By Ramu Damodaran
When asked how we should treat others, the Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi, is said to have replied: "There are no others." This truth was affirmed 10 years ago when the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development convened in Rio de Janeiro from June 20 to 22, 2012. Unlike earlier international gatherings, there were no "we" and "they" there; what emerged at Rio was a movement forward in unison, common goals commonly defined, the responsibilities to their realization, nationally as much as globally, borne by every single nation and their people.
What Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general at the time, was to define as "collective power exercised in powerful partnership" shone through at Rio. No one is owed greater credit for that success than he. When he was originally appointed to his office in 2006, he had observed that "the U.N.'s core mission in the previous century was to keep countries from fighting each other. We need to muster human, institutional and intellectual resources and organize them properly."
It was not easy. A month before the conference, he was candid in expressing disappointment with the negotiations, which were not moving fast enough. But with tenacious effort and persistence, he kept returning to the single measure by which sustainable development and the goals to assure it should be gauged: universality ― a measure inhibited by every assertion of sovereignty, of nationhood.
Looking back to my first days at the United Nations, as a delegate from India admittedly some 35 years ago, I can imagine what my reaction would have been if my country were to be questioned on its performance of any of what we have now come to accept as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
One of the foremost iterations of the intellectual resources to which Secretary-General Ban made reference, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, writing in "The Lancet" journal in 2012, noted that the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), defined in 2000, were "targets mainly for poor countries to which rich countries were to add their solidarity and assistance through finances and technology."
The 2022 Sustainable Development Index, published earlier this month by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which Dr. Sachs leads, offers its own pointers to this universality. While the pandemic has meant that for the second year in a row, the world has in some ways slowed in making progress on the SDGs, a longer-range assessment indicates that, while the top ten countries in the index ― led by Finland ― are all in Europe, the two countries ― Bangladesh and Cambodia ― that have progressed most on the SDGs since 2015 are in Asia, and two others from the continent ― Japan and South Korea ― are ranked in the top thirty countries in terms of overall progress towards achieving the SDGs.
Poignantly, on the day the Rio conference began, a creative and compassionate mind slipped from our midst. J. Michael Adams was president of the International Association of University Presidents when he died. The previous year, he attended the United Nations Academic Impact Seoul Forum, organized by Handong Global University, where he spoke of "creating a larger umbrella of obligations and responsibilities greater than the traditional nation state." It was a concept remarkable in its prescience and in the implicit definition of that umbrella linking not just governments with each other, or with the United Nations, but with their own people.
In the context of the SDGs, their universality demands the metaphor of an umbrella suited for all climes ― sun or sleet, rain or snow ― a protection particularly needed when there are so many areas of international relations where it lies fragmented and assailed. It is an umbrella that unites as much as it protects, a solidarity of many possibilities, individual actions by women and men, by governments and institutions, scholars and activists, bringing the immediacy of what they thought and did to that universality, reversing the old adage and, by thinking locally, allow acting globally.
In many parts of the globe today, it is the longest day of the year. While in many others, it is the shortest. Ninety years ago, the Mexican ambassador to Brazil, Alfonso Reyes, wrote a poem called, "The Romances of Rio de Janeiro," which was translated into English by Timothy Ades. One verse reads:
Land runs into water, playing
City touches on country ground
Darkness enters into evening
Equal friendship, open hand.
The verses are so evocative of the SDGs, the solidarity of our waters and our lands, our communities rural and urban, the universal moment of this equinox where twilight is just another word for sunrise in a part of the world that may be distant but is still open to our open hand of a friendship that is equal, and we to theirs.
"All I ask, Rio de Janeiro," the poem concludes, "Your consent, in my time of test. Let me wander on your beaches when my ship is wrecked and lost."
Ten years ago, 192 governments, together with civil society representatives, scholars, the corporate and business sector, among others, joined on those beaches under the leadership of Ban Ki-moon. The ship they had set sail in 20 years earlier had floundered and flailed because those upon it, in his phrase, behaved as if they could indefinitely burn and consume their way to prosperity.
Those times were a test. The United Nations passed.
