Development beyond 2030: more collaboration, less competition?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represented a key landmark in collaboration and shared agenda-setting to address global challenges across scales and geographies. However, despite initial optimism that measurable goals would support accountability and transparency in development, progress towards realising goals has been mixed. Global development agendas increasingly face challenges from the intensification of climate change, the return of populism and ethnonationalism, and a deepening of inequalities at intra- and inter-national scales.

This article interrogates the priorities that must inform a critical post-SDG development agenda. To think towards this, we first explore three questions of the development agenda: 1) can development be sustainable? 2) Can development be delivered through markets? And 3) can development be ‘global’? To address these tensions and take a first step towards a more critical post-2030 agenda, we call for a focus on spatialities, multiplicities and historicities of development.