The sustainable development goals: A universalist promise for the future.

The Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) have evoked optimism but have also been criticized for reproducing a universal template grounded in a western and neoliberal ideology. Identifying three strands of responses/critiques on the SDGs from a review of literature across several disciplines, I analyze what they have to say in the light of histories of past development work. I analyze how universalism is understood differently in different disciplinary approaches and how, despite its limitations, Agenda 2030 might provide a platform to meet current challenges across the world and a framework to talk across different geographies and disciplines. While a delinking from current development and global economic structures are needed for change, I explore how the SDGs can be used to redeploy development to change those very structures. I argue that decolonizing development calls for changing development structures from inside out as much as finding new ways of being outside it. • The Sustainable Development Goals have been criticized for promoting a universalist agenda underpinned by Global North and neoliberal interests. • The paper identifies three overarching critiques and approaches in relation to the SDGs with indicators at the heart of their differences. • Discussing the different approaches that universalism can take, the paper 'walks backwards into the future,' looking to development histories to identify how the tools, language and spaces of development may be used for emancipatory struggles for change. • It is argued that indicators, at the center of the debates on SDG universalism, rather than a final framework may be seen as 'fictional expectations' as well as 'contact zones' where different interests might meet and make way for challenging dominance of some, especially the global North. • A universal SDG agenda offers the possibility where local imaginaries may meet, collective imaginaries constructed and indicators used as tools for a conversation towards Agenda principles not as final but as sites for a needed debate on the future we want. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]