Though they improve upon the millennium development goals (MDGs), the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) have important draw-backs. First, in assessing present deprivations, they draw our attention to historical comparisons. Yet, that things were even worse before is morally irrelevant; what matters is how much better things could be now. Second, like the MDGs, the SDGs fail to specify any division of labor to ensure success. Therefore, should progress stall, we won't know who is responsible to get us back on track. We won't “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” without an agreement on who is to do what. Third, although the SDGs contain a goal calling for inequality reduction, this goal is specified so that the reduction need not start till 2029. Such delay would cause enormous death and suffering among the poor and enable the rich to shape national and supranational design in their own favor.

The article develops a discourse about equality for children and their recent evolution from adult-centred consideration to definition as a separate, critical constituency as stated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with their child-focused goals and targets. Challenges implementing equality and fairness are discussed, from the World Summit for Children (WSC) in 1990 to the nearly simultaneous ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which gives children agency through its legally binding clauses, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The article reviews past lessons learned and the post-2015 agenda debate, from which worldwide agreement evolved about multidimensional poverty and an equality roadmap. The article suggests social accountability processes to achieve lasting SDG targets. It provides a methodology for implementing social accountability actions, accompanied by examples to mobilise communities and encourage child and youth participation at the local level.

This article assesses the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in terms of their contribution to improved global social governance. As a global policy-making process they are commended. As a set of global social policy aspirations the SDGs are the first global social policy. In terms of the contributions the SDG document makes to improving the architecture of global social governance it is found to fail. It fails in the field of global redistribution, global taxation, global regulation and in the field of the realisation of global social rights. The SDGs document embodies a reversal in policy-making away from a concern to construct improved global governance institutions back to an era of strengthening national sovereignty. The anti-structural adjustment sentiments of the 1980s cast their shadow over attempts to construct a socially responsible globalisation in the 2010s. The SDGs do make suggestions regarding the role of regionalism in meeting the goals and targets and indeed the article suggests reforms in regional social governance might be a more productive route to follow.

The paper examines the notion of global justice in the changing context of International Relations and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved by world leaders in 2015. Structural differentiation of states and the international system is presented as a way to explain limitations and possibilities in the quest of poverty eradication and global justice. The paper ends by assessing how international poverty law and human rights approaches can team up in the search for accountability, defined as the key to transit towards a more just world. It concludes that the political and legal responsibilities emerging from the universal policy agenda of the SDGs (to be implemented according to rights and obligations of states under international law) could pave the way towards global (social) justice.

The UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development impresses with its ambition of transformation, and because it has succeeded in marrying economic, social and environmental goals. This article looks at two interrelated questions. It asks whether and to what extent the Agenda's goals are transformative, but finds numerous omissions and clashes. It also seeks to examine whether the Agenda refers to eco-social policy. Two schools of thought are examined. Both critical theory and sufficiency economics propose shifts in norms, policies and practice – and argue for a “hierarchy reversal”, whereby social and climate justice goals override the economic rationale. The article concludes with a case for instrumentalising the commitments of the 2030 Agenda, but complemented by a subversive approach – injecting radical thinking and action for economic, environmental and social justice. Whether this could succeed in light of political constellations is open, and requires an idealistic faith in the power of ideas.