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ICTs and Inclusive Sustainable Development

This weeks reading were on ICTs and Inclusive Sustainable Development, ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology. The class discussed how having access to the internet and communication technology provides a means of leveling the playing field developing countries. Having access to the internet provides small business owners in developing countries the opportunity to access a market that they otherwise would have been completely shut out of. Additionally, ICT’s provide access to information in new and unprecedented ways that could not have happened a few hundred years ago. During this class the fact that technology is amazing was really driven home and made me think about how often we take it for granted here in the Untied States.

 

After doing research I found project pursued by major companies like Google and Facebook that are aiming to increase access to internet around the world. This question of access and discussion of what it means to make services and experiences more accessible to all proved to be strikingly similar to our conversations about disability inclusion. In a similar way, providing access increases quality of life of those who are marginalized without access and provides means for self sufficiency. Thinking about the parallels of ICTS and sustainable development made me think about our theoretical readings by Amartya Sen. Providing access does truly provide freedom. The creation of the United Nations is representative of a global governing body in which structure and means of freedom to its member states. I would argue that access to internet in developing areas is an extension of Sen’s theories on development, worldwide access that is being pursued by Google and Facebook is indicative of development proving freedom.

 

Interestingly enough in my international business class we often talk about the opportunities that large multinational corporations provide to developing nations. A debate often arises regarding what it more effective in developing countries, international aid or large corporations? ICT’s really fall into this debate because government  or governing bodies like the UN may provide guidance and suggestion to these companies but ultimately the internet is owned by large multinational corporations. It would be interesting to look at how Sen’s writing will be applied in the future and if development should be viewed as governance or business or perhaps both?

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Sustainable Development Goals Overview and the High-Level Political Forum

The United Nations Development Goals have targets and indicators that are meant to provide a way of measuring progress towards said goals. This is something that the prior Millennium Development Goals failed to do and were highly criticized for. The UN created the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) to act as a “central platform for follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, provides for the full and effective participation of all States Members of the United Nations and States members of specialized agencies.” Within the United Nations there is also the presence of Major Groups. The Major Groups represent a variety of specialized individuals who are experts in marginalized communities because they are often representative of that community. Among these major groups are Women, Children and Youth, Indigenous Peoples, Workers and Trade Unions, and Persons with Disabilities.

 

This class session ended up being very important to formulating my own capstone project. My topic ended up looking into Goal 12 (Climate Change) target 12.8 aims to do the following:

“By 2030, ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature” by the year 2030.” (UN SDG 12.8)

Indicator 12.8.1 aims to measure this target by looking at the following:

Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development (including climate change education) are mainstreamed in (a) national education policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher education; and (d) student assessment (UN SDG. 12.1)

 

The goal of my project is to measure how the United States education system is contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by analyzing U.S. education standards related to climate change. It is fascinating to know how much meaning individual words within an official United Nations document have. When doing this reading and skimming over the term “major groups” it never crossed my mind that there was an entire system in place that gives meaning to the term major groups. I have a new found appreciation for the United Nations and all of the documents that are produced because I know how much meaning is beind all of them.

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Theoretical Approaches to Development

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have become a critical component in in international development. However in order to understand the value of the UN SDG’s it is important to also understand what international development is from a theoretical and conceptual approach. This weeks readings went into defining international development by analyzing the writings of Amartya Sen and Sumner and Tribe.

My favorite points were made my Amartya Sen who viewed international development as a catalyst for change. At the time development from the west was majorly focused in economic development. However, Amartya Sen expanded on that idea and viewed development as freedom and contributed to the major indicators that people look at when defining development. Sen makes the point that development grants opportunities for freedom he furthermore provides evidence by looking at differences in developed areas as opposed to their less developed counterparts. This point is illustrated well in the following quote ““Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development.”  An interesting example given within the reading pertains to women’s freedom in countries that only burn fossil fuels vs countries that have more means of energy. Countries that stick only fossil fuels tend to have female populations that have less freedom of choice compared to more progressive countries.

