Os objetivos do desenvolvimento sustentável e a legitimação do capital global: uma análise crítica da governança por objetivos

Abstract

The concerns regarding the impacts of the environmental crisis that erupted at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century have gained prominence in the debates and reports of the main international organizations. Such movement has led to several programs and initiatives aimed at reversing/controling the ongoing socio-environmental destruction. The "Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" is one of the most relevant among these initiatives, an ambitious "action plan" intended to guide the global efforts for development until 2030. This agenda, drafted under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), is characterized by its structure based on a new model of multi-stakeholder global governance: a governance through goals. Fundamentally, this model proposes that global problems can be solved by fulfilling a compendium of "aspirations", voluntarily binding, without a rigid system of accountability, popularly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this sense, a departure from traditional multilateral models is observed within the United Nations, generating both hopes and several doubts about its true capabilities, limits, and intentions. Faced with these suspicions, this dissertation aims to elaborate a critical analysis of this new governance model and its implications for the sustainable development project at the UN. To this end, it takes as its starting point the realization of a historical overview of the concept of development up to its current form, sustainable development. It thus seeks to understand the unfolding of contemporary capitalism in its connections with this new framework of global governance, providing an examination of what the emergence of governance by objectives represents for the neoliberal order. Based on authors linked to the critical theory of International Relations, the investigation points to the narrative of global governance as another tool in the neoliberal hegemonic arsenal. Instrumentalized by an emergent transnational capitalist class, such narrative aims to ensure its interests, in the formation of consensus around the economistic and technocratic solutions of a "green capitalism". With a qualitative and exploratory nature, the investigation was based on bibliographic consultation of books and academic journals, interviews, official documents of entities of the UN system, governments, international organizations and institutes specialized in the study of global governance.