Globalizations, 2015

Vol. 12, No. 4, 581 –596, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1038096

Formulating the SDGs: Reproducing or Reimagining

State-Centered Development?

KATHLEEN SEXSMITH & PHILIP McMICHAEL

Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

A BSTRACT Reformulation of the millennium development goals comes at a time when their
realization is falling short. ‘Development as usual’ through global goal setting is in question
in context of the recent conjunction of global food, energy, and financial crises. Given the
evidence of problematic world-scale restructuring, it is puzzling that SDG visioning continues
to assign principal responsibility to states for the post-2015 development agenda. We regard
this as an epistemic blind spot that foregoes an opportunity to reorient planning to
accommodate the global dimensions of these crises—and their possible solutions. In
particular, we note that current forms of land enclosure, and migrant labor generation, are
inadequately addressed by state-centric measures, especially with respect to the rights of
land users and stateless workers. We offer recommendations for complementing and
modifying nationally generated metrics with a more empowering agenda.

Keywords: global development, state-centrism, urban-centrism, land question, migrant labor,

empowerment

Introduction
Reformulation of the millennium development goals (MDGs) comes at a time when their realiz-
ation is falling short. ‘Development as usual’ through global goal setting is called into question
in the context of a conjunction of global food, energy, and financial crises in the first decade of
the new century, which indicates a systemic crisis of capitalist development (Calhoun & Derlu-
gian, 2011; Moore, 2011). Indeed, the 2013 UN High Level Panel (HLP) report on the planning
of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) noted that ‘the world has changed since the time
when the MDGs were formulated (necessitating) a clear underlying development vision . . .
lacking in the MDGs’ (Hollander, 2013). As compared to the early 1990s when the MDGs

Correspondence Addresses: Kathleen Sexsmith, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY,
USA. Email: kjs256@cornell.edu; Philip McMichael, Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY, USA. Email: pdm1@cornell.edu
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
582 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

were under formulation, the international community has achieved a heightened consciousness
of the national boundary-defying causes of these crises and of the consequent need for a radically
global and participatory approach for identifying solutions. Scientific investigations into climate
change, for example, have clarified global responsibility for environmentally destructive pro-
cesses and the shortcomings of state-centered approaches to dealing with them (Roberts &
Parks, 2007).
Given awareness of the evidentiary basis for a new, global approach, it is extremely puzzling
to find the same cast of nation state actors dominating the post-2015 development planning
process. In this essay, we analyze whether the international community has succeeded at reima-
gining development for the post-2015 period in a way that accommodates the global dimensions
of these crises and their possible solutions. Have the emergent SDGs shown signs of transcend-
ing a ‘development’ reflex of state-centric aid relations? Can they reimagine development from a
truly global political – economic perspective?
We seek to answer these questions in two ways: by examining the assumptions underlying the
formulation of the SDGs, and by showing how these epistemologies occlude the central roles of
global and transnational processes in dispossessions from land and labor rights. In particular, we
examine the experience of agrarian producers in the Global South, within the context of the
global crises and the terms of proposed development solutions. Not only does the conjunction
of crises further deplete these small producers’ livelihoods, but proposed state-centered sol-
utions—such as large-scale land acquisition and tighter integration into value chains—create
further threats to their land and farming rights. Moreover, these processes play a significant
role in increasing various forms of irregular migration by former independent agrarian produ-
cers. The transnational dimensions of crises experienced by agrarian producers in the Global
South provide the ideal window for examining limitations to conventional state-centered devel-
opment solutions, in terms of identifying the theoretical framings that underlie them and the real-
life consequences of reproducing them.
The anti-agrarian orientation of the dominant development episteme helps to frame an inves-
tigation of why state-centric solutions continue to occupy center stage. Depeasantization as a
precondition of national development is a Western legacy, embedded in modern development
policy (e.g. Moore, 1967). While specific trajectories of depeasantization have varied across
time and space via modalities of rebellion, land reform and land grabbing, the stigmatization
of ‘peasantries’ as relics and/or obstacles to labor-saving agricultural technologies has persisted
through the modern era. In this narrative, modern states resolve the ‘peasant question’, by either
‘emptying the countryside’ or by incorporating small producers into supply (value) chains that
essentially convert them from farmers into contract labor on the land. As states in the Global
South invite transnational capital to support their deeper integration into the global capitalist
economy, processes of dispossession lead to irregular migrations across borders, and responsi-
bility for ensuing rights violations are deferred to other actors. In short, by reproducing the state-
centric framework for global development planning embodied in the MDGs, the SDG process
will continue to provide inadequate tools for addressing the crises experienced by those dis-
placed from the land.
In making this argument, we acknowledge that the actual SDGs and the format of their
implementation are still under negotiation. However, we argue that it is nevertheless possible
to identify key epistemic assumptions in the generated reports; in fact, these assessments
provide a privileged window onto the narrow (and theoretically anachronistic) episteme that
is shaping our planet’s future. Indeed, although the amount of time and resources dedicated to
the framing of these reports was substantial and wide-ranging, they are emblematic of the
 Formulating the SDGs 583

continued strategic silencing of those who experience development primarily as dispossession

