The global university sector needs to play a “prominent” part in shaping the next iteration of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), according to the Irish diplomat who helped bring them into being.
David Donoghue said the sector had not been given a “fulsome” role when he and fellow negotiators formulated the 17 goals in 2015. But universities’ determination to embrace the SDGs “as a framework which is relevant to all of their activities” had come as a “pleasant surprise” to Donoghue and other United Nations (UN) delegates.
Now, as the framework enters an “awkward transition period” – with the 2030 deadline approaching, and just 17 per cent of the goals’ 169 targets “on track” to be achieved by then – the sector must assert its weight.
“As we’re preparing for the civil society input into the next agenda, [the] higher education sector needs to be quite prominent – more, perhaps, than it was last time,” Donoghue told Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress (GSDC) in Jakarta.
“I hope that the higher education sector can organise itself so that it can, as it were, make sure that its voice is heard quite loudly. It has a particular status…as one of the actors with kind of wide universal appeal. It needs to work with member states at the UN who are supportive. It needs to identify countries who can advance their interests at the negotiation table.”
