Millennium Development Goals | DemocracyWorks: A Blog of the National Democratic Institute

The Missing SDG Indicators: Accelerating gender equality and empowerment

Women leaders in India, where the constitution dictates that one third of seats in local entities are reserved for women. Photo by: Gangajit Singh Chandok / U.N. Women / CC BY-NC-ND

To achieve a world “in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social, and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed,” will require political action — leadership, commitment and accountability. The U.N.’s “Transforming Our World” sustainable development framework, which will be adopted by the General Assembly in the coming days, is the latest call to action. We will all be judged on what we do over the next 15 years to make that ambition into an empowered reality for women and girls. Sustainable development goal 5 to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” expands significantly on the Millennium Development Goals by detailing in a single goal a full range of issues and actions that will drive success. However, in the proposed indicators, which anchor accountability for the new global framework, critical metrics for women’s participation in political life and public decision-making are missing.

Will there be a fourth democratic wave?

As the Cold War came to a close, renowned political scientist, professor and author, Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed the end of history. He said humankind had reached the endpoint of its “ideological evolution,” and Western liberal democracy had won out as the “final form of human government." At around the same time, another influential political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington wrote that the world was in the middle of a “third wave” of democratic expansion. But 23 years later, the third democratic wave has hit a wall. According to Larry Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, the rapid democratic expansion, which began in the 1970s and continued until 2005, is now in recession.

There’s No Sustainable Development Without Good Governance

With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire this year, attention is turning to a new priority - Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which are being negotiated now and are scheduled to be adopted in late September.

As the world contemplates this new agenda, good governance needs to be a priority.