The need for utopia in the sustainable development proposal of the 2030 agenda

Abstract

Faced with the urgency to save our Common House from a climatic and social fatality, the concept of Sustainable Development (SD) is used by the UN not only as a theoretical and technical concept, but, above all, as a symbolic and utopian concept. This essay presents an assessment of the SD concept, analyzing what is the purpose and importance of this concept that is proposed in the 2030 Agenda, which is in relation to the care of the Common Home.

For this purpose, an investigation was carried out on the purpose of the adjectival “sustainable”, which is found to be put into making interventions that modify the configuration relationships of the capitalist paradigm. Second, the use of the SD concept in the 2030 Agenda is analyzed, discovering a dual symbolic charge, as if it were a concept that refers to a path and a horizon at the same time. Something similar to the definition of “utopia” that E. Galeano pronounced.

Finally, it is discovered that the SD concept is used in its utopian dimension in order to reach intersubjectivity and the scope of the international social relationship, with the intention of generating an axiological horizontal connection that provokes legitimation and participation, in view of the urgent need to generate awareness, as well as hope in the face of the serious challenges we face as a human society.