Are we "rainbow washing" with SDGs or are we just impatient?

A recent paper, published in SciDevNet is indicating that the SDGs are a re-label of what is already being done. The paper is very critical but is maybe not considering how change happens in the world.

For a large corporation to change, from seeding the idea in the board, to widespread implementation, it can take up to 2-3 years. This is the time it takes for new stuff to go through the internal bureaucracy, to the frustration of many top leaders.

In the public sector, it is not entirely different. In a local government in Denmark, an idea seeded by NGOs will take a long time before it turns into politics and real action for a person. I have tried to illustrate this in the below graph with the SDGs in the public sector as an example.

So change should take time. With the SDGs, we need transformational change, on areas where we collectively need to think, talk and act in new ways.

The dilemma is that we are all hungry for change and instead of expecting a slow beginning, we tend to have a linear expectation to change. This makes governments and companies rush for “quick wins” to manage the typical panic gap. When we do this, we are communicating without having real outcomes to talk about.

And that gap is always largest when discussing alternative solutions and when we really only have indicators of what would work. It is when we are having the maximum distance between our linear expectation to change and the speed of real change, that we sometimes throw away the well-intended actions for change, or get accused of “rainbow washing”.

The SDGs require entire societies to transform on areas such as what we eat, how we build and maintain our houses and how we buy things from each other on a global scale. This will take time, and it will take some cool-headed leaders to ensure that we do not throw away our common goals just because they are hard to reach.

Tomorrow, in the Danish parliament there will be a hearing on the progress of the SDGs. My guess, without knowing the progress is that there will be signs of positive change, but also the reverse, but looking forward to about the progress.

I really hope that parliamentarians will remember that “not everything that can be counted, counts….and not everything that counts can be counted” (Thanks Einstein).