rather than as improvement. Hence, the SDG preparatory process reports are crucial sites for
analyzing discourses that erase alternative forms of development—visions in which agrarian
life and agricultural livelihoods would be given equal value in both planning and the epistem-
ology that undergirds it.
We focus below on the report by the HLP, composed of the Heads of State of Indonesia,
Liberia, and the UK (United Nations [UN], 2013), which produced 12 ‘Illustrative SDGs’
that are providing significant input into the final SDG planning stages in early 2014 (UN,
2013). We also reference two substantive research reports that feed into the SDG development
process: the United Nations Development Group’s A million voices: The world we want (2013)
and the Jeffrey Sachs-led expert report to the UN Secretary General, An action agenda for sus-
tainable development (Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network,
2013). Most recently in June 2014, the UN’s Open Working Group on the SDGs, which is pre-
paring a proposal for discussion by the General Assembly, released a ‘Zero Draft’ of its goals
and targets (2014). These documents were based on extensive global consultations and inter-
state negotiations, and are therefore well suited for our analysis of the epistemological assump-
tions of the SDG planning process.

Revising the MDGs?

State-centrism shaped the MDGs as goals that were ‘predominantly donor-led and focused on
themes formulated by the OECD’ (Hollander & Heinemans, 2013). In other words, northern
aid was to be mobilized to reduce or eliminate eight distinct shortcomings associated with ques-
tions of hunger, health, education, gender and the environment—concentrated in the global
South. However, despite a general reduction in the proportion of the world’s population living
in absolute poverty (the China effect), there was a widely observed expansion of global inequal-
ities between and within countries: ‘The world’s rich benefited disproportionately from global
growth over the 1990s and the per capita consumption of the poor increased at only half the
average global rate’ (Payne & Phillips, 2010, p. 161). Such a legitimacy crisis for ‘development’
was reinforced in MDG depiction of global inequality as a problem that ‘development’ can solve,
rather than addressing the possibility that global inequality is an outcome of ‘development’.
This neglect of global inequality as an outcome of development is made evident in the Zero
Draft, in Goal 10.8 which states: ‘establish measures at global level to reduce inequality among
countries’ (2014, 11). While the intent is well meaning, the document does not attempt to identify
sources of inequality, and appropriate measures. We maintain that this is the consequence of an
epistemic ‘blind spot’, since the unequal global relations producing and resulting from ‘develop-
ment’ are obscured by a paradigmatic assumption that development is a serial process undertaken
by individual nation states. This is reflected in the Zero Draft, Goal 17.1: ‘develop and implement
effective and targeted capacity building programmes in developing countries in support of national
plans for implementing sustainable development goals’ (2014, 16). Without reversing neoliberal
free trade and investment policies, national ‘capacity building’ is unlikely to materialize.
The updating of the MDGs occurs in a moment when it is becoming clear that humanity faces
transnational, or global, limits in a new, ‘geological epoch’ (Sachs, 2012, p. 2206). As a recent
article in Nature claims:
Humans are transforming the planet in ways that could undermine any development gains. Mounting
research shows that the stable functioning of Earth systems—including the atmosphere, oceans,
584 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

forests, waterways, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles—is a prerequisite for a thriving global
society. (Griggs et al., 2013, p. 306)

The authors redefine ‘sustainable development’ accordingly: ‘Development that meets the needs
of the present while safeguarding Earth’s life-support system, on which the welfare of current
and future generations depends.’1 They propose strengthening of ‘international governance of
the global commons’ with respect to stemming climate change and preventing further loss of
biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ (Griggs et al., 2013, p. 307).
Meanwhile, the UN’s HLP claims:
The post-2015 agenda must enable every nation to realise its own hopes and plans. We learned
from the MDGs that global targets are only effectively executed when they are locally-
owned—embedded in national plans as national targets—and this is an important lesson for the
new agenda. Through their national planning processes each government could choose an appro-
priate level of ambition for each target, taking account of its starting point, its capacity and the
resources it can expect to command . . . . This is an opportunity for governments to ensure
access of citizens to public information that can be used as the basis of national strategies and
plans. (UN, 2013, p. 21)

