How are we to deal with out of control global issues? Amazingly, the nations have unanimously agreed to an awesome package of Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations SDGs, as scheduled by 2030 (along with earlier UN goals) will get us on the right track. Here is a pdf with the full list of 17 SDGs, 169 targets and 230 numerical indicators to measure progress.
The UN SDGs are designed to be implemented nation by nation as well as globally, with statistics to be developed to track national results. It is no surprise that there is a movement to do the same city by city. The Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments (UCLG) has created a list of targets and indicators for the SDGs that are are appropriate at the city level. The UCLG is a partnership of major global institutions, including major UN agencies such as the UNDP, UNESCO, UN Women and a number of others.
The SDGs were designed to be implemented as a package rather than one by one. That is still true when we bring them down to the local level. Definite goals with corresponding measurable outcomes! That is the first two steps of the collective impact (CI) formula. Please see the earlier Collective Impact article posted here on Voices of Humanity. This current article presupposes you have read the earlier piece.
A bottom-up network from local to national to global of collective impact SDG projects would seem necessary to reach the goals by 2030. Collective impact (CI) is designed for local implementation, so it makes sense to use the CI process locally to bring together the many partners needed to implement the SDGs. Voices of Humanity (VoH) will be hugely useful in each locality as one of the methods to implement “continuous communication” - the fourth of the five requirements for a successful collective impact project. At the same time, Voices of Humanity technology will make it feasible to bring all the CI projects together nationally and globally without losing the flexibility needed to work locally. Again, please see the earlier article.
The Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments (UCLG) would seem the logical choice as the top-down backbone for the bottom-up network. National level backbones would inevitably vary in structure nation to nation. But what about the city level backbones? With support from UN Women and from local women’s organizations, the women’s movement could do itself and the world a huge favor by being the startup backbone for city level SDG collective impact projects everywhere. Very likely the local backbones would evolve with local governments taking on a greater role, but by being there from the beginning, the women’s organizations would be sure that the gender equality goals of SDG 5 would not get lost in the process.
Voices of Humanity will provide flexibility with its enabling of across-the-silos communication on the issue front and intersectional communication on the popular front. Given that at the national and global levels top-down controls will be implemented, the bottom-up collective capability of Voices of Humanity is crucial to build the movement for human unity needed to transcend the nations. In a nuclear armed world, the trust and cooperation required to achieve the SDGs is clearly not there. Voices of Humanity can bring in general-and-complete disarmament along with nuclear disarmament, so the bottom up network can encompass all the goals of the UN, not just the SDGs.
San Francisco, where the UN Charter was signed in June of 1945, would be a great place to start!
#un_goals #sdgs #voh
