On the uses and misuses of SDGs, or, on McDonaldization, solutionism, and the Bataillean challenge in sustainability thinking

Alf Michael Rehn

Chapter 14 in Handbook of Grand Challenges in Global Production and Innovation Networks, 2025, pp 277-288 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Abstract: This chapter represents a critical inquiry into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the intention to challenge their revered status and the position they hold in the contemporary policy regime. While the SDGs tend to be acknowledged as something always already positive, they can also be studied as part of a larger regime of control and optimization, illustrated here by Ritzer's term “McDonaldization”, and thus as something that often reduces complex, holistic issues like sustainability into quantifiable metrics, reinforcing an illusion of control. The chapter aims to present alternative readings to such reductionist approaches and what Morozov has referred to as “solutionism”, where technological fixes overshadow deeper, systemic issues. Inspired by Bataille and his repositioning of excess and transgression, the chapter challenges the current commodified and constrained engagements with sustainability and calls for new forms of critique.

Keywords: Critical theory; Mcdonaldization; SDGs; Bataille; Excess (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035346509
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