A state-centric approach such as this is at odds with the urgency of managing the ‘global
commons’. Within the state system at large, the conventional paradigm fractures the possi-
bility of combined, global responses as states inevitably make appeals to different develop-
ment stages with responsibility and/or concession unevenly shared across different states.
Thus, it was reported at the UN Special Event toward achieving the MDGs in September
2013 that ‘emerging economies like China, Brazil and South Africa . . . are pushing for a
differentiation between “people” and “planet”, (stressing) that a focus on the latter must not
come at the expense of the first . . . these countries oppose universal goals, as their develop-
ment levels are not up to par with those of the developed countries’ (stressing) the principle
of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, as negotiated at the Rio+20 conference, and
(claiming) that the new agenda should ‘contribute to the fulfillment of the right of develop-
ment for developing countries’ (Hollander & Heinemans, 2013). Adherence to the idea of
development rights reproduces rather than rethinks the meaning (and possibility) of ‘develop-
ment’ at this historical moment, as the inequalities of global development processes deepen
(Halperin, 2013). This is the apparent ‘elephant in the post-2015 room’—as the HLP report
‘fails to address the structural inequalities deriving from the global economy, which would
require political instruments (on, for example, tax evasion and capital flight) at global
level’ (Hollander, 2013).
The attachment to metrics of commodified wealth not only affirms the market as the medium
of development, and power (Nitzan & Bichler, 2009), but it also resolves targeting of the SDGs
into measurable forms of economic data processing. Methodologically, this approach to realiz-
ing and monitoring goals focuses only on calculable properties of system improvement instead
of reimagining wealth from the perspective of social and ecological reproduction, rather than
simply economic production (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Perfecto, Vanderm-
eer, & Wright, 2009). Furthermore, it privileges aggregation, and therefore political hierarchy,
enlisting local citizens in a centralizing national exercise of meeting preordained targets rather
than localizing these efforts in a more participatory and community-focused fashion (McMurtry,
2002; Patel, 2009). Finally, the new focus on sustainable goal setting and planetary planning,
enhancing extant data sets assembled through national filters, invalidates a human-rights-
based agenda, as we shall see below.
 Formulating the SDGs 585

Reproduction or Reassessment?
The preparation process feeding into the development of the ‘Zero Draft’ was significantly
shaped by the ‘Illustrative SDGs’ proposed by the ‘Report of the HLP of eminent persons on
the post-2015 development agenda’ (UN, 2013). Additional input was provided by the ‘Proposed
SDGs and Targets’, prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an academic
advisory panel brought together by Kofi Annan and directed by Jeffrey Sachs (Leadership
Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2013), and extensive global and
country-specific consultations efforts. These blueprints are subject to negotiation by member
states in the first half of 2014 via the UN Open Working Group on SDGs.2 In our analysis,
we are interested in the process through which these goals have been developed, and specifically
in the extent to which this process risks replicating the narrow, ‘outcomes-oriented’ framing of
the MDGs (Fukuda-Parr & Yamin, 2013). Specifically, we are concerned with the process of
SDG goal setting in two of its preparatory stages: the decision to rely on ‘global goals’ and indi-
cators to organize and drive the development planning process (deciding to count); and the
design of particular input mechanisms to negotiate these goals (deciding who has the right to
count).

Charting the Post-2015 Development Process: Deciding to Count

Analysis of planning for the post-2015 era reveals significant continuity in the epistemological
framework undergirding the process. As the authors of the HLP report describe it themselves,
their purpose was to ‘start with the current MDGs and ask what to keep, add, amend . . . to
begin a second phase to finish the job [the MDGs] started and build on their achievements’
(UN, 2013). Also as during the MDG process, accountability for progress toward goals has
been envisioned in nation state-centric terms. Indeed, the HLP authors state:
National governments have the central role and responsibility for their own development and for
ensuring universal human rights. They decide on national targets, taxes, policies, plans and regu-
lations that will translate the vision and goals of the post-2015 agenda into practical reality. (UN,
2013, p. 10)

Hence, despite heated debate over the effectiveness of the MDGs as a development blueprint,
they have become a model for post-2015 efforts.
The foreclosing of consideration of alternative approaches to global development raises a
number of practical concerns. First, there are no firm conclusions in the development literature
that goal setting is the most effective medium for achieving social improvements (Fukuda-Parr
& Yamin, 2013). Second, there is also no evidence that it works best when nation states hold
accountability for monitoring progress (Fukuda-Parr & Yamin, 2013). Rather, the MDG experi-
ence demonstrated that the most important consideration when setting an agenda for social trans-
formation is that the global community expresses significant support and the capacity to
mobilize resources around the problem. For example, the inadequate inclusion of global insti-
tutions working around food security problems in the MDGs elaboration process is in no
small part responsible for the lack of progress toward food security and nutrition targets
(Fukuda-Parr & Orr, 2013). Third, development planning is a learning process that should be
considered part of the development process itself: in other words, planning is not only the
means to development, but participation in planning is an important development end in
itself. Inadequate grassroots involvement in developing plans for change means that an impor-
tant opportunity to promote rights through greater participation in decision-making was lost.
586 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

Reasons for concern over reliance on global goals as a development framework stem to the
level of epistemology, as well. That is, scholarly observers of the post-2015 development plan-
ning process share concern over the ‘knowledge effect’ produced by the emphasis on a ‘data
revolution for development’ (Engle Merry, 2009; Fukuda-Parr & Yamin, 2013). That is, the
heavy emphasis on quantifying change risks making a fetish of development indicators; that
is, of mistaking means (quantitative measures for tracking social change) for ends (qualitative
transformation of these social opportunities), and is indicative of the ‘spread of corporate think-
ing into the social sphere’ (Engle Merry, 2009, p. 583). The further expansion of data-gathering,
monitoring and measurement activities to address increasingly complex development concerns
creates the false impression that these problems can be treated as isolated issues, rather than
addressing their systemic causes (Fukuda-Parr & Yamin, 2013). Furthermore, the ‘data revolu-
tion’ approach emphasizes methods of aggregation, which may lead to celebration of overall
improvements even though sub-groups or regions are experiencing no change (or even a
decline) in their well-being. In the drive to define goals and indicators, investigation of those
individual lived experiences of where and how global goal setting is not working will be
given short shrift.

