The article offers a critical analysis of the United Nations 2030 Global Development Agenda, whose stated aim is to "transform the world" in such a way that no one is left behind. Drawing on post-Marxist theory, we argue that the 2030 Global Development Agenda is a fantasmatic narrative seeking to conceal the conflictual causes and the antagonistic origins of global development and sustainability issues. Within this fantasmatic narrative, ‘sustainable development’ is the empty signifier that articulates and sustains the agenda’s discourse. Our analysis of the ontological assumptions underpinning the documents that frame the agenda shows that, rather than transforming, the agenda naturalizes and consolidates the existing status quo: a status quo that has created (and continues to perpetuate) the global problems that the agenda aims to solve.
The Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals are the latest instalments of a development endeavour started by the United Nations (UN) after WWII. This article conducts a discourse analysis of the UN development agenda, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxist thoughtwhich combines post-structuralist discourse analysis and Marxist (Gramscian) political analysis. The essay exposes the ontological tenets underlying the UN's agenda, and how it conditions the way social issues are understood and addressed. It explains how the agenda conceals the political dimension of development and sustainability debates. Rather than 'transform our world', the UN development agenda 1) hinders practices that would truly transform it in terms of more emancipation and justice, and 2) subtly reinforces the power dynamics that sustain the status quo in which underdevelopment, poverty, inequality and exclusion emerged.
Guatemala -motivated him to propose a doctoral dissertation on the discursive dimension of development theories. While developing his doctoral dissertation in the University of the Basque This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Third
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