The 2030 Agenda and eradicating poverty: New horizons for global social policy?

The article examines the approaches to poverty of the UN development decades, with a focus on the current 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Using the “5 R” criteria of global social policy discourse, the article’s main point is that a coherent analysis of poverty is absent from the agenda. While the agenda does address redistribution, social rights, and resource consciousness, and makes important contributions to social protection and care policy, it makes only superficial reference to the need for regulating of the economy. The main lacuna of the agenda, however, is that it does not address the issue of relationality – the systemic asymmetries in economic, social and political power. As a result, it is weak on policy, and there is the risk that poverty eradication will remain an elusive goal, even beyond 2030, despite the agenda’s transformative remit.