In the Multidimensional Space of Goals, or the Difficulty of Achieving Everything at Once

Despite rising tensions in international relations in recent years, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remain a critical benchmark for the global agenda. The slowdown in international trade and capital flows that began after the 2008-2009 global recession—which has become more pronounced in places and been exacerbated by specific political and economic confrontations—has led to viewing the world economy in terms of "slowbalization."¹ Or even in terms of actual or potential deglobalization.² Attitudes toward the UN have also grown more complicated given the Organization's less-than-successful performance in what is arguably its core mandate: international security. These developments call for greater caution toward attempts at international cooperation—particularly under UN auspices—to address humanity's global challenges. At the same time, doubts about the success of collective action don't remove the problem from the agenda; on the contrary, delay may only make it worse. This is the state of the Sustainable Development Goals: global consensus on the importance of the issues raised and the respectability of their rationale coexists with doubts about whether joint solutions can extend far beyond declarations.

The composition of the goals, their specifications, and corresponding indicators naturally face criticism from the scientific and expert community in light of changing circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic was one recent example that prompted a rethinking of the SDGs and the development of proposals for their modification—as in an article by Sergey Bobylev (Moscow State University) and Leonid Grigoryev (HSE), who noted the possibility of refining nearly every goal in light of new circumstances.³ Nevertheless, the overall palette of 17 goals in effect since 2015 appears comprehensive.

At the same time, examining efforts and results toward achieving these goals suggests that global goals and measures to achieve them are "the tip of the iceberg," while the real work and practical successes lie at the national level. One illustration is the eradication of global poverty—SDG 1—which heads the list of Goals. The trajectory of the share of the extremely poor population (using the current lower poverty threshold of $3 per day per capita under the UN SDG methodological approach) globally demonstrated progress in line with global poverty reduction efforts, especially from 2000 to 2015—the period of the Millennium Development Goals, the previous version of the SDGs (Figure 1). Against this backdrop, however, China's progress stands out: it managed to virtually eliminate extreme poverty within 15 years, starting from levels far above the global average. Meanwhile, poor countries, while showing some improvement by the mid-2010s, did so at a pace well below the global average, and since 2015 the situation there has actually deteriorated. But global progress also slowed sharply after extreme poverty virtually disappeared in China—that is, after 2015, the very year the Sustainable Development Goals were launched. According to UN estimates, maintaining current trends would only reduce the share of the poor population globally to 8.9% by 2030, rather than eliminating it entirely as planned.⁴

When considering prospects for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, it's important to answer two questions: first, how they align with the national goals of major countries, and second, how different goals relate to one another. Major countries, as China's example with poverty shows, have the potential to make decisive contributions to changing the global situation. Naturally, some portion of the extensive SDG agenda will be covered at the national level in any case. Problems arise because the SDGs themselves may be viewed as not entirely consistent with one another, to say nothing of the interpretations they acquire in national contexts.

One widely discussed variant of such internal inconsistency is the so-called "new Rodrik trilemma."⁵ In 2024, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik proposed that three policy directions are incompatible with one another: preventing climate change, reducing global poverty, and protecting the interests of the middle class in developed countries. The essence of this trilemma is that it's impossible to combine all three directions—progress on any two of them will inevitably lead to deterioration in the third. At first glance, this seems intuitively clear. If we pursue climate goals and attempt to transform the energy sector, achieving improved energy efficiency and a fundamental shift in the structure of global energy consumption, but don't want these requirements to constrain the economic development of less wealthy countries, then taxpayers in the developed world—primarily the middle class—will have to pay for this, either directly or indirectly. If priority is given to prosperity in purely economic terms both in poor countries and in the developed world, then reliable prevention of climate change will have to be abandoned, since achieving high results everywhere exclusively through green technologies remains quite difficult for now. Finally, if taxpayers in developed countries are unwilling to bear the burden of the global transition to a green technological base, then the additional costs imposed on developing countries will slow their escape from extreme poverty—or at least their income convergence with the developed world. We economists from Moscow State University, together with colleagues from MGIMO and a number of other researchers, examined in greater detail the options for distributing responsibility and the possibilities for balancing interests within global climate policy in our recent study.⁶