Input and Negotiations: Deciding Who Has the Right to Count

Beyond the decision to rely on global goal setting for achieving development concerns lies a
further set of decisions, namely over participation in the goal-setting process. In the development
of the SDGs, there have been two distinct phases: first, the input process, which involved the
leadership of multiple branches of the UN system in gathering input from civil society, scientific,
and governmental communities (in sometimes overlapping efforts); and second, the negotiations
process, whose protagonists are the UN member state delegations to the ‘United Nations Open
Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals’. Will the SDG planning process simply
reproduce global power imbalances by giving the usual array of actors—nation states and the
private sector—substantive decision-making power in the identification of goals and targets?
On the one hand, the range of UN actors involved in managing input collection have made an
impressive attempt to cover a broad range of social groups and regions (Friedman et al., 2013).
Literally millions of people across the globe were contacted through multiple sub-consultations
around thematic and regional concerns. Nevertheless, significant concerns with the distribution
of participation rights to the most marginalized social groups into the planning process remain.
For example, the curious absence of issues specific to those without citizenship rights in the HLP
report reveals a de-politicization of heated national debates over the rights of ‘irregular’
migrants. Their desires for social change are intrinsically counter to the state-centric planning
process: the lived realities of those who have suffered constrained access to state services and
violent surveillance at border-crossings reveal an inversion of the assumption that host
country governments are motivated to improve human well-being. Moreover, the actual nego-
tiations process where the final goals are determined will be undertaken by the usual sus-
pects—UN member states. In short, business as usual at the UN will shape the final
development of the SDGs, undermining needed attention to concerns over the right to have a
voice within this institution.
In the context of these epistemological concerns over state-centric negotiation and account-
ability mechanisms, we now turn to a discussion of the assumptions that frame the content of
the preparatory documents. What theoretical frameworks can be exposed in the documents’
 Formulating the SDGs 587

discussions of what counts? In particular, what vision for the lives and livelihoods of those living
directly from the land in the Global South is embedded in the SDG planning discourse?

The Land Question

The difference between now and 2000 is the return of the land question, following the food price
shocks of 2007 – 2008. This is not to say that land was not an issue at the turn of the century—but
at that time the MDGs focused on particular goals through the aid lens, rather than addressing the
intensified eviction of small producers from the land following agricultural trade liberalization in
the WTO’s 1995 Agreement on Agriculture. A conservative estimate by the FAO for 16
countries in the global South claimed that between 20 and 30 million people lost their land in
consequence of such agricultural liberalization (Madeley, 2000, p. 75). A global agrarian
crisis was at its height, with structural adjustments combining with the dumping of US and
EU food surpluses in world markets at artificial prices that undercut food producers in southern
markets (Bové & Dufour, 2001).
Agricultural liberalization under the WTO regime not only compromised small producers
through manipulation of market prices, but also, with structural adjustment mandates, policies
and transnational corporate investments promoted export agriculture from southern regions to
defray debt, in turn providing some farm work for dispossessed producers. Rather than
address these restructuring conditions, the MDGs focused on outcomes such as rural poverty
and food insecurity (McMichael & Schneider, 2011), missing the point that corporate-dominated
markets reproduce such outcomes.
The deeper issue is, of course, the understanding of ‘development’ and its mechanisms.
Development theories routinely assume smallholders constitute a class ‘in waiting’ for oppor-
tunities or conditions removing them from the rural sector into urban-industrial employment
(Lewis, 1954). The mechanisms are variable—from ‘pull’ factors (farming as historical
relic), through processes of land concentration as agriculture modernizes, to market
‘sorting’ of producers, where larger-scale agriculture (subsidized and market-supported) is
deemed more efficient. These assumptions inform an urban-centric understanding of ‘develop-
ment’, which in turn naturalizes rural poverty, as a symptom of the absence of development.
Meanwhile, research on the ‘planet of slums’ reveals the irrelevance of the development
model in a global economy in which urbanization has been decoupled from industrialization,
where industry is footloose, and neoliberal accumulation redistributes rather than produces
wealth (Araghi, 2009; Davis, 2006).
Nonetheless, urban-centrism informs much of the ‘post-2015’ rethinking of the MDGs. Thus
the HLP Report’s executive summary notes:
The world is now more urban than rural, thanks to internal migration. By 2030 there will be over one
billion more urban residents and, for the first time ever, the number of rural residents will be starting
to shrink. This matters because inclusive growth emanates from vibrant and sustainable cities, the
only locale where it is possible to generate the number of good jobs that young people are
seeking. (2013, p. 18, italics added)

The message here is unmistakable: urbanization is a given, and it is the principal site and vehicle
for improving livelihoods, which are associated with wage-employment. But this scenario
depends on a vision of an urban future, sourced with food and energy from the land via
large-scale, industrial agriculture. Improving (and stabilizing) rural livelihoods, and the right
of existing land users to their land, remains unaddressed.
588 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

