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Leaders of today: Hannah Stanton on sustainable development and the power of youth

Ida Scharla Løjmand — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 23:05:33 +0000

In November, the Association of Foreign Affairs at Malmö University had the pleasure of hosting a lecture with Hannah Stanton, programme director of TheGoals.org, an online learning platform for creating awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).

Hannah Stanton, 2016

Hannah Stanton has previously led the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) delegation to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women and the Agenda 2030 negotiations. Currently, she focuses on her work in the UN Major Group for Children and Youth and as director of TheGoals.org.

TheGoals.org is an interactive web app created to educate young people in the age of 14 to 30 years about the SDG’s. The aim is to inspire the users to take action against climate change, gender inequality, and hunger or in other ways work to fulfill UN’s 17 SDG’s. The philosophy of TheGoals.org is that education can appear in various forms and forums different from traditional school. And according to Hannah Stanton, such a platform connects young people pursuing a more sustainable world and shapes the future decisionmakers.

A world of unlocked potential

Hannah Stanton gained her own leadership skills and experience working with young people through the girl scout movement. She has attended various international events, meeting scouts from all over the world and she strongly believes the young generation has the power to push for a more sustainable world.

The sustainable development goals projected on the UN headquarters, New York 2015

One may wonder what a teenager can do to stop climate change or what difference a student from the far North can make for women in Zambia. When asked why it even matters to involve young people who are not influential decision-makers, Hannah Stanton answers resolutely:

“The unlocked youth potential is the biggest driving force of making a change. We are dealing with the most growing generation – look at a country like Jordan where 65 percent of the population are under 30. Not using this group would be a huge loss. Youth is often disregarded and not included. If we can affect this, the decision-makers cannot neglect the youth anymore.”

She also stresses the importance of influencing the young generation from the beginning:

“Young people are still learning and if we can shape their behavior to be sustainable from the start they do not have to relearn anything. The older people, including ourselves, have to learn a lot of new things. If we give the young people a good start, they can be responsible adults from the beginning.”

Hannah Stanton at Malmö University 2017

Different kinds of change

So according to Hannah Stanton, we are dealing with a huge generation – as more than half of the world’s 7 billion population is under 30 years – of potential to change, just waiting to be realised. And even though the background and resources of those young people vary, she believes that the young generation can make much more of a difference than some people might assume.

“What exactly young people can do depends on where they come from and what kind of agency they have,” she says and brings up an example from her work as UN Major Group for Children and Youth Global Focal Point for SDG 14 (Conservation and sustainable use of the oceans):

“Look at the small island states – or large ocean states as I think they should be called – for example. Here we need to bridge the gap of understanding between young people in the islands and in other landlocked countries. Government indicators may not be the best tool for this purpose. The young people in landlocked countries need to understand how our consumption behaviours and climate change impact put these islands at risk, and how we can change and stop that to save our ocean and the islands.”

Young participants at the UN Ocean Conference, June 2017

She admits that there is a difference between the youth and the older decision-makers who set the indicators for sustainable development. However, according to Hannah Stanton, this is not an obstacle for younger people to contribute to change.

“For me, the focus here is understanding the global context and what I can contribute with and not so much thinking ‘I need to ensure sustainable fisheries in the small island states’,” she says and turns her eyes towards the ceiling with a grimace. “I mean, that can be overwhelming or just too far from home for some. Now, if you are into marine biology or work in an environmental group, that will be closer to home and will be your focus. But for me, at this stage the most important part is that young people globally understand the significant impact our lives and lifestyles have on the ocean and the significant impact the ocean has and will have on our lives.”

So, what should the young people do once they achieve this understanding? According to Hannah Stanton, this is again a matter of context.

“In this part of the world [the West/Nordic countries, ed.], we must change our consumption patterns and transport manners and lead by example. I think those tasks are the easiest for us to fulfill, for instance here in Malmö,” she says. “For other parts of the world, I think the issue is to not develop like a developed country but to be sustainable from the beginning and not fall into the trap of seeing owning 50 types of the latest car model as a status symbol. To make sure to recycle, not burn the plastic, and so on.”

Hopes to inspire

To think less materialistically seems easy for a well-educated woman living in Sweden, one of the world’s most affluent and gender equal countries. Young people from a poor country, who compare their life to the ideal presented in the media, might find it easier to relate to the strive for owning a car than for conserving the oceans. But this manner of thinking is also a thing Hannah Stanton aims to address with TheGoals.org.

Hannah Stanton, 2016

“We are hoping that this materialistic aspiration is just not encouraged by the way we educate [on TheGoals.org, ed.], for example by providing realisations like that you need to wear a piece of clothing 80 times in order for it to be sustainable,” she explains. “If we succeed, we will have the first sustainable generation. And I hope – well, i am sure – that we can do that.”

The belief in the power of the youth is crystal clear when Hannah Stanton talks. Despite global differences, she firmly maintains her trust in the people’s ability to make a change already while they are young.

“I hate – with passion – the notion of ‘leaders of tomorrow’,” she says. “We are all leaders of our lives today. The choice I make today has an impact today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and so on. I am not the leader of tomorrow, I am very much the leader of today.”

By Ida Scharla Løjmand

Photo Credit:

SDG Media Zone by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hannah Stanton by United Nations Development Programme, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

UN Headquarters by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

UN Ocean Conference by United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hannah Stanton by by United Nations Development Programme, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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A Path to Prosperity? The Place of the Private Sector in the Sustainable Development Goals

Taminka Hanscamp — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 10:24:24 +0000

No poverty, prosperity for all and a healthy planet by 2030: this is the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Set in 2015 this quixotic set of 17 goals is deliberately more aspirational compared to the eight concrete Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which underpinned the UN agenda on international development from 2001 to 2015. The MDGs alongside the optimism and momentum of the Make Poverty History Campaign, microfinance and the Fairtrade label defined much of the development work and discourse in the first 15 years of the twenty-first century. Progress was made, child mortality was cut in half and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries dropped from 47 per cent in 1990 to 14 per cent in 2015 (UN, 2016). However, whilst purporting to have learnt from, and improve the development agenda since the MDGs, the SDGs are still plagued with problematic westerncentric assumptions.