When developing my capstone project keeping in mind the opportunities that derive from development will be important. The benefits of development provide more opportunities for persons with disabilities to have access to opportunities that they may otherwise be inhibited from. Living in the United States provides individuals the opportunity to look at already present standards and mechanisms in place and make everyday life more attainable for persons with disabilities. Perusing the same task in a society that does not have any of these mechanism, laws or enforcement in place provides more challenges.

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The Global “Grand Challenge” of Inclusive Sustainable Development

On the first day of our Inclusive Sustainable Development course Professor Cogburn introduced the concept of a “Grand Challenge”.  Throughout history humanity has faced many of them, my favorite example used in class was humanities race to get to the moon. There was a period of time where great minds were coming together to solve this problem of taking humanity where they have not gone before. To understand whether or not we are alone in this vast universe or if there are others out there. Professor Cogburn related to this topic to the concept of a “moonshot”. A moonshot is taking a chance to find something great no matter how out of reach it may seem at the beginning.

The millennium development goals were a moonshot; great minds working on development looked at the overall work individuals were doing and realized that there should be a collection of goals that focus overall efforts. Although highly criticized for their effectiveness and inclusivity, the millennium development goals led to our present day Sustainable Development Goals. These goals are more inclusive, effective, and create frameworks for tracking progress. Every moonshot leads to a bigger and greater discovery that is improved with time. Before humanity commended itself for sending a man to the moon, now we have people like Elon Musk who are working to put man on mars permanently.

Back when things were a little more sane, the Obama White House put forth 21st Century Grand Challenges and viewed them as an opportunity to change the lives of Americans. The White House invested in missions to expand our understanding of the human brain and treat diseased like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy. The Department of Energy also invested in the “Sunshot Grand Challenge” which aimed to expand solar technology and apply it to vehicles. NASA has a very sobering Asteroid Challenge that aimed to “find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them”. All of these challenges led to new discoveries that pushed forward new initiatives that continued to help humanity.

Professor Cogburn’s final message for the day was to have this “moonshot” mentality throughout the semester when perusing our project on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Understanding that the path to inclusive sustainable development still has a lot of work to be done but every project will be an important step towards progress.

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Global Strategic Frameworks

This blog post discusses Global Strategic Frameworks, particularly the SDGs and MDGs and their positives and negatives and how it connects to my Capstone.

 

Global Strategic Frameworks are designed to create worldwide frameworks, solutions, strategies and policies and actions and are becoming ever prevalent in modern society. The increase of technologies and an increased sense of importance in worldwide rights and ideals has caused global strategic frameworks to become the main method of creating international order.  Global strategic frameworks allow for actors worldwide to come together, collaborate and create a discussion area to discuss numerous issues, particularly issues around development. While these frameworks create a space for progress and discussion, Global Strategic Frameworks are also widely criticized by outside actors.

Global strategic frameworks, in theory, allow for choreographed and well planned global action and cooperation across numerous agendas. It also is supposed to create a space where all actors are equal in their opinions and are able to build partners in their social, economic and environmental goals. However, global strategic frameworks have limitations and are subject to wide criticism. Often indigenous persons are not able to participate in conversations, there is a lack of accountability, enforcement, determination, follow through, a complete understanding of cultures and other issues that have lead to disastrous consequences. Additionally, specifically with the SDGs and MDGs, these global strategies often lacked local context and had few analyses into individual countries social, cultural, political, and economic norms. The MDGs and SDGs created an ideological depiction of what the western world wanted with little consideration of local context. The MDGs are considered both a classic example of both what a global framework should be and the shortcomings of such frameworks. The MDGs were monumental for 2000 when they were first initiated. The MDGs also were incredibly important in the conversation of development as they marked the first time that the world collectively said that the idea of poverty is not just an economic experience, but a more holistic understanding of what development is and what areas that poverty effects. However, the MDGs did not accomplish all of its 8 goals and the success it did have was not equally distributed. The MDGs helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, to make inroads against hunger, protect planet etc. however, progress has been uneven. The goals that it created were shortsighted, and while each goal had targets and indicators, it lacked enforcement, accountability and solid plans to achieve said goals. Furthermore, the MDGs lacked input from many groups including persons with disabilities and indigenous groups and had many detrimental impacts in some areas of the world.

