Real Goals to Empower the Developing World Alternatives to the U.N.'s Agenda for Sustainable Development

The United Nations is soon due to replace its ambitious Millennium Development Goals with a new set of far more extensive and even more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals. However, the U.N.'s approach suffers from some major flaws. Instead of setting targets, the world should adopt strategies that have proven to deliver a healthier, greener, and more prosperous planet — strategies that also improve the resiliency of communities to whatever nature throws at them.The U.N.'s approach is flawed because it focuses on simply announcing a slew of targets that are unlikely to prove achievable, especially as there are tradeoffs involved in meeting some targets over others.Moreover, the U.N.'s emphasis on “sustainability,” as generally defined among development bureaucrats and NGOs, imposes significant burdens on developing countries' freedom and ability to achieve the rapid increases in human welfare that were the target of the original Millennium goals.The U.N. also ignores the lesson of the most successful developing economies. For instance, Hong Kong and Singapore followed a proven path to prosperity that is centered on principles that have significantly increased the resiliency of their societies.We therefore recommend five realistic goals that developing world economies should pursue