited local capacities, particularly missing governance capabilities (Mishra, 2004; Oya, 2011). In contrast, Barnes and Brown (2011) call the MDGs ‘unambitious when viewed against the sheer volume of unmet basic human needs’. For Langford (2010), global goals for low- and middle-income countries fall short because they are too ambitious for some countries and not challenging enough for other countries.

Creating a list of goals – a ‘shopping-list approach’ – risks the omission of important issues and underinvestment in other key areas of development (Keyzer& Van Wesenbeeck, 2006). Hayman (2007) argues that the limited list of MDGs makes it easy for donors to justify policies exclusively focused on MDG targets. The MDGs represent a ‘Faustian bargain’ because a consensus was achieved only by ‘major sacrifice’ (Gore, 2010). Saith (2006) adds that by concentrating largely on developing countries, the MDG framework serves to ‘ghettoize the problem of development and locates it firmly in the third world’. Using the goals and targets as country-specific goals, according to AbouZahr and Boerma (2010), gives too little consideration to national baselines, contexts and implementation capacities.

Limitations of the study:
This study must be interpreted as a foundational exercise in assessment of SDG’s. This study has two important limitations, as described below. It is hoped that further studies will build on the methodologies presented here to provide more precise analysis. Firstly, the study does not account for all possible development pathways that can be chosen in the development venture; Secondly, the target level as well as the goal level is extremely large in scope and have not been exhaustively researched or understood in this study. 

Contemplations for the future:
There is now a remarkable convergence of vision underlying the priorities for the proposed SDGs and those of the new Government in India. Building on the MDGs, the SDGs propose to end poverty and deprivation in all forms, leaving no one behind, while making development economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. 

The Government of India has also adopted the principle of SabkaSath, SabkaVikas (“Together with All, Development for All”), and stated that the “first claim on development belongs to the poor.” More than ever before, the Government is calling for improved sanitation, health, education, financial inclusion, security and dignity of all, especially women. Government is simultaneously prioritizing improving environmental development with respect to water, air, soil and the biosphere by treating the challenge of climate change adaptation as an opportunity rather than a problem. In less than nine months since taking office, the Government has announced a variety of measures to accelerate the process of growth with equity and sustainability and shown its eagerness to learn from success stories in these areas in India and abroad. Yet a complete blueprint of how to achieve these goals in a time-bound fashion is still a work in progress.

The SDG proposals will ensure momentum generated by MDGs is carried through to 2030 to end deprivations. SDGs include four sets of challenges for India namely;

(i) completing the unfinished MDG agenda with a higher level of ambition of ending – not just reducing all deprivations;

(ii) strengthening critical development drivers such as economic growth, industrialization, employment creation and reduction of inequality within and between countries, basic infrastructure including energy, and governance and institutions, without which many social and environmental objectives would not be easy to reach; 

(iii) strengthening the sustainability dimension to address new and emerging challenges such as deteriorating environment, unsustainable consumption and production patterns that are rapidly depleting natural resources, the need to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change, and develop livable urban areas; and 

(iv) accessing the means of implementation including transfer of advanced sustainable technologies from developed countries and harnessing India’s frugal engineering capabilities for pursuing low carbon development pathways.

The goal of sustainable development cannot be achieved globally without India. !is increased convergence in development priorities provides a basis for an enhanced partnership between the United Nations and India as the country develops. Proposed SDGs have also set a higher standard, which all Indians can recognize as an opportunity to finally end the crippling deprivations much of the country’s population has long-suffered from.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explicitly recognises volunteer groups as stakeholders to achieve the 17 SDGs. This has strongly emerged from an extensive consultation process led by the United Nations, which has involved over eight million people, and was summarized as follows by the UN Secretary-General in his Synthesis Report on the post-2015 Agenda, The Road to Dignity by 2030:

As we seek to build capacities and to help the new agenda to take root, volunteerism can be another powerful and cross-cutting means of implementation. Volunteerism can help to expand and mobilize constituencies, and to engage people in national planning and implementation for the Sustainable Development Goals. And volunteer groups can help to localize the new agenda by providing new spaces of interaction between governments and people for concrete and scalable actions.

Role of Social Worker Ineffective Implementation of the SDG’s: The National Context:
The role of social workers can’t be emphasised enough in the development saga. The actions they take strengthens civic engagement, safeguards social inclusion, deepens solidarity and solidifies ownership of development results. The UN also recognizes the ripple effect of such actions. It inspires others and advances the transformations required for the SDGs to take root in communities.

