From Charity to Universality?

Recent issues of Policy and Practice, including this one, have carried articles reflecting on the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be agreed at the United Nations (UN) in September 2015. Many of the articles have pointed at the failings of the Goals’ predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), while others focused on the sector’s focus on aid to the detriment of a more fundamental critique of development discourse. In this article, Hans Zomer, Director of Dóchas, argues that the new SDGs will have a bigger impact on development education (DE) practitioners than they might expect. He suggests that DE and the wider development sector should take the more universal approach adopted by the SDGs to press for sustainable solutions to long-term poverty that move us away from the more dominant and short-term charity model