Two of these three directions are part of the SDGs—climate protection (SDG 13, and partly SDG 7 "Affordable and Clean Energy") and the fight against poverty (directly SDG 1, and indirectly a number of other goals). The third—supporting the middle class—doesn't appear to figure directly in the SDGs, but first, it does appear partially, for example, in SDG 8 "Decent Work and Economic Growth," and second, and most importantly, no state can exclude it from its national goals in one form or another. And if it isn't realized, then populist parties and politicians may come to power in these states, fundamentally distancing themselves from the UN SDGs at least in certain aspects—which is already happening in practice in some places.

With regard to Russia, in answering the question about the relationship between national and global goals within the framework of the MSU Scientific and Educational School "Mathematical Methods for Analyzing Complex Systems," my colleagues and I assessed in early 2025 the compatibility of the UN SDGs and Russia's National Development Goals (NDGs), approved by Presidential Decree No. 309 of May 7, 2024,⁷ taking into account the multitude of tasks and target indicators formulated in both cases. As a result, it turned out that of the 169 UN SDG targets, just over half align with Russia's NDGs, although compared to the previous iteration of Russian national goals, there has been undeniable progress in this direction. This is partly due, of course, to the fact that a significant portion of the SDGs are "tailored" to the needs of very poor countries and are fundamentally irrelevant for Russia. But there are also substantive discrepancies, and one of the main gaps lies precisely in the sphere of energy efficiency and renewable energy—that is, essentially in the area of climate issues. And if we analyze the "core" of the intersections between the SDGs and NDGs, the economic aspect predominates over the environmental and social. This suggests that although Russia entered the ranks of high-income countries in 2024 by World Bank criteria, the Russian state in its priorities remains more in the logic of developing countries, focused more on raising material prosperity than on comprehensively improving people's quality of life.

In attempting to identify and subsequently choose a more balanced development trajectory both at the national and global levels, it seems advisable to think in at least two directions. One of them is understanding that universal solutions are few, and finding a unified approach for the entire diversity of states won't work—and in Russia's case, even at the regional level—and that national priorities can and should be adjusted in one direction or another. In a forthcoming article by my colleagues Ekaterina Yakovleva, Anastasia Baraboshkina, and Maria Didenko, also within the framework of the aforementioned scientific and educational school, a classification of Russian regions has been developed based on their position in the space of social, environmental, and economic tasks of the SDGs and NDGs.⁸ The authors found that Russian regions can be divided into four clusters. The first cluster, the most successful on average in implementing the NDGs, turned out to be not entirely balanced among economic, social, and environmental components, with a bias toward the first aspect. This cluster includes, for example, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tatarstan, and Sverdlovsk Oblast. The second cluster (which includes, for example, Moscow, Leningrad, Vladimir, and Kaluga oblasts) appears more balanced and even sustainable in its development trajectory, especially in terms of the environmental component, although less successful in implementing the NDGs. The third cluster shows a lag in the NDGs but has a stronger social orientation, while the fourth shows moderate achievements in the NDGs, decent economic and technological results, but has the most unbalanced assessments. This analytical approach provides grounds for managing regions more flexibly and adjusting the incentives coming from the center for implementing both the NDGs and SDGs to compensate for emerging gaps.

The second direction consists of finding ways out of contradictions similar to "Rodrik's new trilemma." The author himself partly reassures readers that a reasonable compromise may be found, but the fundamental way out of the trilemma most likely lies in the sphere of supporting research and development that makes the use of green technologies and inclusive mechanisms of economic growth not only morally correct or reducing long-term risks, but also priorities in terms of medium-term economic viability. This choice can be achieved through a system of high penalties, demanding quotas, and other regulations, but given the impossibility or extreme complexity of building global monitoring and ensuring symmetrical regulatory approaches throughout the world, the risks of circumventing them in one form or another—for example, the formation of "carbon leakage" in various formats—are very high. Reducing the costs of sustainable solutions through technology diffusion—that is, a "carrot" for economic agents—seems likely to be more effective than the stick in choosing a balanced approach to the development of countries and industries.