5. Delivering Our Agenda: a Shared

5. Delivering Our Agenda: a Shared Responsibility
“Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny,
poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities
as well as intolerance and overactivity of repressive states.” Amartya Sen
5.1 Measuring the new dynamics
133. Progress in sustainable development will depend on vibrant economies and
inclusive growth to keep pace with growing populations and longer life expectancies, and
to generate employment, wages, and revenues for social programmes. But for making our
economies inclusive and sustainable, our understanding of economic performance, and
our metrics for gauging it, must be broader, deeper and more precise.
134. We need to reconsider how to account for sustainable production and
consumption patterns in national accounting. Measures that do not distinguish between
socially and environmentally harmful activities on the one hand, and social goods on the
other, that do not account for equity and the distribution of costs and benefits, and do not
include impacts on future generations, will not help us to navigate to a sustainable future.
135. Member States have recognized the importance of building on existing
initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that go
beyond gross domestic product. Thus, work on developing alternative measures or
progress, beyond GDP, must receive the dedicated attention of the United Nations,
international financial institutions, the scientific community, and public institutions.
These metrics must be squarely focused on measuring social progress, human wellbeing,
justice, security, equality, and sustainability. Poverty measures should reflect
the multi-dimensional nature of poverty. New measures of subjective wellbeing are
potentially important new tools for policy-making.
136. To realize the sustainable development agenda, we also need measurable targets
and technically rigorous indicators. Here too, Member States have advanced the process
significantly, by proposing an array of targets, which bring a strong integrating effect, and
go a long way in defining the substance of what we need to achieve. However while
many remain robust and responsive to the goals, others serve better the ongoing work of