Can we ‘transform our world’ without affecting international power relations? A political analysis of the United Nations development agenda

Abstract

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 thought – which 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.