Framing policies to achieve sustainable development goals
Polin Kumar Saha
For achieving sustainability, all countries have now been asked for setting their own policies under the outlines of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Generally, these goals still perform at the premature stage and we should take action in respect to the specific development sectors of a country. So, to attain the best outcome of the SDG goals, we need to have unique policies for sustainable development considering many cross cutting policies which are already adopted in our different development sectors. Since 1992, Bangladesh has attempted its political commitment to practice on sustainability policies in 23 development sectors (e.g. agriculture, environment, health, education, etc). But in reality, these sectoral policies are only for the related development of our environmental issues.
This is just one dimension among the three pillars of sustainable development including a balanced development of social, economic and environmental issues of a country. Even, we have National Economic Council (NEC) of Bangladesh government who has the supreme power to reject or accept any project that come under review for its prospective implementation in the country. This type of review of a project should be based on the countrys context to achieve sustainability. But, we will be able to give numerous examples on the implemented project outcome that our evaluation and monitoring processes of the development are not on the right track for achieving countrys sustainable development.
In making the new policies towards achieving SDGs by 2030, the climate agreement of COP21 (2015 climate conference in Paris) marks the biggest global initiative towards combating sustainable development. This agreement sends us a powerful message that the world really starts thinking about our future existence on earth with the commitment of low-carbon emission. Over the last 20 years, the important negotiation has been passed out by the United Nations, and finally reached to an agreement in COP21 to reduce the global temperature under one umbrella.
Since the agreement of COP21 is a global force for our agenda of SDGs, we have commenced a strategy for achieving our sustainable development. The settings of SDGs can be planned easily now with the help of development directions specified in this climate agreement. We got a commitment from the developed countries as they must support the developing countries, which is the most important direction of this agreement. This process of support may explore an opportunity to the international community for working together across practices of mutual understanding among different countries. It seems that the agreement is emphasizing the support required to be accomplished from the developed countries to developing countries. But the burning question is how this support of the developed countries can be performed as the additives of our policies for achieving sustainable development, especially for the developing countries.
The international negotiations such as COP21 agreement is primarily assumed to maintain the quality of environmental standards in our industrial production where the companies are bound legally to adopt these climate policies into their own development phase for achieving sustainability. It has already been experimented globally - without reducing global temperature our future existence on earth is not possible; therefore, the climate issue must influence our all policies for movement towards sustainable development. But, due to lack of integrated policy framework in our institutional format, the existing policies fail to notice sustainable development globally, especially in developing countries. For example, innovation policy of an industry needs to be considered through different policies related to product growth, human needs, fuel, electricity, water, raw materials, technologies, and so on; therefore companies should first try how to adopt these policies in the best possible ways to achieve sustainable innovation.
However, sustainable development discovers many factors on the ways to achieve it and the process must be within the sustainability framework. This framework may organize an integrated platform in lieu with all the existing policies collectively which are exposed to our socio-ecological and economic development policies. We argue that we must have the sector-wise Industrial policies to monitor the sector-wise development; but practically, an integrated sustainable development policy is the present demand through which we can firmly establish the specific indicators for continuous improvement and which may determine the level of satisfaction of our journey towards SDGs. On the other hand, a strong framework could perform as the self motivated driver in a country where a discourse platform would be created to any citizen and thus we would be able to participate for stepping the strategy and actions for each of 17 SDGs.
Here, we can design a framework that has five levels for organizing our thoughts and information in the process of sustainable development on a specific issue, sector, or a goal of our SDGs. Thus, we may produce a rigorous platform for our understanding, planning, implementing and monitoring of sustainability strategies. Firstly, an understanding of our system in the specific development sector is very important that needs to be considered with all components dealing with the context. How all the components are linked systematically to the issues of social, economic and ecologically has to be clearly understood. Secondly, we should define our success in line with the specific goal of SDGs or our common interest, where a sustainable society follows four principles that nature is not subject to systematic increases in: concentrations of substances from the Earths crust; concentrations of substances produced by society; degradation by physical means; and, in our sustainable society, we are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine our capacity to meet our needs. Thirdly, we need to develop our own strategies that guide our organizations to follow the implementing pathways for our sustainability journey. Fourthly, we need to establish some concrete actions for a sustainable future in respect to the specific sectors requirements. Our sustainability actions could be divided into short, mid and long term plan depending on our capacity and cooperation locally and internationally. Fifthly, we can talk about the monitoring and evaluations of our path to development through the help of a variety of tools. For example, some effective tools can be Environmental Management System (EMS), ISO 14001, Life Cycle Assessment or so on. We could use these tools to evaluate our sustainable development in the context of designing previous levels of the framework. In this regard, companies can also step for their own created tools considering the nature of other levels of this framework.
Finally, there are many hindrances for sustainable development in Bangladesh. Among these, institutional framework, policy gap and intra or extra departmental coordination are the most significant issues that lead to all the other factors. Therefore, our government should take care of our institutional existing policies and framework to adopt with a new dimension of our long journey; and afterwards, the next initiative could be a reformation for the integration of all policies practiced for the sustainable future of Bangladesh.
The writer is Researcher on Sustainability at BRAC Research and Evaluation Division
