At the height of the global financial crisis in 2008, numerous commentators were keen to consign neoliberalism to the dustbin of history.

 

Six years later, we are witnessing not the retreat of neoliberal globalization but its continued virulence. In short neoliberal globalization is continuing to restructure the world economy and social order to further expand and consolidate monopoly capitalist rule and safeguard the conditions for further capitalist accumulation.

 

With the overwhelming evidence of persistent poverty, deepening inequality, ecological degradation and climate change accelerating under neoliberal globalization, elites are desperately proposing new pathways towards “sustainable development” that “leaves no one behind” and protects the planet all at the same time.

 

In this context, the UN system is now engrossed with coming out with a new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” and a “Post-2015 development framework” to succeed the Millennium Development Goals which are supposed to have achieved by 2015. These new goals and new framework will be agreed by Heads of States and Governments at the Development Summit to be held at the UN Headquarters in September 2015. But will these new SDGs succeed where the MDGs failed?

 

Will they really commit to a new paradigm of development or merely try to rescue the old paradigm by attempting to reconcile continuous growth in profits with eradicating poverty, narrowing inequality, and respecting the planet’s ecological limit?