ABSTRACT

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, are the latest manifestation of what Gillian Hart has termed ‘big D development’ (Hart, 2001); that is, intentional interventions to achieve progress and modernity. Since the Second World War there have been different forms of international cooperation to bring ‘development’ to economically poorer parts of the world, to improve living standards and reduce marginalization. These attempts at development have been criticized for their top-down, Northern-centric perspectives, and how they classify peoples and places of the Global South according to what they lack rather than what they have (Escobar, 1995; Sachs, 1992).