Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

This thesis examines the assessments constructed by the Sustainable Development Goals under the lens of distributive justice and strong sustainability by exploring the geographic distribution of sub-national development performance across Chile. I hypothesize that the advancements toward the achievement of the SDGs have not been fairly distributed and generally favor areas where wealth and power reside. Despite overall successful national performance on the SDGs, the continuous high levels of inequality, the persistence of a neoliberal economic regime, and a unitary and physically centralized government all raise concerns about the geographic distribution of Chile’s development progress. By disaggregating selected SDG indicators at a municipal scale, this research determines whether national performance masks local concerns for both people and the environment. Through quantitative analysis, sub-national results are assessed on their divergence from national aggregates, on their variations across jurisdictions, and on their correlation to wealth and power. Data is obtained from Chile’s own performance reports to the United Nations and data sources used to calculate the national SDGs. By underscoring the limitation of the SDGs in achieving distributive justice and strong sustainability, the thesis examines the way they assess success for countries, their effectiveness in identifying genuine gaps for governments to work on, and, ultimately, their capacity to reach the fundamental goal of prosperity. As the increasing adoption of the SDGs set guidelines for government officials, acknowledging these shortcomings contributes to expand what must be factored in while using them to protect the same principles under which they were constructed.