The UN’s 2030 Agenda
Much of the United Nations’ programs and activities today are tied to a foundational document entitled The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2030 Agenda was adopted by all UN member states in 2015. Basically, it is the UN’s “blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.”
You can read this document on the UN website: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development or download the print edition here: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The preamble frames the loftiness of this international agreement: “This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity…. All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan…. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets which we are announcing today demonstrate the scale and ambition of this new universal Agenda…. The Goals and targets will stimulate action over the next fifteen years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet.”
By way of introducing the magnitude of this global initiative, the UN provides a sweeping description of the agenda’s scope: “At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.”
The 2030 Agenda is the result of a lengthy policy development process at the UN that dates back more than three decades. The genesis of its environmental goals can be found in Agenda 21, a document that comes from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Agenda 21 highlights a global consensus around the concept on sustainable development to protect the environment. In 2000, the UN’s Millennium Summit came to an agreement on goals to reduce extreme poverty. There were further summits in 2002, 2012, and 2013 that finally led to a 2015 UN meeting where the different threads of policy discussions resulted in a number of international agreements. In September 2015, at its headquarters in New York, the UN achieved success in having its sustainable development agenda adopted by all member countries.
The 2030 Agenda was unveiled as the world’s roadmap for ending poverty, protecting the planet and tackling inequalities. The 17 SDGs are the cornerstone of the Agenda, and they “offer the most practical and effective pathway to tackle the causes of violent conflict, human rights abuses, climate change and environmental degradation and aim to ensure that no one will be left behind. The SDGs reflect an understanding that sustainable development everywhere must integrate economic growth, social well-being and environmental protection.”
The UN summary on this initiative is found on its website, The Sustainable Development Agenda ~ 17 Goals for People, for Planet
Each of the 17 goals are broken down to provide information on the action items. For example, here is the link to the UN’s first goal: End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
It cannot be understated how important this public information is to understanding the UN’s mission and its means to an end. I encourage everyone to take the necessary couple of hours and read through the UN’s goals and action items.
For the purposes of this article’s brief, here are the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals that member countries are to stretch towards and, ideally, reach by 2030.
Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Goal 14: Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
No one will argue that the focus of these goals are worthy and commendable.
However, let’s scratch the surface and look at how the UN proposes to reach the goals. The devil is often in the details – and it certainly is with the UN when one recognizes that this international organization and all of its many agencies are advocating for “world socialism.” The UN’s utopia is a world of international agreements, direct government intervention into all facets of economics and social activities, and a global management of goals and agendas. With the UN’s plan, poorer countries are not supported to aspire to a greater status through growth, but rather wealthier countries must be pulled down to a lower level where all countries’ wealth and economic development are equal.
The all-encompassing set of 17 goals is not driven by a western classical liberal ethos of ensuring a good standard of living by providing conditions for all to excel (that fundamental belief that a high tide lifts all boats). Instead the UN takes a socialist approach where all can be provided for with a global management of sustainable development goals and a redistribution of wealth at the expense of the industrious and independent.
Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, in an analysis of the UN’s worldview dating back to 1985, put it this way: “The UN has been actively promoting a comprehensive and totalitarian system of global management… The overriding UN ideology is one of international control of natural, financial, and informational resources, as well as the global regulation of economic and even cultural activities.”
This reference to Bandow’s article, “Totalitarian Global Management: The UN’s War on the Liberal International Economic Order” was discovered in Dr. Rectenwald’s informative book The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty (2023) – page 234.
As an aside, I must again acknowledge the detailed work of Dr. Michael Rectenwald -- Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019, also teaching at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He is to be commended for his in depth research and analysis of the UN, WEF and WHO global agendas.
Dr. Rectenwald makes the argument that the UN is advancing a model of world government that will centralize government decision making and authority within international organization(s), and will establish an order where their global agendas are managed by stakeholder controls. He is highly critical of the UN’s philosophical bent towards the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The UN presents the socialist’s zero-sum equation where the creation of wealth for one population will produce poverty for another population. The UN’s Marxist contention is that third world and developing nations are “the proletariat” being exploited by the wealthy first world nations.
Dr. Rectenwald writes:
“This, Agenda 2030 promoted socialist redistribution, while relying on envoi-neo-Malthusianism. Underlying this vision is zero-sum thinking. According to this conception, wealth is necessarily represented as a static, fixed sum – not only because resources are regarded as finite but also because growth is considered environmentally unsustainable. This, “equity” can only be accomplished through wealth transfers from the developed to the developing world… “Equity” not only averts the supposed looming environmental catastrophe by reducing consumption in the developed world and “unsustainable” development in the developing world but also allows the agenda to appear humanitarian even while leading to economic loss in the developed world and continued immiseration in the developing world.” (page 248)
The UN has been propagating a narrative where it is the hero-figure Robin Hood. Through the past four decades it has developed an elaborate story of how they must “rob from the rich” to ensure the continuation of humanity.
And with this cursory review of the UN’s sustainable development goals, let’s now consider how the organization is working to establish its centralized government and stakeholder control in order to reach the 17 goals of the 2030 Agenda.