Ithaca College

 David Turkon (Anthropology) and Anita Spring (University of Florida, Gainesville) co-organized a roundtable panel on Sustainable Development Goals entitled, ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERROGATIONS OF THE UN'S SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS. The roundtable was peer reviewed and awarded invited status by the Association for Africanist Anthropology and Culture and Agriculture, both subsections of the AAA. David chaired the panel.

 This roundtable interrogated the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that sets the United Nations development agenda to 2030, and asked should anthropologists, who typically work in localized settings, be linking our work to global patterns of inequality in effort to guide such policy development? We sought to identify areas where anthropological research and practice can influence the agenda that will evolve during roll-out, implementation and follow-ups. The International Conference for Science and the International Social Science Council sponsored report describes the SDGs as “a unique tool designed primarily for negotiators, technical support teams and other actors engaged in defining a universal, integrated and transformational set of global goals and targets for sustainable development and the political declaration on the post-2015 development Agenda.” Development experts such as anthropologist Jason Hickel, fault the SDG focus on growing GDP, but also recognize the possibility that the commitment to eradicate poverty can be leveraged to advocate for and guide implementation toward “changing the existing rules of our global economy to make it fundamentally fairer for the world’s majority.” We have seen progress in this area through the anthropological work of Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, which links the battle against infectious disease with the battle against poverty, achieving demonstrable and measurable successes especially in areas of HIV and AIDS and multiple drug resistant tuberculosis.  Indeed, substantive economic and anthropological theory work on the viability of commons could be particularly useful in advocating for agendas that privilege locally driven development strategies over large scale, top down efforts, particularly on intensive agriculture and regional and national economic development.