‘The Future We (Are) Want(ing)’: Quantifying Decent Work in the Sustainable Development Goals

The concept of sustainable development is inherently temporal, implying that development should address future generations’ needs. Drawing on a Grounded Theory-based analysis of key publications, in addition to selected interviews, the paper analyzes how constructing indicators of sustainable development de-futurizes the concept. Constructing indicators of sustainable development builds on the anticipation of future needs, but reduces both the utopian content of sustainable development and the inherent openness of the future. First, setting and quantifying goals limits the space available for policy-making, particularly for imagining (other) possible futures. It constrains the future horizon, limits the set of practices available to counter problems and transforms the open and contingent horizon of the future into one of teleological and directed development. Second, the sustainable development goals displace politics. In the production process of the Decent Work indicators, we see how a tightly constrained, technical and expert community decides key issues of sustainable development. Third, the utopian character is transformed into a manageable process for the present, which need not be concerned anymore with the future and its implications. The Sustainable Development Goals necessarily imagine a future tightly linked and limited to its goals, not reflecting upon the potentiality of dramatic changes in the environment it is located within. The independence of particular goals might also clash with ideas of interdependency within the concept of sustainable development. Potentially adverse effects of reaching one goal to the disadvantage of another might be invisibilized. Insofar, overall, the paper analyzes how ‘the future we want’ (ideas and promises of the ‘better society’) is essentially wanting in futures.