The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

Leaving No-one Behind?

Clive Gabay, Suzan Ilcan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138591134
• eBook ISBN: 9780429955099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book represents an unusual intervention in debates about the nature of contemporary international development, where the majority of scholarship tends to concern itself with measuring or collating goal performance. Through a series of analyses of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this book explores development as a political construct, and is concerned with the kinds of epistemological, hegemonic, or politico-economic assumptions built into contemporary development policy, and the ensuing effectiveness the SDGs will have in terms of addressing or perpetuating the historical impoverishment of large groups of people living in poverty. The contributors to the book take issue with many of the assumptions upon which SDGs rest, while also broadening the conversation to pay attention to knowledge production, modernity, colonialism, exclusion, citizenship, and other conceptual insights. In this context, the book raises questions about the discourses and practices of the SDGs, especially in relation to how they can: define the limits of what can be said and what can be done; shape development logics through notions of division and forms of exclusion; construct political problems as technical problems; create certain spaces of imagination as a field of activity; and endorse particular ideas and forms of knowledge in models for sustainable development.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Universal Access to Affordable Housing? Interrogating an Elusive Development Goal

SUSANNE SOEDERBERG

ABSTRACT Universal access to safe and secure housing has long been a central concern of the international development community. Since 2001, this aspiration has taken the form of global benchmarking embodied in the UN Millennium Development Goal 7–11 and its successor the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Despite these targets, hundreds of millions of households continue to be excluded from this basic human right. How might we understand the politics driving the disjuncture between rhetoric and reality? By historically examining the core policy documents, it is suggested that the self-actualising discourse of neoliberalism—in which the housing goals are framed—work to normalise a reality in which the commodification of basic survival needs and individualised self-help are seen as the only viable alternatives in realising decent shelter for all. Moreover, the construction and reconstruction of neoliberalism over the past 15 years has resulted in the increasingly explicit and central role of corporations in delivering housing justice.

Introduction

Member states are obliged ‘to recognise the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living … including adequate food clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. (UN Human Rights, 1966, Article 25.1¹)

Access to adequate and affordable shelter has long been a basic human right. Despite its legal status, the universal right to housing has remained an elusive goal for an ever-increasing number of people across the planet. The United Nations’ (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 7–11 (2001–2020) and its successor, the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG) (2015–2030), are key examples of the compulsion to reach the objective of universal access to affordable housing. These global development platforms operate under the slogan, ‘what gets measured gets done’ (World Bank, 2015a). At first glance, these benchmarking practices appear a useful and even desirable exercise in terms of establishing clear and achievable aims in a complex, ever-changing, and messy world. The MDG 7–11 has even claimed that it met its goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers well in advance of 2020. Upon closer inspection, this headway has not resulted in a meaningful enhancement to the housing conditions of the vast and continually growing number of low-income people. Yet, the disjuncture between rhetoric and reality has not damped the aspiration of promoting global housing goals. Why?

To address this question, the essay engages in a discursive analysis of core policy documents of leading development institutions (UN-Habitat and the World Bank) and global business organisations (World Economic Forum [WEF] and McKinsey & Company). This focus and method require some justification. In the absence of clear blueprint to reach the global development goals, a historically informed macro-level analysis is employed to study the power and paradoxes driving the broad ideological transformations associated with these benchmarks. The emphasis on policy documents is based on the assumption that they are not neutral. Instead, as David Mosse (2005) suggests that, these texts are products of wider policy processes that are best viewed as social relations marked by power. The representation of specific problems, such as the lack of adequate and affordable housing for the poor, and the subsequent prescriptions offered by these global governance institutions have a self-actualising quality in that they affect the daily survival strategies of hundreds of millions of people across the world (Peck & Theodore, 2015).

