Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

In this exclusive blog post , Routledge author Felix Dodds, discusses the development of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a forthcoming book that will tell the complete story. On September 25, Heads of State met in New York and adopted the ‘Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development' (UN, 2015). This had been a long process that started in Solo, Indonesia, in July 2011 when the governments of Colombia, Guatemala, Peru and UAE suggested that instead of replacing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with another set of development goals that would deal with impacts of policies, that a set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ should complement the MDGs. These SDGs should challenge the root causes and not the symptoms that they should be – not only for developing countries, but for all countries. They also shouldn’t just address development, but also sustainable development. Stakeholders had the first attempt at ident...

Nikhil Seth The UN Secretary General has announced that he has appointed Nikhil Seth as Executive Director of UNITAR. For many of us Nikhil has played a critical role as Director of the Division on Sustainable Development overseeing both Rio+20 negotiations and the Sustainable Development Goals and Post 2015 Summit preparations. I've known Nikhil from the 1992 when he represented India and the subsequently as thee Special Adviser to Under Secretary General Nitin Desai. Always a great supporter of stakeholder’s engagement in whatever post he had. In the mid-1990s Nitin somehow got a room in DC1 or 2 for what then was the CSD NGO Steering Committee. From 1997 to 2001 Nikhil was our wing-man when conference services came to try and take our room back....good times. Also good times for stakeholder engagement in the political process of sustainable development. I still believe that the stakeholder dialogues introduced for the 1997 Rio+5 Review and which ran until 2002 were the best...