When the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, they embodied a rare global metanarrative, infused with the Enlightenment ambitions of reason, progress, and moral responsibility. Seventeen goals, 169 targets — poverty eradicated, inequality reduced, the planet saved — promised measurable solutions through collective effort. They offered not just technical benchmarks but a sweeping story of shared purpose, a belief that globalization could inspire cooperation across borders to deliver a fairer and more sustainable world.
A decade later, that story has begun to fray. The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 hastened the erosion of global development consensus and the collapse of multilateralism. U.S. foreign aid, long a linchpin of Global South initiatives, was slashed, with USAID programs gutted or redirected toward transactional, security-driven goals. Multilateral institutions face crises of legitimacy and dwindling resources. The grand vision of the SDGs, already struggling against geopolitical rivalries and economic shocks, now looks increasingly out of step with reality.
As French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argued in The Postmodern Condition, our era is defined by the end of grand narratives and the rise of “little narratives” (petits récits). The SDGs — once envisioned as a universal story of global progress — now confront both intellectual malaise and practical collapse. Adam Tooze, in his September 8, 2025 Foreign Policy essay “The End of Development,” contends that the SDGs were aspirational rather than achievable, their lofty ambitions unmatched by political will or institutional capacity. For Tooze, the future of development lies not in salvaging a faltering metanarrative but in embracing plural, localized strategies: fewer priorities pursued with determination, context-specific sequencing instead of a checklist of seventeen targets, and strengthened domestic institutions. In this fractured world, development must be reframed as a constellation of small, messy, local narratives that sustain resilience and progress.
This turn toward “little narratives” is already visible. Across the globe, local initiatives, city networks, and grassroots movements are advancing poverty reduction, tackling inequality, and innovating climate adaptation. Even in the absence of global coordination, communities persist in building solutions from the ground up. The United States — often seen as the emblem of centralized power — illustrates this vividly. Community-based organizations, mutual aid networks, participatory budgeting, and local environmental projects continue to meet urgent needs when federal systems falter. During the COVID-19 pandemic, neighborhood groups distributed food, offered healthcare, and provided support to vulnerable populations, often more swiftly than official programs. These dispersed initiatives show how, when the grand narrative collapses, small narratives proliferate to carry progress forward.
Bangladesh offers parallel lessons. Long before the SDGs, community-led development emerged as a response to poverty and vulnerability to natural disasters. Microfinance institutions like Grameen Bank and BRAC enabled millions of rural women to become economic actors, reshaping household and community dynamics. Women-led cooperatives created both income streams and platforms for political participation. In cyclone-prone coastal regions, local communities developed innovative adaptation strategies — floating farms, makeshift embankments, and disaster shelters — often without waiting for state or international interventions. More recently, community-driven solar power projects have brought electricity to villages beyond the reach of the national grid, underscoring how grassroots energy initiatives can support both livelihoods and environmental sustainability. These initiatives do not erase the need for systemic reform, but they highlight the resilience and agency rooted in small-scale practices.
Yet the decline of the SDGs as a unifying framework also exposes a deeper crisis of legitimacy. The agenda was hobbled by a $4 trillion annual funding shortfall, deepened by the pandemic and debt crises. The promise of “blended finance” collapsed as private capital bypassed poorer nations, leaving loans instead of grants and climate pledges underdelivered.
Three outcomes now overlap: cynical fragmentation (rhetoric without delivery), local empowerment (grassroots projects sustaining progress), and nostalgic symbolism (the SDGs surviving as moral reference points). Global governance has become a patchwork of competing agendas — China’s Belt and Road, the EU’s Green Deal, the US Inflation Reduction Act — all advancing sustainability through strategic advantage rather than solidarity. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” accelerated this competitive fragmentation, pushing smaller states like Bangladesh to balance investment opportunities against new dependencies.
Dhaka Opinion Magazine is a global/international opinion magazine. It publishes for you all. The magazine publishes with the aim to help address concerns, improve conditions, solve problems and mitigate conflicts all over the world. Your support is important for the esteemed magazine. You can sponsor the magazine and/or donate to it…
The consequences of this fragmentation are stark. Wealthier nations are pouring resources into green transitions, digital infrastructure, and health surveillance, while poorer nations confront mounting debt, climate disasters, and underfunded social sectors. Bangladesh exemplifies this tension: rising sea levels, river erosion, and extreme weather that threaten millions, yet concessional finance is shrinking. Here, Tocqueville’s lesson is clear: when central systems falter, local communities remain the backbone of resilience. Women’s cooperatives, climate-adapted farming, and community-based disaster response embody precisely the civic initiative needed to sustain progress in the absence of global consensus.
Still, the SDGs retain symbolic weight. Even if their machinery falters, they endure as moral vocabulary — invoked by governments, NGOs, universities, and corporations as a compass for advocacy. But rhetoric without enforcement risks deepening cynicism. Lofty speeches about ending poverty and saving the climate ring hollow against the backdrop of surging military expenditures and competitive aid politics. The SDGs may persist less as operational goals than as fragments of a vanished global imagination—a reminder of what the world once aspired to, even as new realities intrude.
The prospects of sustainable development, then, hinge less on reviving grand narratives than on cultivating plural small ones. The task is to reimagine development not as a single, universal arc but as a mosaic of localized stories: messy, adaptive, and grounded in the resilience of communities. From city networks in the Global North to village cooperatives in Bangladesh, from grassroots climate initiatives to neighborhood health projects, these small narratives — backed by smarter financing, local empowerment, adaptive multilateralism, and renewed solidarities — carry forward the work that grand visions can no longer sustain.
The end of grand narratives, in Lyotard’s sense, need not be the end of hope. It may mark instead the beginning of a more realistic, if fragmented, approach — development as the aggregation of countless local efforts which, taken together, can still amount to global transformation.
Resolving this crisis requires both structural and local solutions. Financing must be reframed—moving from loans to grants, introducing global taxes on digital trade and carbon emissions, and redirecting fossil fuel subsidies toward social and climate investments. Local actors should be empowered through direct support for grassroots projects, city networks, and community innovations. Multilateralism must adapt into smaller, task-oriented coalitions while regional banks and civil society gain a stronger voice in shaping priorities. Countries should adopt smart sequencing, focusing first on food security, climate resilience, and institutional capacity before pursuing broader targets.
With North–South dialogue in sharp diminution, reinvigorated South–South cooperation is no longer optional, it is essential to share knowledge, mobilize resources, and build collective resilience. Diaspora engagement and transnational coalitions can further strengthen these solidarities beyond failing global frameworks. Finally, even as the machinery of the SDGs falters, their symbolic force must be restored as a living vocabulary that not only inspires advocacy and transparency but also animates tangible action at every level — from local communities to global networks.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Magazine and its editorial team. Views published are the sole responsibility of the author(s).