The essay argues that a core vector of power present in the global housing goals is neoliberalism. The latter describes a broad and dynamic set of practices and processes that support minimal state intervention, privatisation schemes, and commodification of basic social needs such as housing, and individualised forms of self-help. In examining the reconstructions of neoliberalism and identifying dominant patterns of neoliberal restructuring, as it relates to the global housing goal, the analysis highlights two developments. On the one hand, the policy documents mirror what Peck & Tickell (2002) refer to as fail forward strategies in which the only viable solution advanced to the problems caused by neoliberalism is a neoliberal response. As the essay demonstrates, the fail forward strategies have served to depoliticise the past neoliberal failures by repackaging their shortcomings in the neutral and technical terrain of the economy and its self-equilibrating market forces (see also Mitchell, 2002; Soederberg, 2010b, 2014). At the same time, fail forward strategies have facilitated and normalised a significant social change: the increasingly explicit and central role of corporations in shaping the global housing goal.

The essay unfolds in six sections. The first section provides an overview of the MDG 7–11 and SDG 11 and their discontents. The second section explores the World Bank’s 1993 manifesto on housing policy reform, which marks a significant landmark in the neoliberal fail forward strategy to the housing question. The third section highlights some problems emerging from the enabling policy set in place by the World Bank’s 1993 manifesto. The fourth section captures the next wave of fail forward strategy in the global development discourse under the ambit of risk management, which not only reproduces core ideas of the 1993 World Bank publication but also deepens the role of business and markets in achieving housing justice for all by reducing social phenomena to an economic calculus moving along a continuum of challenges and opportunities. To provide a closer look at the politics of risk management, the fifth section elaborates on two policies aimed at achieving affordable housing. The final section concludes by summarising the argument and highlighting areas of future research on the housing question.

Benchmarking Universal Access to Housing

In 2001, the UN issued a list of common goals under the MDG (see Box 1). One such goal (MDG 7–11) involved significantly improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers through adequate housing. Unlike the other MDGs, which were given a 2015 end date, the deadline of the MDG 7-D was extended to 2020. Despite this longer timeframe, the MDG target was not just met but surpassed in 2015. According to the UN, 320 million people have ‘gained access to either improved water, improved sanitation, durable housing or less crowded housing conditions’ (UN, 2015, p. 60). The UN admits that despite meeting its target, it is an insignificant achievement given that vast number of people living in slums—around 828 million in 2015—continues to grow at an alarmingly high rate. In contrast to the MDG 7–11, housing has not only been granted a standalone target under SDG 11: that is, make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable (see Box 1). But also, the specific housing goal in SDG 11 is substantially scaled up. The target of the SDG 11 aims to ‘ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums’ by 2030.²

GLOBAL HOUSING DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Target 11:

Achieve, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers (2001–2020)

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Housing Target:

By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums (2015–2030)

Sources: MDG Retrieved at: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/environ.shtml. SDG Retrieved at: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/cities/

Notwithstanding the relatively more ambitious aim of the SDG 11, both global housing goals share several important characteristics. One such commonality is neoliberalism. The essay explores the neoliberal roots and nature of these goals in the next section. Here, it is useful to highlight several key criticisms raised in the literature about the global housing goals both to reveal continued themes running through each of the above goals and to shed critical light on several ‘self-evident truths’ that have been produced and reproduced through these benchmarking exercises (Gabay & Death, 2015).

To begin with, scholars have criticised the underwhelming aims and the vagueness of the global housing goals (DiMuzio, 2008; Milbert, 2006). This strategy allows the UN to easily claim success with minimal effort whilst also concealing their power, whilst permitting states to evade any binding commitments in meeting the targets that greatly affect the living conditions of a huge proportion of the world’s population (Soederberg, 2007, 2010a). Another objection raised is that UN’s benchmarking exercise is based on absolute numbers of households residing in slums. This metric is argued to be problematic because standards of what constitutes a slum differ across geographies and social classes. In this respect, low-income settlements—informal or otherwise—are not homogenous; but instead are highly diverse in terms of income levels and tenure relations, for example, squatting, renting, and owning (Davis, 2006; Gilbert & Ward, 1985; Huchzermeyer, 2011).