And this remains the case despite the recent public controversy over ‘land grabs’ (see, for
example, GRAIN, 2008; Kugelman & Levenstein, 2013; Liberti, 2013; Pearce, 2012; World
Bank, 2010)—much of which concerns the implications of converting land into a financial
asset, and investors with no knowledge of farming buying or leasing land that is often occupied
and used by farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and forest-dwellers (cf. De Schutter, 2011). Such
‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003) compounds the eviction of land users under
the WTO regime. Both processes are profoundly political rather than inevitable (McMichael,
2013b).
We focus here on arable land grabbing,3 since it concerns food security, carbon manage-
ment and energy supplies. The question is whether and how ‘post-2015’ discourse is addres-
sing these issues in context of the land debate? As to whether, the answer is essentially no, as
the terms of reference remain fixed, as above, on an unexamined assumption of ‘rapid urban-
ization’ as the expected outcome of ‘development’. As to how, the principal change is the sub-
stitution of ‘sustainable’ for ‘millennium’—registering the assessment in the HLP’s Executive
Summary that the problem with the MDGs was that ‘environment and development were
never properly brought together’ (UN, 2013, p. i). In consequence, ‘environment’ has been
united with ‘development’ in a Faustian bargain that subordinates environmental processes
and relations to the economism underpinning development thinking, even as the SDG
vision is of no more ‘business as usual’ (UN, 2013, p. 10).4 In spite of this declaration, the
vision projects a definite ‘epistemology as usual’ regarding how to manage natural resources
and promote food security. This is clearly evident in the HLP Report’s claims that ‘Because
we “treasure what we measure”, an important part of properly valuing the earth’s natural
abundance is to incorporate it into accounting systems’ (UN, 2013, p. 48). That is, any
rethinking underway relies on deploying a market calculus as a form of resource management.
Here, ecological accounting purportedly re-embeds ‘environmental externalities’ in pricing
mechanisms to establish the real cost of doing business. While costing environmental
impact is a cognitive improvement (if ontologically flawed5), it retains a blind spot with
respect to social impact (cf. Lohmann, 2006).
This brings us to the land question. Commodification of land serves two purposes. First, it
enables capitalization to expand production of food and biofuel (energy) supplies for global con-
sumer markets. While represented as the principal mechanism for ‘feeding the world’, it is
important to note that 48% of total grain production is consumed by humans, 35% by livestock,
and 17% is for biofuels. During the 2000s, 60% of land grabs were for biofuel production (Vidal,
2012; Weis, 2007, p. 327). In other words, while ‘feeding the world’ is a misnomer, it provides
legitimacy for the conversion of land to commercial-industrial purpose. Second, land and ‘eco-
system service’ commodification exerts a particular kind of (future) control over the natural
world in the sense that it forecloses other meanings and uses of land (Fairhead, Leach, &
Scoones, 2012; Harvey, 2010). Commodification of land and natural processes (such as
carbon sequestration) privileges investor rights with exclusionary consequence. Thus,
any choice over what kinds of environments and landscapes are to be produced, and for what pur-
poses, increasingly passes from any semblance of broad social discussion into narrow class
control orchestrated through the market. (Smith, 2007, p. 26)

In combining ‘environment’ and ‘development’ within a market framework, the accounting may
be more sophisticated, but it ignores human impact. And the human impact is twofold: it con-
cerns both land-user rights—human rights to livelihoods, and the implications of denial of
such rights insofar as this removes the right to produce food on the part of a global ‘peasantry’
 Formulating the SDGs 589

