Temporality in the United Nations 2030 Agenda: development or rupture?

Abstract

Time is a constitutive element of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations (UN). This article analyses how the 2030 Agenda articulates time – i.e. how its discourse connects past, present and future. This analysis shows how the agenda partially breaks with the 19th-century evolutionist assumptions that pervaded previous UN development policies and strategies. On the one hand, the 2030 Agenda implicitly assumes that a historical rupture is needed to shift the world towards a sustainable path in order to avert a civilisational crisis, and that the history of modern, industrialised Western countries is no longer exemplary in this respect. On the other hand, the 2030 Agenda fails to integrate the need for a historical rupture consequentially: it falls into contradictions and continues to replicate the linear logics that caused the very problems that the agenda aims to solve. ‘Development or rupture?’ seems to be the troublesome and difficult dilemma that haunts the UN’s endeavour to transform the world.