Following the most inclusive consultancy process in UN history, 193 countries signed off on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. The more diverse representation of voices included during the three-year build up to the SDGs, through national consultations, working groups, and the global My World Survey (Naidoo, 2016), provided the initial agreement with input legitimacy. The soft governance design of the global goals offered countries the flexibility to adapt the goals to their context, through a process that was touted as nation led (Smith, Ehren & Grek, 2024). However, while the SDGs at first were understood to be comprehensive and ambitious, the more narrow operation and implementation of the goals reduced their scope (King, 2017) and restricted national autonomy. The original desire for reporting across global, thematic, regional, and national indicators never really materialized and what the world was left with was a scaled down version of specific global indicators and legacy indicators (remnants of previous goals that were already being collected) (Smith, 2024). This restriction reflects the power of numbers to motivate behaviour (Bandola-Gill et al., 2022; Fukuda-Parr & McNeill, 2019), especially when complemented by the actions of international actors and preferences of donors (Smith et al., 2024b). With the next round of global goals forthcoming, this presentation examines how governing by goals and governing by numbers creates friction that can undermine the initial democratic legitimacy of global goals. This presentation looks forward to the potentials of the post-SDG era, proposing alternative approaches to the design of the next goals that might better meet the needs of countries and provide for the promised national autonomy.

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