Voices around the world are demanding leadership on poverty, inequality and climate change. To turn these demands into actions, world leaders gathered on 25 September, 2015, at the United Nations in New York to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2030 Agenda comprises 17  new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will guide policy and funding for the next 15 years, beginning with a historic pledge to end poverty, Everywhere, Permanently.

However, in India, the discussion on pathways to achieve the goals have, over the past year, become the domain of central- and state-level bureaucrats who, perhaps because of competing priorities, have shown little ability and inclination to challenge the status quo, devise new partnerships and generate solutions. Irrespective of our opinion of the calibre of elected leaders in India, it is they who know the pulse of the people, it is they who are accountable and have the ability to see challenges and solutions beyond silos. If the SDGs are likely to drive India’s national and state planning and development processes till 2030, are our legislators prepared and willing to wrest centrestage, to lead from the front and take charge of the show on behalf of the people of India?

The role of NGO’s and social workers in particular is very significant in this context. To make the policies and programmes work at the grass root level and to reach those whom it is intended for becomes possible only when the social workers intervene. NGO’s are both the agents of change and the answer to many of the tough issues faced by the development agencies. 

Many of the Sustainable Development Goals call for long-term attitude and behaviour changes. Social workers facilitate changes in mindsets by raising awareness or championing those changes and inspiring others.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development explicitly recognises volunteer groups as stakeholders to achieve the 17 SDGs. They emphasise ‘Volunteerism as a vehicle for sustainable development’. This is an important fact that has strongly emerged from an extensive consultation process led by the United Nations, which has involved over eight million people, and was summarized as follows by the UN Secretary-General in his Synthesis Report on the post-2015 Agenda, The Road to Dignity by 2030:

As we seek to build capacities and to help the new agenda to take root, volunteerism can be another powerful and cross-cutting means of implementation. Volunteerism can help to expand and mobilize constituencies, and to engage people in national planning and implementation for the Sustainable Development Goals. And volunteer groups can help to localize the new agenda by providing new spaces of interaction between governments and people for concrete and scalable actions.

Volunteerism and Social workers strengthens civic engagement, safeguards social inclusion, deepens solidarity and solidifies ownership of development results.

It simply is not possible to attain the SDGs without a wide range of people engaged at all stages, at all levels, at all times. Volunteerism is a powerful means for bringing more people into the fold. Volunteerism and Social workers are already expanding the space in which we achieve the future we want by engaging greater numbers of people in local and national planning and action for achieving the 2030 Agenda.

Putting the Goal-wise roles in Perspective
By its very nature, volunteerism is an important vehicle for sustainable development. Volunteerism lets people and communities participate in their own growth. Through volunteering, citizens build their resilience, enhance their knowledge base and gain a sense of responsibility for their own community. Social cohesion and trust is strengthened through individual and collective volunteer action, leading to sustainable outcomes for people, by people.

Volunteerism strengthens civic engagement, safeguards social inclusion, deepens solidarity and solidifies ownership of development results. Importantly, volunteering has a ripple effect. It inspires others and advances the transformations required for the SDGs to take root in communities. 

Social workers can provide technical support and enhance capacity in all thematic goal areas. They deliver basic services, help transfer skills and foster exchanges of good practices, and add valuable international and local expertise through domestic, South-South, South-North and North-South exchanges. Corporate Social workers can play a particular role in this regard, by making their expertise available to public institutions as well as to fragile communities.

Social workers help leave no one behind by reaching out to people, including those marginalized or difficult to reach, to bring people’s voices and knowledge into collective actions. This is crucial to build ownership and localize the SDGs. Volunteer organizations can serve as brokers of engagement, connecting governmental strategies and initiatives with complementary, yet essential, community voluntary action.

Many of the SDGs call for long-term attitude and behaviour changes - for example, in the way we live together or in the way we consume. Social workers facilitate changes in mind sets by raising awareness or championing those changes and inspiring others.

Finally, the SDGs require a “data revolution” to collect and analyse disaggregated data to monitor progress. Social workers can help measure progress on SDG implementation by collecting data, providing expertise and supporting participatory forms of planning and monitoring. Volunteerism, as a form of civic engagement, is a way to strengthen state-citizen accountability mechanisms for the coming decades.