responsible for producing over 50% of the world’s food (ETC, 2009).6 Such rights are absent
from the HLP Report, which privileges the large-scale:
Moving to large-scale sustainable agriculture, while increasing the volume of food produced, is the
great challenge we face . . . . Too little investment has been made in research. This is true even as the
goods and services produced in rural areas are in high demand—food as well as biofuels, eco-system
services and carbon sequestration, to name a few. (UN, 2013, p. 40)
The large-scale investment approach reappears in the Zero Draft (Goal 17.9): ‘increase invest-
ment in rural infrastructure, agricultural research, technology development, institutions and
capacity building in developing countries to enhance agricultural productive capacity, particu-
larly in countries that are net food importers’ (UN, 2014, p. 17). The model is the G8-sponsored
New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, fostering public– private partnerships in Africa,
centering on large plantations and smallholders alike, and to which host states must sign on in a
Cooperation Framework Agreement promoting new seed and chemical technologies (McKeon,
2015). In both cases, the solution is commercial agriculture encompassed within value chains
organized by transnational processors and retailers. Here, smallholders can be incorporated
into global, corporate (rather than their local) markets, thus:
smallholder farmers’ incomes might be rapidly raised by giving them land security and access to
credit, but even more so if they are able to transport their produce to market and have mobile
phones and electronic banking, so that they know how prices are moving and can get paid straight
away. And if global food markets work better—are more transparent and stable—smallholder
farmers will have better information on what to plant to get the most value from their farms.
(UN, 2013, p. 16)
This, of course, is a quid pro quo, because while allowing small producers to stay on the land
as out-growers under contract (within the HLP’s privatized financing stream) they constitute a
new market for agro-inputs, and grow food (and fuel) for only those who can pay for it. The
‘value chain’ scenario follows the World Bank’s new prescription of ‘agriculture for develop-
ment’ (2007), whereby land users are to be corralled into markets dominated by agribusiness,
corporate processors and global retailers. Local economic systems and food production networks
in particular disappear when land commodification puts a premium on potential corporate
market access. And exposure to global market volatility and competition results in smallholder
debt and likely eviction (McMichael, 2013a). The HLP report ignores such local consequence in
advocating global commodity market expansion to address food insecurity (cf. van der Ploeg,
Jingzhong, & Schneider, 2012).
Promoting agro-industrial methods of production, even via ‘sustainable intensification’, offers
a singular solution to combating rural poverty and food insecurity. Two pertinent issues here are
a blind spot on the part of the post-2015 discourse: the planetary significance of poly-cultural
farming to replenish biodiversity, and a tendency to overlook and override local rights to self-
determination and local voices in the process of managing a more equitable and resilient
future (cf. Fukuda-Parr & Yamin, 2013).7 The IAASTD Report advocates multifunctional
farming as a solution to poverty reduction and gender inequality, stabilizing rural cultures, rever-
sing environmental degradation and mitigating climate change (2008). In 2003, the Coordi-
nation Paysanne Européene proposed that ‘maintaining the number of people working in
agriculture is not a sign of economic “backwardness” but an added value’—meaning of
course that a multifunctional agriculture generates employment and retains income and
wealth in rural regions.8 IAASTD points out that markets fail to adequately value environmental
and social harm, implying that the application of a standardized metric can only deepen market
590 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

relations and interpret social needs and ‘environmental services’ in these interchangeable and
abstract terms.
IAASTD also recommends a ‘shift to nonhierarchical development models’, building trust
and valuing farmer knowledge and natural and agricultural biodiversity, as well as seed
exchange and common resource management systems (2008, pp. 5, 7). This exemplifies inte-
gration of grass roots interests and voices into the discussion of SDGs. Here, note the paternalism
of the HLP Report, discounting civil society organization representation of alternative agendas,
and dovetailing ‘voice’ into a preconceived global agenda:
Civil society organisations can play a vital role in giving a voice to people living in poverty, who
include disproportionate numbers of women, children, people with disabilities, indigenous and
local communities and members of other marginalised groups. They have important parts to play
in designing, realising, and monitoring this new agenda . . . . In a new partnership, CSOs will have
a crucial role in making sure that government at all levels and businesses act responsibly and
create genuine opportunities and sustainable livelihoods in an open-market economy. (UN, 2013,
p. 11)

Finally, post-2015 thinking ignores IAASTD recommendations:9 to end subsidies for North-
ern surpluses and develop subsidies for smallholder environmental stewardship, and, contradict-
ing WTO liberalization, promote national policy flexibility to balance the needs of poor
consumers and small farmers. The irony is that the WTO regime is not a free market, its solutions
being politically determined to protect monopoly interests (Rosset, 2006). One of the key blind
spots of the HLP report and SDG discourse in general is lack of attention to the WTO trade
regime, and its uneven impact across national boundaries, and in particular its role in destabiliz-
ing rural producers and cultures. It is this outcome that connects to the labor question, as dis-
placed rural producers are forced into irregular migration within and across national boundaries.

The Labor Question

The SDG planning process takes place as the pool of mobile and unprotected labor increases
rapidly on a global scale. There are an estimated 214 million international migrants worldwide,
a figure that is up from 150 million in 2000 and projected to continue increasing through the first
half of the twenty-first century (International Organization for Migration, 2010). Much of this
international migration is driven by the development process itself; that is, the intrinsic link
between accumulation and dispossession originally theorized by Marx and more recently by
Harvey (2003). Yet, instead of recognizing development as a root cause of desperate, migratory
searches for work, the SDG planning process has identified ‘job creation’ as labor’s overarching
concern This reveals a theoretical blind spot toward the ubiquitous insecurity that characterizes
the modern-day ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2014). The Zero Draft does mention ‘decent work’ in con-
junction with economic growth in Goal 8, but leaves the mechanisms for supporting labor
remarkably more vague than those that describe supports for capital. Hence, we contend that
the post-2015 planning process also exhibits a capital-centric approach to economic growth,
which de-prioritizes the need for to regulate and, eventually, reverse capital’s expanded repro-
duction through flexible mechanisms of labor control.
The capital-centrism of the approach taken by the SDG planners is evident in the ways that
‘priorities’ and indicators for growth remain silent about labor rights and empowerment. The
authors highlight the importance of achieving growth by taking measures to enhance business
‘productivity’ and to create a ‘stable environment that enables businesses to flourish’ (UN,
2013, p. 9). Stability for business is defined as a ‘simplified’ and more ‘transparent’ set of
 Formulating the SDGs 591

