UN's Sustainable Development needs to be a lot more to stay legitimate and effective

Sustainable Development as a global goal, which is at the front of the United Nations' efforts for human progress, is today an elusive horizon for the whole world, and particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Changing global power imbalances and new crises have slowed or reversed such progress in recent years. 

At the same time, a number of competing development paradigms have been (re)born and/or gained strength, not only in academia but in more aware and mobilized societies across the world. Increased pluralism at a global scale, along with strong movements away from multilateralism and into nationalism or regionalism by a number of powerful countries and other international actors, have brought more debate and policy alternatives and have made international coordination efforts harder than ever.

The UN remains a recognized articulator of ideas and possibilities of action and a legitimate convener to all kinds of social actors. However, the meager progress and reversals in well-being large numbers of people have experienced in many countries, have weakened UN's perceived effectiveness.

In that sense, Sustainable Development (both as a goal and a multi-discipline area) needs to become a lot more of an open, dialogical, proactively pluralistic process where dissent and heterodoxy become the norm rather than the exception. It also needs to make room for, and learn from knowledge and practice arising from the creativity spurred by times of both prosperity and crisis in populations whose knowledge continues to be undervalued by epistemic communities traditionally considered as the ultimate experts on development matters.

Sustainable Development needs to be a process of open and proactive listening, sharing, acknowledging and self-transforming for it to strengthen its own legitimacy, and to be an effective tool for human progress at the UN.