NGO’s provide a reliable bridge between the different stakeholders in the development paradigm. What’s really important is the reflexive learning capacity that a social worker achieves by working with the people at the grassroot level. The emerging relationship between the policy makers and the masses brought about by the mediation of the social worker epitomises the fundamental ongoing changes. Its potential significance in reshaping the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders must be taken cognisance of.

The Goals of the SDG’s and the role of social workers are explored below:
1) End poverty in all its forms everywhere:  Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere implies attention to both completely eliminating extreme poverty while attending to other key socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental dimensions of poverty, and monitoring progress in social protection and inequality. The intricate nature of poverty with various social, economic and environmental components makes an independent assessment of this goal difficult. It requires action on all fronts of water, energy, food security, livelihoods creation, securing the health of natural resources on which the livelihoods of people depend, reducing vulnerabilities, ensuring equity and a just governance framework. These are components of the targets in the other SDGs.

It is therefore clear that poverty eradication will mean pursuing three separate but interdependent objectives: tackling chronic poverty, stopping impoverishment, and sustaining poverty escapes. While social assistance and basic needs fulfilment schemes will help in furnishing the first two of the objectives, inclusive economic growth models bought to the fore by the aid of social workers will allow opportunities for sustaining poverty escapes and thus become an essential component of poverty eradication.

2) End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture: Food security is influenced by a number of factors, including those that determine food availability—domestic food production and the capacity to import food—as well as determinants of food access, including the distribution of food among various segments of the population.

Continuous shrinking of land for agriculture due to land demand for industries, infrastructure and cities may further increase the costs of food security. Climate change may influence the availability of various resources for agriculture, further increasing the costs. Transition to sustainable agriculture systems is also likely to increase the food subsidy bill of the government due to a probable dip in the food production during the transition period.

Technological innovations are the backbone of productive and resilient farms, fisheries and livestock operations and a safe, wholesome food supply. They contribute to improvements in the quality of seeds, animal stock and inputs, laboursaving devices, effective production and conservation practices, reduction of postharvest losses, efficient price discovery mechanisms and control of pests, diseases and contamination. Access to these innovations will be essential if farmers and producers along the value chain are to meet the rising global demand for agriculture in the face of climate change. Social workers intervention in this area by providing a knowledge transfer channel will be extremely helpful.

3) Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages: this goal  includes health and well-being for all, which depends on health status of the population, health infrastructure, access to health insurance, etc. It also includes targets that look at preventing and reducing death by road accidents and chemical pollution. For India to achieve this goal, it will have to reach the value of around 0.9 for its Health Index, which includes health status of population, quality of healthcare institutions and financial instruments for access to healthcare (insurance, etc.).

4) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all:  

Goal 4 calls for universal access to all levels of education and skill development, starting from pre-primary education, early childhood care and development, primary and secondary education, all the way to tertiary education, and skill development. 

5) Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls: 

The goal calls for ending achieving gender equality by ending all forms of discrimination against women, and empowering women in all spheres of life. In India, discriminatory attitudes towards women have existed for many generations. This is visible in a multitude of indicators: India’s child (aged 0-6) sex ratio as of 2011 is 914 females per 1000 males, declining from 927 in 2001 (Times of India, 2011). Although literacy rates are increasing, women still lag behind men; the female literacy rate as of 2011 is only 65.46per cent, compared to 82.14per cent for males. No country in the world has achieved complete gender equality yet, but some countries are getting close. Social attitudes and mindsets discriminate against women in a variety of contexts.
The Gender Gap Index of India is comparable to countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania. This index includes indicator for economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment of women.

Clearly, India and the rest of the world have a long way to go before it can achieve gender equality. It would be extremely incorrect to assume that gender equality can be achieved by simply allocating more public funds for women, as social change requires much, much more than just finance. At a fundamental level, it requires a change in attitudes and mindsets of people and the political will to empower women, among countless other factors.

The sustainable development goal on gender is a cross-cutting goal that will influence and be influenced by the achievement or non-achievement of most of the other sustainable development goals. Gender equality is inextricably linked to the provision of equal opportunities in and access to education, employment, healthcare, food security, energy, water, sanitation and political empowerment. Hence the role of social workers is even more significant in this regard.

6) Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all: Ensuring water security (Goal 6) for domestic, agriculture and industry applications and sustainable management of our rivers and water bodies in order to retain the ecological flows is another huge task. 

