Inter Press Service: Sustainable Development Goals: One of the Greatest Fun Things in the World!?
Inge Kaul, adjunct professor at the Hertie School of Governance and first director of UNDP’s Offices of the Human Development Report and Global Development Studies

“…[P]rogress toward meeting the SDGs still faces a number of obstacles that require major reforms in the global economy and an improvement in the functioning of the system of international cooperation. … [T]his is not the time for fun travel from one international SDG meeting to another, a pattern that has become rather popular after 2015. … The key missing element, which prevents scaled-up and accelerated progress, is the willingness to start ‘walking the talk,’ that is, to act unilaterally and, as and when necessary, collectively with the requisite sense of urgency on the most pressing, high-risk challenges. … To facilitate the emergence of such a strong worldwide movement of change advocates, the series of annual ‘SDG Festivals’ could be discontinued and the U.N. could encourage the festival partners: (1) to lend their support instead to the hard work of transformative change … and (2) to use available resources to offer a global platform for interaction and cooperation to the recently sprung-up but steadily growing and already world-spanning movement of ‘Fridays for Future’ [– a peoples movement following the call from climate activist Greta Thunberg to school strike]…” (5/6).