In September 2015, leaders from around the world gathered in New York at the United Nations General Assembly and committed to an ambitious global agenda, setting forth seventeen “Sustainable Development Goals”, or SDGs, to be achieved by 2030. These goals, if accomplished, would mark incredible feats of human history. Unfortunately, the most recent report from the UN Economic and Social Council shows that the world is not on track to meet these targets by the 2030 deadline. This episode of the Oxford Policy Pod will dive into the progress and delays on the SDGs, and understand what it will take to reach these goals. We also explore how policymakers are using these voluntary international commitments to guide and prioritize work in practice, specifically in the context of developing urban areas.
Edward Mishaud, is a Senior Advisor and current acting Director with the SDG Lab at UN Geneva. He has over 15 years of expertise across policy, donor relations, governance, advocacy, and communications, and has worked with several UN and other international organizations, such as the UN Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the Joint UN Programme on HIV and the Green Climate Fund.
Dr. Sylvia Croese is an urban sociologist who is a Senior Researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand and Research Associate with the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has conducted extensive research on urban planning, politics and governance through the lens of housing, land, urban infrastructure and mobility, with a particular focus on the localization of global urban development goals in African cities. She has published widely on this work in major international journals, as well as three co-edited books: Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities (African Minds, 2021), Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa: Knowledge Co-production from the South (Routledge, 2021) and Localizing the Sustainable Development Goals in African cities (Springer, in press). Currently, her research examines the transcalar workings of developmental policy circuits as part of the ERC funded comparative research project Making Africa Urban: the transcalar politics of large-scale urban development.
This episode was produced and hosted by Livey Beha, with support from Read Leask. Season 4 of the Oxford Policy Pod is executive produced by Livey Beha and Read Leask.
To learn more about the Sustainable Development Goals, check out:
