What’s in an SDG?

In an effort to more deeply understand the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), over the next few months, the About Sustainability… podcast will zoom in on each of them in turn. We will invite experts to join us and parse out more about an individual goal, where we are in terms of achieving it, and the challenges it presents. We will also discuss how each goal, including those that are not environmentally oriented, is linked to environmental sustainability.

In the first of these SDG-focused episodes, André and Erin spoke to Atsushi Watabe (who we call “Watabe-san” at the office) and Dwayne Appleby, two IGES experts who have studied and written about SDG1, on ending all forms of poverty everywhere. 

We covered what is meant by “extreme poverty” and “relative poverty”; which aspects of poverty have been left out or not explicitly addressed in SDG1; the effects of poverty alleviation on the environment; to what extent we are making progress toward alleviating poverty (and how reliable the figures are); how poverty and inequality or inequity are linked; the possible drivers of poverty; and potential solutions.

Related links:

• UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ SDG 1 page
• Sustainable Ways of Living Issue Brief Series (Atsushi Watabe)
• One Planet Network Sustainable Lifestyles and Education Programme

SDG1 reading list:

• Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (Dambisa Moyo)
• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo)
  • For some discussion of the drivers of poverty and exploring new pathways forward
• Population and Development: The Demographic Transition (Tim Dyson)
  • For the intersection of population/health and poverty
• State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (Atul Kohli)
  • For a comparative discussion of the challenges and successes of activist governments in reducing poverty
• Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Robert Wade)
  • For a political economy take on activist states in the context of development in East  Asia
• Development as Freedom (Amartya Sen)
  • For a well-summarised discussion of capability and poverty
• Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories 2nd Edition (Ozay Mehmet)
  • A view of how poverty is invented in the development process
• Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice (Pathways to Sustainability) 1st Edition (Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones, and Andy Stirling)
  • An exploration of contesting and dynamic framings of development, security, poverty, etc. along with socioeconomic changes

About our guests:

Atsushi Watabe is Programme Director of the Sustainable Consumption and Production unit at IGES. He has a background in the sociology of rural development, population movement, and migration in Southeast Asia.

"About Sustainability..." is a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), an environmental policy think-tank based in Hayama, Japan. IGES experts are concerned with environmental and sustainability challenges. Everything shared on the podcast will be off-the-cuff discussion, and any viewpoints expressed are those held by the speaker at the time of recording. They are not necessarily official IGES positions.