There are also definitional problems attached to the word slum (Gilbert, 2007) that fail to acknowledge power relations. According to official meanings³ employed in the policy documents, settlements without water, for instance, are deemed to be slums. However, for those who reside in the many settlements that do have water, this essential resource remains inaccessible. The primary reason for this is its prohibitive cost, largely linked to the neoliberal transformation of this public good into a privatised commodity (Bakker, 2013). A related criticism raised in the debates about the global goals is the exclusive attention granted to slums. The problem is that relatively poorer people do not live in the slums; but instead are forced to reside outside these spaces due to costs or social exclusion based on gender, case, sexuality, religion, ethnicity/race, age, and so forth (Desai, 1988; Doshi, 2012).

Another relevant criticism raised in the scholarly debates has been the urban-centric nature of the global development goals (Sexsmith & McMcMichael, 2015; see also Roy, 2005). While the emphasis on the urban space is justified by the exponential growth of cities, the uncritical embrace and its neglect of the primary reasons for the unprecedented growth in urban populations is problematic (Brenner & Schmid, 2014). As Lefebvre (2003) argued, the concentration of the urban population cannot be separated from grasping the historically and geographically specific social processes of the capitalist mode of production, especially with regard to the role of agrarian societies. Long-standing rural–urban migration, for instance, has played a central role in urban growth. While there are many reasons for migration from the countryside to the city, much displacement has been induced by capitalist penetration into rural spaces, such as the decimation of small-scale farming through corporate-led land enclosures (land grabs) as well as debt-induced migration to urban centres (Borras & Franco, 2010; Taylor, 2015).

The above critiques reveal not only the broad limitations in the MDG 7–11 and SDG 11. They also reveal particular representations or ‘truths’ of housing insecurity that are mobilised by global governance institutions tasked with framing how these targets should be reached. Specifically, turning the housing problem into a set of simplified metrics relies upon an exclusive focus upon the idea of slums of the global South that are represented as being are occupied by a homogenous and passive population of slum dwellers.

To move beyond these self-evident truths inherent to the MDG 7–11 and SDG 11, we need to confront the key strength of neoliberalism: its ability to consistently de-politicise and de-historicise reality rendering society technical (Bourdieu, 1998; Ilcan & Lacey, 2011; Li, 2011). By examining global policy documents tied to these goals both historically and politically we can begin to understand how and why powerful interests have sought to reconstruct these truths. As noted earlier, the significance of these texts lie in their ability to reassemble and reconstruct—through fail forward strategies—a particular social reality that benefits specific interests (Mitchell, 2002). Here, it is vital to underscore that neoliberal power relations are not just discursive and symbolic in nature. They are equally affected by, and rooted in, the social material foundations of capital accumulation processes. For instance, all international organisations examined in this essay wield monetary power by influencing, either directly or indirectly, who receives funding and on which terms (Soederberg, 2004, 2006).

Manufacturing Neoliberal Truths: Market-led Housing Justice

A significant text was a path-breaking study issued by the World Bank, Housing: Enabling markets to work in 1993. As this section demonstrates, the 1993 World Bank document is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, it represents a turn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: The Shared Humanity of Global Development: Bio-politics and the SDGs
• Introduction: Leaving No-one Behind? The Politics of Destination in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
• 1. Universal Access to Affordable Housing? Interrogating an Elusive Development Goal
• 2. Politics of Poverty: The Post–2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the Business of Agriculture
• 3. Are Equity and Sustainability a Likely Outcome When Foxes and Chickens Share the Same Coop? Critiquing the Concept of Multistakeholder Governance of Food Security
• 4. Politics of ‘Leaving No One Behind’: Contesting the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda
• 5. Migration and Development after 2015
• 6. Re-centring ‘Race’ in Development: Population Policies and Global Capital Accumulation in the Era of the SDGs
• 7. Decoupling: A Key Fantasy of the Post–2015 Sustainable Development Agenda
• 8. The Affective Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnership, Capacity-Building, and Big Data
• Index