Goal 6 deals with all aspects of water availability, access and use. The targets within this goal are closely linked to one another and also to other goals. For instance, universal provision of drinking water and sanitation coverage can only be achieved if existing water bodies are sustainably used and the quality of water in these bodies is kept at an acceptable standard. Maintenance of water quality is in turn dependent on the way industry, agriculture and other sectors use and dispose of water. Industrial effluents and sewage are major sources of water pollution, but are also consequences of uncontrolled industrialisation and urbanisation. Goals 9 and 11  must address these concerns.

7) Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all:

For ensuring access to energy in the Business As Usual (BAU) scenario, that is, a fossil fuel dominant energy mix, India would require finances of the order of INR 28 lakh crores for enhancing production capacity alone, and not including other related costs. India may opt for two other scenarios. If India moderately increases the share of renewable energy and reduces the fossil fuel component from the current 60 per cent to 50 per cent, the financial requirement increases to INR 34 lakh crores. India may also opt for an energy mix with net-zero emissions by 2050, for which by 2030 it must reduce the fossil fuel energy component further from 50 per cent to 27 per cent, which entails a financial requirement of INR 42.5 lakh crores (USD 675 billion).

8) Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all: 

India registered a GDP growth rate of 7.17 per cent in 2014 over the previous year (Statistica). Prospects in terms of the growth rate look promising; the World Bank has predicted a growth rate of 8 per cent for India by 2017 (Press Trust of India, 2015). 

Calls for a sustained per capita economic growth at a level that is appropriate given national circumstances. Economic growth rate is controlled by a large number of factors not limited to the business cycle, investment, demographic changes, income equality, productivity of the workforce etc. Each of these factors is in turn dependent on other factors. Productivity of the workforce is dependent on the health, education and level of skills of the workforce as well as technology and the input mix used in production. Investment is dependent on factors such as political institutions, policy environment, ease of access to credit, ease of doing business and an endless list of other things. Economic growth also depends on fiscal and monetary policies of the government, as well as international trade.

For a sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, India will require to enhance its MSME sector and other labour intensive sectors. It would require growth strategies that generate employment opportunities for its youth. In addition to this, for India to ensure sustainable economic growth it needs to look at costs of resource efficiency and promoting sustainable production systems.

9) Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation: 

Infrastructure development has always been on the top of the agenda for India, considering the current global economic dynamics as well as domestic growth imperatives. Infrastructure spending is likely to have a positive spiral effect to the GDP growth and is likely to be one of the main levers to unleash India’s economic growth potential.

Infrastructure projects are complex, capital intensive, and have long gestation periods that involve multiple and often unique risks to project financiers. Due to its non-recourse or limited recourse financing characteristic (i.e., lenders can only be repaid from the revenues generated by the project), and the scale and complexity, infrastructure financing requires a complex and varied mix of financial and contractual arrangements amongst multiple parties including the project sponsors, commercial banks, domestic and international financial institutions, and government agencies.

10) Reduce inequality within and among countries: 

Inequality is multi-faceted in nature. There is inequality in income; but there is also inequality in educational attainment, health status, employment, access to food, access to water, access to social security and in general access to opportunities and choices. These different aspects of inequality are interlinked; improved access to water and sanitation may help reduce inequality in health outcomes, improved educational attainment may help people find better jobs and reduce the inequality in employment and incomes, and so on. Therefore the achievement of Goal 10 will be closely linked to the achievement of all other goals.

People’s ability to meet their needs for food (Goal 2), remain healthy (Goal 3), acquire education (Goal 4), access clean water and sanitation (Goal 6), meet their energy needs (Goal 7) and have opportunities for productive, decent work (Goal 8) are closely linked to their economic, social and political status in society and therefore are determinants of and determined by inequality. If these goals are taken care of, then, the outcome would result in the elimination of inequalities.

11) Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable: 

Urbanisation in India has been on the rise. Population residing in urban areas in India, according to 1901 census, was 11.4 per cent. This count increased to 28.53 per cent according to 2001 census, and crossing 30 per cent as per 2011 census, standing at 31.16 per cent. People migrate to cities in the hopes of finding better economic opportunities, access to a larger range of public amenities and services, and prospects of a better life than in rural areas. Unfortunately, a large section of the population is marginalised, resorting to dwelling in slums without access to basic amenities such as clean water, sanitation and proper housing. 

