A postcolonial feminist critique of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: A South African application

In September 2015, world leaders formally adopted the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, more commonly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are a global target-setting development agenda aimed at ending poverty, tackling climate change, and ensuring peace and prosperity for all by 2030. The SDGs have been lauded for improving on their predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by broadening the global development agenda to include environmental, social, economic and political concerns, and for, in the process of their formulation, engaging with member states and civil society. The SDGs can further be commended for broadening the scope of targets under the goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Nevertheless, this article concludes that the MDGs and SDGs fall into the same traps. The article employs a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to critique the SDGs and then applies this critique to the achievement of substantive gender equality in South Africa. The critique is guided by four factors: power, agency, neoliberal economics and indigenous knowledge, which are also applied/extended to the South African National Development Plan. The article argues that adherence to a liberal feminist and neoliberal framework impedes gender justice and a better life for women on the ground. Postcolonial feminism is held up as an alternative (and superior) lens to not only better understand how power inequalities operate and manifest in gendered ways, but also to demand and effect real change through attention to local issues of agency and voice.