The MDGs essentially targeted Sub-Saharan African countries and were often critiqued for providing a one-sided, top down transfer of assistance from the Global-North to the Global-South. Since the implementation of the MDGs International development discourse has become more aware of how it can be neo-colonialist, paternalistic and dismissive and this is reflected in the broader, more inclusive focus of the SDGs. For example, in addition to no poverty and zero hunger, the goals address reducing inequality, responsible consumption and production and climate action, issues that affect and originate from countries across both the Global-North and Global-South.

The naming of the goals under the ‘sustainable development’ banner reflects this at a normative level as well. Sustainable development evokes ideas of capacity building rather than dependency, self determination, environmentalism, and a long term, intergenerational outlook. Therefore the SDGs signal a shift at least in understanding, recognising that the Global-North has a responsibility, not only its aid and development work but also at a domestic level to address global issues of inequality, discrimination and environmentalism. Nonetheless with the expansion of globalisation the interrelationship and inter-causality of the issues that the SDGs address becomes even more important.

The MDGs were limited in scope to address very traditional areas of concern within the development and non-government sphere and provided little invitation to civil society, the private sector or public institutions to share in the responsibility or initiatives designed to tackle the issues. The SDGs however have deliberately emphasised the role of the private sector and state bodies. For the private sector this is fairly consistent with new focuses and projects on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its related counterparts.

It is appropriate that the private sector be included and recognised as potential key contributors to the realisation of the SDGs. This reflects the reality of our globalised world.

Further the SDGs engage a holistic approach that recognises how achieving health, education and a healthy environment relate to each other and how aiming for these things presupposes and can lead to, other development outcomes such as jobs, peace, justice and partnership. However, before this innovative and holistic approach is accepted on its face, the underlying causes and contributors that have prevented the realisation of these outcomes needs to be appreciated. At an oversimplification, hunger and preventable diseases continue to kill not because we do not know how to address them but because we prioritise industry, patents, profits and greed.

There remains an inherent hypocrisy and impossibility in expecting the private sector to help reduce inequality and promote responsible consumption and production. At the most basic level the goals operate within a capitalist mandate. A mandate which supposes that accumulation of wealth for personal gain is a primary good.

How are the companies that predicate their existence on this assumption and their survival on the basis that customers adopt the same practice, expected to redress global inequality?

At a panel discussion on implementing the SDGs in the business sector, hosted at Lund University on November 16 in conjunction with the Swedish Aid Department FUF and the Lund UN chapter, Mats Svensson, International Secretary at IF Metall discussed the landmark industrial trade union agreement achieved with H&M to ensure local enforceable workers rights and conditions. The work of IKEA, H&M and others should be applauded and their practices are deserving of recognition and are certainly a lot better than many competitors, however analysing their application points to the hypocrisy of the goals. If H&M have worked to achieve decent work conditions for the employees in their supply chain, it is partly at the cost of promoting responsible consumption and production.

The thousands of employees that now have ‘good jobs’ are able to do so because of the required mass production that fuels quick product turnover which directly opposes responsible consumption at an individual level. Also at this panel IKEA’s Global Communication Manager of Next Generation Social Entrepreneurs Ann-Sofie Gunnarsson talked about the innovative CSR work done by IKEA. For one project, IKEA invests in training entrepreneurial women in selected rural locations in developing countries to build handicraft businesses and then aims to sell these products in their stores. However good this might be, the impact of the best handicraft initiative is still dwarfed by what could be achieved if IKEA stopped dodging taxes. If the money they cleverly avoid paying in taxes went to the governments of the countries where these initiatives occur, the conditions, infrastructure and accountability needed to achieve ‘development’ for the people targeted in these projects would be allowed to occur at the local level. Yet, achieving tax justice is not addressed by most actors who are apparently on board with the SDGs. One estimate suggests that in 2008 developing countries lost more than USD $160b through two forms of multinational corporate tax dodging, those same countries collectively received USD $120b in aid the following year.

Whilst the inclusion of the private sector in the SDGs is appropriate, for it to have integrity, the private sector needs to realise and address their underlying practices which contribute to the global issues that the SDGs aim to address. If this does not happen, it remains easy to be cynical and consider the work done through CSR to simply be about positive branding.

The legacy of colonialism is once again seen to rear its head through the inclusion of the private sector in the SDGs, whilst western economies were allowed to develop and profit from their histories of exploitation and are only now expected to implement sustainable practice, initiatives and organisations in the Global-South are now subject to these checks from the outset. This is seen in the IKEA handicraft project which ensures that the rural, small-scale businesses they support, are mandated to remain just that, small-scale and rurally based. Thus, the women will now have some income, skills and experience but they are prevented for aiming for the larger profit margins and mass production that allows IKEA to be a globally successful company.

The reality of the world as one plagued with inequality, poverty and suffering cannot and should not be ignored. There will always be dispute and cause for critique about how these problems are being tackled. Nonetheless, the SDGs remain an important, normative and unified agenda for addressing these issues. The inclusion of the private sector allows for greater force and diversity in the approaches adopted to address the SDGs. It is unlikely the 17 goals and 169 subgoals will be achieved by 2030 but just as the SDGs changed to incorporate the lessons learnt from the progress made in the MDGs, so too success may be better measured not in what is achieved but by what is challenged and changed in the process.

Taminka Hanscamp

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