My Love/Hate Relationship with the UN SDGs
By Ben McLain
Senior Impact Advisor
Ben’s passion is equipping and empowering individuals and organizations to display the reality and beauty of God’s Kingdom in the marketplace for the joy and flourishing of all people. Through his experience as a senior executive with Accenture, and ‘intrapreneur' and operations lead for a software and management consulting firm focused on the energy industry, Ben has gained a broad perspective on optimizing the positive impact of businesses and technology. Ben and his wife, Ruth Lee, were married in 2000, have three sons: Hudson, Landon, and Colson, and the world’s sweetest golden retriever, Lucy.
I need to make a confession, of sorts. Two years ago, I wrote a paper for the Christian Economic Forum (entitled “King Jesus and the United Nations”) encouraging Christian investors to embrace the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals[1] and vigorously pursue their achievement.
I made the case that the Bible speaks clearly to each of the issues addressed by the 17 SDGs and that Christians today have a unique opportunity to lead the way in demonstrating excellence and innovation by promoting true flourishing in our world through the achievement of the SDGs. Even more, we may simultaneously accomplish the completion of the Great Commission as we pursue the SDGs through a biblical lens. This vision deeply inspired me and drove me to identify a means by which I could practically engage in this work.
I knew the path would be challenging, but I now believe I overlooked many of the complications and nuances involved with actually implementing a biblical SDG framework in a real-world investment portfolio. It has been a bit of a bumpy journey to date.
I still believe the SDGs are a worthwhile framework, but there are significant flaws, and it will require meaningful collaboration among faith-driven investors to ensure the SDGs are actually useful and beneficial to the Christian investing community.
Developing a Biblical Framework for the SDGs
Late last year, I eagerly joined the team at Impact Foundation. Our unique organizational structure as a steward of hundreds of Donor Advised Funds (we call them “Impact Accounts”) has afforded us the privilege and responsibility of managing a portfolio of companies that currently numbers about 250. My primary role is to shepherd these companies as they seek to maximize their Kingdom impact by supporting their wide-ranging needs and helping them navigate the numerous challenges presented by daily operations and organizational growth.
I have also embarked on an ambitious endeavor to actually implement a biblical framework for the SDGs across Impact Foundation’s portfolio of companies. My goals for this project are:
To determine the real-world value of adopting the SDGs at both a company and a portfolio level.
To develop content that articulates a biblical, Christ-centered philosophy of the SDGs as a counter to the secular-humanist underpinnings many organizations enact upon them. Seems simple enough, right?
A Worthwhile Undertaking
You may be wondering why I believe this is a worthwhile undertaking. I have three primary motivations:
First, the SDGs have garnered widespread adoption in the global investing community and essentially provide a standard taxonomy for the social and environmental outcomes that are the heartbeat of “impact investing”.
The manner in which the SDGs have established collaboration and a common framework throughout the global investing community is rather extraordinary. I believe we would be demonstrating our ignorance of the broader impact investing space if we do not incorporate the SDGs into our communications as we encounter external parties in the marketplace. For example, instead of saying we are focused on “poverty alleviation”, we can report that we are targeting “SDG 1” and most everyone in the global investing community will recognize our intentions. This benefit alleviates some of the challenges we have faced when we say that many of our portfolio companies are focused on “redemptive methodology” (blank stares usually ensue…). Plus, there are fancy icons for each SDG that we can post on our website and in our reports.
A second benefit is that there is an increasingly robust and maturing catalogue of targets, indicators, metrics, and reports associated with the SDGs.
One of the biggest frustrations with “impact investing” is determining and then communicating the actual impact achieved! The past few years has seen significant progress in this area and the SDGs have helped forge collaboration and advanced the standardization of data collection and reporting methods. There is still much room for growth, but by adopting the SDGs an organization gains access to a curated and rapidly improving library of knowledge and tools that enables it to more effectively assess the impact it is making and to communicate that news (both the good and the bad) with its stakeholders. This is one of the areas that I am most excited about implementing at Impact Foundation. I believe having more visibility into the work of our portfolio companies “on the ground” will reveal dramatic stories of God’s activity in our world and will also enable our donor/investors to experience the joy of generosity more deeply.
A third motivation to implement the SDGs in our portfolio is that I believe it will afford us with numerous opportunities to engage with the broader investing community.
Even in the world of COVID, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of seminars, conferences, learning communities, and other groups that are devoted to pressing deeper into the SDGs and exploring how to advance their achievement. I have personally been invited to participate in over a dozen groups that are examining various aspects of the SDGs, such as metrics, outcomes, global awareness, etc. Building on what I advocated in my previous paper, I truly believe these groups provide Christians with an awesome opportunity to demonstrate excellence and innovation as we seek to achieve the SDGs. In my experience, when you truly press into the motivations on why these people are so passionate about causes such as improving the environment or ending poverty, their core is quite hollow because it is based on a secular/humanistic worldview. The message of a loving and self-giving Creator/Redeemer Who actually demands and deserves our worship is a revolutionary concept to many and leads to some riveting conversations. How could I pass up that opportunity?