regulations, raising the specter of deregulation (Idem). Moreover, significant attention is paid to
the need for incentives to stimulate entrepreneurialism and economic diversification, which may
require ‘flexibly regulated labor markets’, as indicators of economic ‘health’ (UN, 2013, p. 47).
This is concerning in a context where labor rights are increasingly denied by nation states, and
the need for their protection by private sector employers is acute. An alternative approach rooted
in the concerns of workers themselves would have highlighted the inability of businesses to keep
up with responsibilities for workforce social reproduction—which is separated from production
on a transnational scale via migrant labor systems (Burawoy, 1976).
The HLP report’s authors reveal their perspective on international migrants in the list of
assumptions about the future, framing their development of the SDGs:
The universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of migrants must be respected. These
migrants make a positive economic contribution to their host countries, by building up their
labour force. Sending countries benefit from getting foreign exchange in the form of remittances
and from greater trade and financial flows with countries where they have a large diaspora. By
2030, as global population rises, there could be 30 million more international migrants, remit-
ting an additional $60 billion to their home countries through low cost channels. (UN, 2013,
p. 18)

Similarly, the Zero Draft Goal 8.15 proclaims to ‘by 2030 lower the overall costs in migration
processes and minimize transaction costs of remittances’. These quotes reveal the productivist
lens applied by the SDG planners: the justification provided for attending to migrants’ rights
is a purely economic one, relating to migrant workers’ contributions to host and home econom-
ies. This reductionist framing of migrants as mere reserves of labor and remittances undermines
the need to address more complicated questions about their political, economic, and social
rights. Given that many migrant-receiving states continue to deny access to health care and
other basic human rights to migrants within their borders (Brolan et al., 2013), silence by
global development leaders on the question of the rights of undocumented people is unjustifi-
able. Indeed, the moral problem of the widespread denial of basic protections to those
without formal citizenship is reduced to a discussion of the need for access to legal identity
for 50 million stateless children (UN, 2013, p. 50). The framing depicts undocumented status
as a problem created by careless national governments, rather than a condition that is systema-
tically produced by neoliberal global development.
Second, the statement denies the basic and necessary relationship between development and
migration. Labor migration is most often fraught with the denial of basic human rights during
violent migration journeys, and hostile resettlement conditions (cf. Holmes, 2014). By attribut-
ing the projected increase in the number of international migrants to population growth instead
of development, difficult ethical questions about migration as a consequence of development are
avoided. In fact, the report directly acknowledges and promotes the role of the mobility of capital
in the global economy: ‘ . . . inclusive growth has to be supported by a global economy that
ensures financial stability, promotes stable, long-term private financial investment, and
encourages open, fair and development-friendly trade’ (UN, 2013, p. 8). In this way, the
authors promote those mechanisms that will increase prevalence of labor movement in the
global economy. Accordingly, the discourse of the SDG planning process normalizes labor sub-
ordination through its forced mobility and stripping of rights, under what Selwyn (2014) recog-
nizes to be capitalism’s ‘systematic’ labor exploitation. In sum, the capital centrism of this view
supports a set of structural conditions that would exacerbate forced migration and the cheapen-
ing of the labor force, while simultaneously de-politicizing the issue by portraying statelessness
as a problem that originates with the nation state.
592 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

Given the characteristic mobility and insecurity of labor, we come now full circle to the epis-
temological foundations of the post-2015 planning process to highlight the grave inadequacy of
its methodological nationalism. In the first place, elected state officials are accountable to a citi-
zenry, which the state itself has the power to define through immigration and citizenship regimes.
As the report’s authors defined it: ‘Accountability must be exercised at the right level: govern-
ments to their own citizens, local governments to their communities, corporations to their share-
holders, civil society to the constituencies they represent (UN, 2013, p. 23). This model is an
anachronism in the post-2015 global system of development-induced hyper-mobility, stateless-
ness and transnational belonging. Moreover, states are actively producing a hierarchy of rights
and protections within their borders. The resurgence of bonded labor to a single employer
through temporary guest worker visas (Basok, 1999), and the ineffective border protection pol-
icies that exemplify the de facto acceptance of an exploited under-class of undocumented migrant
workers, provide ample evidence. Making states accountable for the rights violations they
produce, and subsequently attempt to silence, would be an irresponsible approach to the question
of labor by the global development community. Second, as a project heavily reliant on national
statistics, the ‘data revolution’ is intrinsically underprepared to identify and analyze the key con-
cerns of precarious workers hired through global production networks, which defy accountability
measures for labor abuses through elongated supply chains and sub-contracting arrangements
(cf. Phillips, 2011). The global goal-setting approach decentralized to national governments is
inadequate for identifying and understanding such globally generated issues.