When the MDGs concluded in 2015, the SDGs were created to replace them with the idea of taking the great strides that had been made in the MDGs and making them more sustainable. The SDGs focused more on intersections in the development world and had more goals, targets and indicators, included representation of more groups, were considered more universally applicable and focused less on what the West traditionally considered development. However, the SDGs had some downfalls, as well, as is true with every global international framework. Often the terminology used in the SDGs is a bit unrealistic and the statements made in the goals are not the same as what the indicators describe. For example, eradicate extreme poverty and hunger is one of the SDG goals, however, Target 1 states that the target is to Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day. The issue with this goal to target interpretation is that eradicate isn’t the same as half. Additionally, the MDGs started in 2000, not 1990. $1.25 to measure poverty an arbitrary figure. Some critics use this as an example to say that the SDGs created the language in order to assure improvement over the years. Additionally, many of the goals that are created in the SDGs are unrealistic for all countries and some critics are saying that it is asking too much too soon and setting certain areas up for failure with the methodology of setting the goals being inconsistent and arbitrary around the world. For example, the idea of the goal of 100% education is biased against countries with low starting points and the question is raised about the quality of the education the children are receiving. If a country prioritizes getting their children to school and they have 900 students but only 3 teachers, do they still succeed according to the SDGs? Finally, as applicable to most Global Strategic Frameworks, collecting this data to see if the goals have been accomplished is very expensive and time-consuming.

While there are numerous flaws with Global Strategic Frameworks, the overarching idea of creating a space where persons worldwide can discuss their ideas and their beliefs is positive. The idea of Global Strategic Frameworks is instrumental in my paper as it analyzes the CRPD and discusses how and why a global strategic framework may not be as comprehensive as they intended it to be when it was created and how to create more accountability and more opportunities.

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IGF: Internet Rights and Principals

During the 2018 Internet Governance Forum, I watched the webinar titled “DC on Internet Rights and Principals: Sustainable Future: The Internet, Humans Rights, and Environmental Issues”. The seminar was an open-mic discussion of the connectivity between the Internet, human rights, and the environment and the goal was to serve as the beginnings of a coalition on this topic. It discussed some of the key issues of accessibility, energy impact of Internet infrastructure, and finding a balance between equal access and sustainable access.

Access to information and internet as a means for development has been established as a human right under the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet, but sustainability is something which historically has not been factored into the equation when it comes to striving for wider Internet access. The SDGs mention both sustainability and technology, but the link between them is left as something to be implied. But given the energy used in both creating the infrastructure for Internet use and in processing massive amounts of data, sustainability is absolutely something that needs to be brought into the conversation of expanding Internet accessibility.

One of the main themes of the seminar was the need to recognize and fill policy gaps. The fact that the SDGs don’t explicitly overlap energy, ICT infrastructure, and environmental sustainability is a major policy gap at the international level, but is also language that is missing at the state and local level. A new coalition called the Digital Cities Coalitions for Human Rights led by Amsterdam, Barcelona, and New York are working to create standards for companies and public spaces for the creation of data centers. Their goal is to incorporate internet as a human right into a holistic approach to sustainability for equitable, sustainable data centers which are popping up more and more in cities. A key takeaway from the seminar was the need to incorporate social inclusion and environmental awareness into the design of networks, products, and supply chains—regulation afterwards is less effective and more costly in resources and can delay equitable access.

Another key point was the importance of making this dialogue on internet, human rights, and environmental sustainability multi-stakeholder in nature. For example, the private sector has a critical role to play given that it collects massive amounts of data in comparison to the public sector. Additionally, local innovations and the formation of microgrids for internet as it were, could play an important role in achieving harmony between these three areas. Overall, the webinar brought together key themes of connection between the internet, human rights, and environmental sustainability in a manner that equalized the three fields and called for further collaboration to see sustainable, equitable access to the internet.