Ramu Damodaran served as the first director of the United Nations Academic Impact, an initiative linking universities around the world with the United Nations. He is the 2017-2021 recipient of the J. Michael Adams Leadership and Service award, instituted by the International Association of University Presidents, which Dr. Choue Young-seek co-founded in 1965.
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What Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general at the time, was to define as "collective power exercised in powerful partnership" shone through at Rio. No one is owed greater credit for that success than he. When he was originally appointed to his office in 2006, he had observed that "the U.N.'s core mission in the previous century was to keep countries from fighting each other. We need to muster human, institutional and intellectual resources and organize them properly."
It was not easy. A month before the conference, he was candid in expressing disappointment with the negotiations, which were not moving fast enough. But with tenacious effort and persistence, he kept returning to the single measure by which sustainable development and the goals to assure it should be gauged: universality ― a measure inhibited by every assertion of sovereignty, of nationhood.
Looking back to my first days at the United Nations, as a delegate from India admittedly some 35 years ago, I can imagine what my reaction would have been if my country were to be questioned on its performance of any of what we have now come to accept as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
One of the foremost iterations of the intellectual resources to which Secretary-General Ban made reference, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, writing in "The Lancet" journal in 2012, noted that the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), defined in 2000, were "targets mainly for poor countries to which rich countries were to add their solidarity and assistance through finances and technology."
The 2022 Sustainable Development Index, published earlier this month by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which Dr. Sachs leads, offers its own pointers to this universality. While the pandemic has meant that for the second year in a row, the world has in some ways slowed in making progress on the SDGs, a longer-range assessment indicates that, while the top ten countries in the index ― led by Finland ― are all in Europe, the two countries ― Bangladesh and Cambodia ― that have progressed most on the SDGs since 2015 are in Asia, and two others from the continent ― Japan and South Korea ― are ranked in the top thirty countries in terms of overall progress towards achieving the SDGs.
Poignantly, on the day the Rio conference began, a creative and compassionate mind slipped from our midst. J. Michael Adams was president of the International Association of University Presidents when he died. The previous year, he attended the United Nations Academic Impact Seoul Forum, organized by Handong Global University, where he spoke of "creating a larger umbrella of obligations and responsibilities greater than the traditional nation state." It was a concept remarkable in its prescience and in the implicit definition of that umbrella linking not just governments with each other, or with the United Nations, but with their own people.
In the context of the SDGs, their universality demands the metaphor of an umbrella suited for all climes ― sun or sleet, rain or snow ― a protection particularly needed when there are so many areas of international relations where it lies fragmented and assailed. It is an umbrella that unites as much as it protects, a solidarity of many possibilities, individual actions by women and men, by governments and institutions, scholars and activists, bringing the immediacy of what they thought and did to that universality, reversing the old adage and, by thinking locally, allow acting globally.
In many parts of the globe today, it is the longest day of the year. While in many others, it is the shortest. Ninety years ago, the Mexican ambassador to Brazil, Alfonso Reyes, wrote a poem called, "The Romances of Rio de Janeiro," which was translated into English by Timothy Ades. One verse reads:
Land runs into water, playing
City touches on country ground
Darkness enters into evening
Equal friendship, open hand.
The verses are so evocative of the SDGs, the solidarity of our waters and our lands, our communities rural and urban, the universal moment of this equinox where twilight is just another word for sunrise in a part of the world that may be distant but is still open to our open hand of a friendship that is equal, and we to theirs.
"All I ask, Rio de Janeiro," the poem concludes, "Your consent, in my time of test. Let me wander on your beaches when my ship is wrecked and lost."
Ten years ago, 192 governments, together with civil society representatives, scholars, the corporate and business sector, among others, joined on those beaches under the leadership of Ban Ki-moon. The ship they had set sail in 20 years earlier had floundered and flailed because those upon it, in his phrase, behaved as if they could indefinitely burn and consume their way to prosperity.
Those times were a test. The United Nations passed.
Ramu Damodaran served as the first director of the United Nations Academic Impact, an initiative linking universities around the world with the United Nations. He is the 2017-2021 recipient of the J. Michael Adams Leadership and Service award, instituted by the International Association of University Presidents, which Dr. Choue Young-seek co-founded in 1965.
