Home
Global and development-related research
Research group

The Global Sustainable Development Group

The Global Sustainable Development Group (GSDG) focuses on the 17 goals adopted by the UN in 2015 as global goals for development, not only goals for developing countries as the previous MDGs.

Sustanable development
Photo:
Colourbox

Main content

The group is in particular focusing on the goals that activate the need for knowledge about relations between economics and politics.

Goal 1 asks us to get rid of poverty. Goal 2 tells us to get rid of hunger and to secure nutrition and food through sustainable agriculture. Goal 7, on the energy shift, and most explicitly for our topic, goal 8, which asks us to secure inclusive economic growth leading to full and real participation in the working life, with decent work for all.

This goal 8 is closely linked to goal 9, which wants us to secure industrialization and an infrastructure that makes this possible by fostering innovations. Important are also goal 12, that asks for change both in production and consumption patterns, and 14 and 15 which asks for an economy that utilizes resources on land and in the seas in a sustainable manner.

But most importantly for this research group is goal 13, which asks the political economy to contribute to urgent actions to combat climate change. Thus, we also link up to the Paris Agreement of 12th of December 2015 which outlines the now global agreement on a “Framework convention on climate change” (FCCC/CP/2015/l.)/Rev.1).

Towards a new global political economy

Under the “sub-title” of the group: “Towards a new global political economy” we build in particular on  theoretical tradition on political economy developed within and in relation to the marginalized countries of this world.

Since the launch of the annual UNDP Human Development Report, new literature with the political economy perspective from the least developed countries has gained size and quality. As it feeds into the Human Development Report, it challenges many of the established truisms of orthodox (western) political economy. This development has also influenced the SDGs.

The political economy implicit in the 17 goals expects that we will and must change our consumption, production, how we divide work between ourselves, and how we make sure the majority have access to the working life. For these expectations to be more than rhetoric, we need a dramatic transformation in how politics and the economy interact.

Not only is a new political economy needed to enable us to reduce poverty, but linked to this, also transform the kind of energy consumptions that now threatens all life.  In other words: A new political economy needs to secure that human (social and economic ) rights are taken into consideration by economic actors and economic policies at the same time as it transforms its energy base, way of producing and ways of influencing consumption.

Thus the research of the group takes part in the discussion about how politics may reform the economy to both secure work for all, human work conditions, transform consumption, change its energy base towards renewables, secure an equal distribution of the burdens of the coming transitions, and thus in this shift, get rid of poverty.