Congestion in Indian cities is clearly visible, particularly in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai and Delhi. This necessitates proper urban planning with provisions for necessary urban infrastructure and services, including urban water supply, urban transport, sewage, solid waste management, roads, traffic control, maintenance of public spaces etc.

This includes housing for all, development and planning of cities, efficient transport systems, public spaces and other components of urban infrastructure costs. 

12) Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns:

Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) is a pre-requisite for the world’s development to remain within the safe limits of growth and planetary boundaries. It is fundamental in order to achieve sustainable development. 

According to the statistics from Planning Commission Report (Planning Commission, GoI, 2014)], India emitted 1,728 million tonnes CO2 equivalent of GHGs, making it the sixth largest emitter in the world. India is, however, conscious of its global responsibility, and in December 2009, it announced that it would reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 20 to 25 per cent, from the 2005 levels, by the year 2020. This voluntary commitment, which India has made to the international community, shows India’s resolve to ensure that its growth process is sustainable and based on low carbon principles.

13) Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (taking note of agreements made by the UNFCCC forum): 

This goal deals with policy and development planning in alignment with climate change action. India is highly vulnerable to climate change with an extensive coastline and the massive glaciers that serve as life sources, and cap the country. The country has already faced frequent disasters such as cyclones on the east coast of Odisha, floods in Jammu & Kashmir and drought in Central India. The diverse nature of disasters requires varied capacity and responses.

India has prepared a comprehensive National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCC) with a view to achieve sustainable development with a focus on climate change. The successful achievent of this goal is dependent on how well these plans are implemented and it is here that the role of the social worker becomes significant. 

14) Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development: 

India has an existing network of 700 protected areas (ENVIS Centre on Wildlife & Protected Areas, 2015). However, since the average size of the protected areas in India is small, the percentage of the country’s land area covered through this network is only 5.06 per cent.

Target 11 of the Aichi Targets for Biodiversity Conservation states, “By 2020, at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes and seascapes” (CBD, 2010). For India to achieve this target as well as corresponding SDG goals, there are 2 kinds of costs: direct administrative costs and opportunity costs of protection.

Thus, social workers should work to expand India’s protected areas network and extend the coverage also.

15) Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss: Both Goals 14 and 15 of the proposed SDGs contain within them a hint at a strategy that India is familiar with, for conserving biodiversity. Simply put, this is a strategy that is pursued through the creation, expansion and consolidation of a protected areas network that has resulted in remarkable achievements of conserving species as well as ecosystems in India. Although the protected areas network is a remarkable achievement for a developing country like India that has many other competing and urgent priorities, additional efforts need to be made to expand the network in order to conform to not only SDGs but also terms agreed upon under the Convention on Biological Diversity. The social workers can pitch in to help in these efforts by sensitizing people.

16) Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels: Goal 16 is an important goal for harmonious co-existence of individuals in a democratic society. It is hoped that further studies will assess the reforms or additional systems needed to strengthen India’s institutions, peace and inclusiveness.

17) Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development:Goal 17 provides the means of implementation of other SDGs. Some of the targets under Goal 17 call for developed countries to assist developing and least developed countries through transfers of finance, technology, capacity building support, etc. Other targets pertain to strengthening the means of implementation within each country.

This can be achieved by enhancing the global partnership for sustainable development complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technologies and financial resources to support the achievement of sustainable development goals in all countries, particularly developing countries 

Encouraging and promoting effective public, public-private, and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships is yet another way to achieve the set goals.

Conclusion:
The implementation of SDGs needs every country to judiciously prioritise, and adaptthe goals and targets in accordance with local challenges, capacities and resources available. That said, experts continue to quarrel about certain aspects of the SDGs — yes, they aren’t perfect. Some worry that the SDGs continue to be a sell-out to the concept of growth as the fulcrum for development. Others are concerned about the subliminal role of the private sector written into the fine print. Objects, people and places of inherent value aren’t ever perfect. They are what we make of them through application. The SDGs reflect the complexity of the world today and in the future.. It doesn’t present a utopian leap into the ideal, but incremental changes with the institutions, systems, tools and people among whom we inhabit. It is in this quest that the role of a social worker becomes strikingly significant.

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Dr. Shashidhar Channappa
Head, Department of Social work, The oxford college of Arts, Bengaluru