Obstacles to Implementing the SDGs
Unfortunately, I have discovered that implementing the SDGs is not so simple and there are significant obstacles to overcome.
For example, many of the SDGs are poorly defined and they overlap with one another.
Remember how I said we could replace the term “poverty alleviation” with “SDG 1”? To be truthful, the cause of “poverty alleviation” could legitimately be mapped to SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and arguably 2 or 3 additional SDGs. Would Impact Foundation’s stakeholders be better served if we adopt a custom set of well-defined “causes” instead of adopting the SDGs? Are we reporting with integrity if we claim to be addressing multiple SDGs, when perhaps only one SDG is truly being addressed? How can we actually know where to draw the line between individual SDGs such as “No Poverty” and “Zero Hunger”? At this time, I am not sure of the answers to these questions, and I am hoping to conduct a pilot in the near future to gain clarity on a path forward.
A second challenge involved with implementing the SDGs across our portfolio is that while much progress has been made on developing tools and measurement standards to assess progress on the SDGs, there remains a long way to go in effectively tracking outcomes and determining what “good” is truly being done in the world.
For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping made international headlines earlier this year by declaring “victory over extreme poverty in China”.[2] Xi claimed that nearly 100 million Chinese citizens had been delivered from extreme poverty since he assumed power in 2012. Certainly, this news seems wonderful at face-value and would seem to have little downside. However, when examined more closely the price of such “deliverance” may be quite steep. For example, reports of forced relocation of rural Chinese peasants to urban areas and the involuntary requisitions of Chinese farmers’ lands are widespread.[3] Also, hugely harmful effects on air quality and drinking water safety have been linked to the country’s increasing industrialization.[4] Are such personal freedom and environmental trade-offs simply the “price of admission” for lifting people out of poverty, or are there better, more redemptive ways to accomplish this goal? Are the SDGs the right framework to make this determination?
Another difficulty in implementing the UN SDGs across Impact Foundation’s portfolio is that there is increasing hostility towards biblical ethics and overtly faith-based organizations among many of the world’s leading governing bodies, including some facets of the United Nations.[5]
For many of our donor/investors, the United Nations and other “global” organizations are viewed with suspicion and seen as a serious threat to our religious liberty. Why, then, would we want to embrace their espoused framework and seek to further its advancement? This is certainly a valid concern and my sympathy with it has grown over the past year. While I do see a legitimate cause for worry over the punitive actions being taken towards faith-based organizations (some of which are being labeled as “hate groups”), I still believe that Christians will refute these detractors most effectively and make our case as “societal benefactors” by demonstrating our faith as working through love and emerging as leaders in the achievement of the SDGs for the glory of God and the good of humanity.
A final challenge involved with implementing the SDGs across our portfolio is that many investors remain unfamiliar with the SDGs and significant education is needed to equip them to adequately engage with this framework.
Whereas the majority of the global investor community has quickly adopted the SDGs, Christians – for all the reasons I have outlined above and more – have been slower to hop on the bus. This reality presents an interesting conundrum: some Christian investors are absolutely against the SDGs and have developed a robust rationale on why the UN is evil, while other Christian investors barely give a thought to the UN and have never heard of the SDGs. Given all of the controversy and complexity surrounding the United Nations and the SDGs, is it worth expending all of the resources necessary to educate our donor/investors and articulate our view on the SDGs and how we are implementing them across our portfolio? That is precisely the cost/benefit analysis I am hoping to conduct over the coming months as I engage with our Impact Foundation team, our portfolio companies, and our community of donor/investors.
Are the UN SDGs redeemable?
Given their shortcomings and questionable origins, and their knack for creating controversy and division in the Christian community, can they be used for good? Are the SDGs actually helpful in assessing the impact an individual organization and an investment portfolio is making on the world?
I now realize that these questions do not have quick or easy answers and require meaningful and sustained collaboration for them to be resolved. I welcome the opportunity in the coming months and years to engage as a community of Christian investors to evaluate the value of the SDGs and explore the possibility of effectively implementing these goals across an investment portfolio. Presently, I remain optimistic that the benefits of engaging with the SDGs outweigh the risks, but I hold this conviction loosely and am willing to change my mind on the matter. For now, my love/hate relationship with the SDGs continues…
[1] https://sdgs.un.org/goals
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56194622
[3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2004/03/25/china-forced-evictions-spur-protests#
[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20964129.2020.1779010
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/10/government-restrictions-on-religion-around-the-world-reached-new-record-in-2018/
