Video gallery
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Experiment overview
A provocative conceptual intervention challenging the effectiveness of current sustainable development frameworks through the creation of a hypothetical 18th Sustainable Development Goal.
Initially conceived as a crowdfunding campaign that ultimately failed to secure backing, this project ended up shelved despite raising important questions about how sustainability frameworks often perpetuate the very colonial power structures they claim to address.
Main objectives
The initiative critically examined sustainable development paradigms through:
1: Exposing the technological determinism embedded in existing SDGs, where Western technology dictates development paths without sufficient consideration of its own impacts or indigenous alternatives
2: Challenging the colonial mindset underlying sustainability frameworks that position privileged Global North perspectives as universal solutions to problems they helped create through centuries of extraction and exploitation
3: Proposing alternative development directions centered on systemic transformation and regenerative approaches rather than incremental improvements that maintain existing power hierarchies
Achieved results
Despite not reaching its crowdfunding goal and ultimately being shelved, the project generated thought-provoking materials that questioned conventional sustainability thinking.
The campaign’s failure to secure funding itself became a revealing data point about institutional resistance to confronting the colonial foundations of the sustainable development goals frameworks.
Main reflection
The project’s journey from conception to crowdfunding rejection highlighted the challenges of advancing critiques that question established sustainability paradigms, particularly those that expose their roots in colonial governance structures.
This experiment revealed growing recognition that current sustainable development frameworks may be insufficient while demonstrating the difficulty of funding alternatives that challenge the status quo of Western-centric environmental discourse.
The shelving of this initiative mirrors broader patterns where critical examinations of sustainability frameworks remain marginalized in favor of more comfortable, incremental approaches that preserve existing power structures while creating an illusion of progress - a dynamic that continues to privilege corporate sustainability theater over the lived experiences and indigenous knowledge.