Conclusion
It is widely agreed by those who plan, experience, and analyze development that the post-2015
global development process should strive for transformative change in the way global economic
benefits are generated (sustainability) and distributed (equity). What is less widely agreed is just
how deep a transformation, in terms of both development planning, and the epistemology that
frames it, is required. While the ambitious, universal targets for alleviating poverty that are
being promoted would represent a significant advance in human welfare beyond that achieved
by the MDGs, they must proceed farther to address the structural causes of unequal and unsus-
tainable outcomes. Such an agenda requires innovating various aspects of the outdated epistem-
ology that undergirds the conventional model of development planning. Here, we have
emphasized the importance of exchanging methodological nationalism for a new, transnational
model of accountability for regulating capital, nurturing ecosystems and protecting land-user
and labor rights. We have also signaled the need to conceptualize rural livelihoods as meaning-
ful, and the right to land as fundamental rather than simply as a transitional stage in an inevitable
urbanization process. Finally, we have argued for complementing (or perhaps even replacing)
universal global targets with locally owned, democratically developed plans for envisioning
and implementing transformative social change.
The post-2015 development planning process has thus far shown little sign of realigning the
development agenda around these principles. While it has reassessed the MDG planning process
through an inclusive global consultation approach, it has reproduced some of the most proble-
matic flaws in the MDG process. These are that its intended outcomes are limited to those
that have calculable properties, rather than a deeper, rights-based understanding of empower-
ment and a holistic approach to ecosystem support. We have sought to show that these issues
are of particular importance in the post-2015 era to land users and labor under the dominant
development episteme. Reproducing the nation state-centric model of development
 Formulating the SDGs 593

accountability places rural dwellers and labor at great risk of continuing to lose their access to
basic rights of social reproduction, in a context of poorly regulated transnational flows of capital
and limited protections for globally mobile labor. Moreover, it de-politicizes these questions
through an approach that claims universality, while remaining silent as individual states
create hierarchical rights regimes that offer limited protections for vulnerable migrant labor
and small landholding classes.
We offer five recommendations for moving ahead in the post-2015 environment. These rec-
ommendations assume that the ‘data revolution’ has been so deeply embedded in the goal-setting
process that it is likely to be adopted by the General Assembly. Here, we suggest ways this
approach should be complemented and modified with a more empowering agenda. First, SDG
negotiators should be fully transparent about the ways that final goals are set, and supporting
indicators are developed. Second, negotiators should make ample room at the local level for par-
ticipatory development of intended outcomes and of the means to achieve them—which may or
may not be based on the goal-setting approach. Third, qualitative reporting, in terms in-depth
analyses of the issues that are of most concern to particular societies, would help strike the
balance between the need for universal targets and attention to particularities. Fourth, urban
bias should be acknowledged and ended, if not reversed, since supporting land users to repair
and replenish natural processes in the service of domestically oriented food security is founda-
tional to the sustainability to human society. Finally, once the SDG agenda formally moves
ahead, its proponents must emphasize enforcement of its universal agenda. Aggregate data
may help indicate trends, but progress must ultimately be measured by actions that reduce socio-
economic inequalities, and by lived experiences of the expansion of rights to production and
social reproduction.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1 Recall that the Brundtland Commission report defined ‘sustainable development’ as ‘meeting the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (quoted in Rich, 1994,
p. 197).
2 The final set of goals is negotiated by this Open Working Group, which is composed over UN Member States, over
five meetings in the first half of 2014, for proposal to the UN General Assembly in September 2014.
3 See the Special Issue of Globalizations, 10, 1 (2013) on Land Grabbing and Global Governance, edited by
M. E. Margulis, N. McKeon, and S. M. Borras, Jr.
4 A conclusion reached also by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for
Development (2008).
5 The flaw is that the environment is an ecological process and relation, and cannot be so easily fractionated into
commensurate metrics across diverse ecosystems and micro-climates.
6 The distinguishing feature of the food sovereignty movement is its reframing of rights discourse – for example,
instead of the neoliberal food security mechanism of the ‘right to (purchase) food’ (cf. Jarocz, 2009), La Vı́a
Campesina claims the ‘right to produce food’.
7 Interestingly, while the HLP advocates ‘each goal should . . . . Be grounded in the voice of people, and the priorities
identified during consultations, especially children, youth, women and marginalised and excluded groups’ (Fukuda-
Parr & Yamin, 2013, pp. 13– 14), this apparently does not apply to rural communities under threat of eviction or
corralling into market relations in which they are subject to agro-industrial technologies, global corporate
interests, and price volatility. See also Künnemann and Monsalve Súarez (2013).
594 K. Sexsmith & P. McMichael

8 It also has been shown to be more productive, and resilient, than monocultural farming (Badgley et al., 2007).
9 And those of UN Right to Food Rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter, who recommends: ‘A more appropriate reframing
of agricultural trade rules would explicitly recognize that market-determined outcomes do not necessarily improve
food security’ (De Schutter, 2011, p. 16).

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Kathleen Sexsmith is Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Development Sociology at the

Cornell University. Her doctoral research examines labor migration from rural Mexico and
Central America to dairy farming regions of New York, and the impacts of US immigration
policy on working immigrant youth. She collaborates with the Cornell Farmworker Program,
Worker Justice Center of New York, and Workers’ Center of Central New York.

Philip McMichael is Professor and Chair of the Department of Development Sociology. His
research is on the contemporary agrarian question, including land grabbing and agrarian resist-
ances. He has authored Food regimes and agrarian questions (2013) and Development and
social change: A global perspective (Sage, 2012, 5th edn.) and edited Contesting development:
Critical struggles for social change (Routledge, 2010). He currently works with the Civil
Society Mechanism of the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security.
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