It took two recorded votes for states to pass the ministerial declaration at the United Nations (UN) High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York on 15 July. Until recently, this document was routinely adopted without controversy. Uruguay, speaking for the Group of 77 developing countries plus China, pushed through an amendment deleting a reference to the climate agreement reached at the COP28 summit. It passed by 82 votes to 54. Israel then forced a vote on a paragraph about self-determination for peoples under colonial and foreign occupation, which was retained by 113 votes to one. Russia dissociated itself from the paragraph on peace and security, calling it unbalanced and beyond the forum’s mandate.

It wasn’t always this way. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) once commanded broad support. All 193 UN states agreed the SDGs in 2015 as a shared global blueprint for humanity, to be achieved by 2030. They committed to tackling climate change, hunger and poverty, and ensuring accountable institutions, affordable energy, clean water and gender equality. They agreed to track progress each year at the HLPF, where states can present self-assessments, known as Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), for examination.

Tenth anniversary

This year’s session ran from 7 to 15 July and focused on goals covering cities, energy, industry, partnerships and water. It marked the tenth anniversary of the process, and 36 states presented VNRs, bringing the number of reviews conducted since 2016 to 437. Half of the 36 were African states, hinting at an imbalance in who shows up and who stays silent. While Togo and Uruguay presented their fifth review this year, and Egypt and Switzerland their fourth, three states – Haiti, Myanmar and the USA – have never presented a VNR.

States sought to highlight key issues of national and regional concern. The Pacific island states of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tonga spoke of climate change and geographic isolation as their key challenges. The African Union and the UN co-chaired an Africa Day side event calling for a ‘nexus’ approach that recognises that development, peace and security are intertwined rather than separate agendas. The HLPF also offered connections to other processes, with the review of the water goal feeding into preparations for the 2026 UN Water Conference later this year.

While states may speak up, there remains the question of who they speak for. Many of the states that presented their reviews this year heavily restrict civic space. The CIVICUS Monitor rates 17 of the 36 as having repressed or closed civic space, indicating serious and systematic restrictions on people’s rights to organise, mobilise and express dissent. These states present themselves as accountable stewards of the SDGs, but at home they close off the civic freedoms that enable civil society to help achieve the goals.

They can do so without consequence because the VNR process requires no consultation with civil society or corroboration through independent data. As a result, many states can treat the VNR process as a technocratic reporting exercise and a PR opportunity to talk up their achievements, divorced from the SDGs’ core human rights and social justice agenda.

The wrong diagnosis

The fights around the ministerial declaration said much about the current contested state of multilateralism and showed where states stand on accountability and human rights. Ireland, speaking for the European Union (EU), called Uruguay’s amendment on the COP28 agreement a disappointment, given that the language had already been agreed, while Brazil and Colombia defended the agreement as a milestone in the shift away from fossil fuels. Israel called the self-determination paragraph ‘a politicised element’ and rejected the text regardless of the vote. Russia argued that the declaration placed disproportionate weight on human rights and gender issues, while the EU voiced regret that it didn’t go far enough on gender-responsive implementation, climate-resilient infrastructure and meaningful civil society participation.

The UN Secretary-General’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 found that, of the SDGs’ 139 targets with reliable trend data, only 15 per cent are on track. A further 21 per cent are making moderate progress, 49 per cent are advancing too slowly to matter and 15 per cent have regressed below their 2015 baselines. On the HLPF’s opening day, Secretary-General António Guterres pointed to how the goals are slipping further away with every new crisis and called for progress to be accelerated ‘at scale and speed’.

It’s against this backdrop that next year’s SDG Summit will decide what comes after the 2030 deadline. That summit’s mandate comes from the Pact for the Future, a 2024 agreement that had the aim of making the international system more effective and better suited to today’s challenges. Preparatory work, including a new Global Sustainable Development Report, is under way.

Some states are using the lack of progress as a pretext to attack the goals. The USA has denounced the SDGs as advancing a programme of soft global governance inconsistent with national sovereignty. Russia is saying the goals were too ambitious. At a side event it hosted during the HLPF, its representative said the SDGs’ ambitions had proven ‘quite far away from reality’, blaming overreach in the design stage rather than states’ failure to deliver.

Progress on some targets undercuts Russia’s claim. The UN’s regional Asia-Pacific review, presented alongside the HLPF, found that child labour across the region fell from 49 to 28 million children between 2020 and 2025, a rapid and very tangible gain that will make a huge difference. This shows that acceleration and achievement are a matter of political choice, not design.

In the room but not at the table

There’s a vital voice that isn’t being heard enough in the debate. Where civil society can act, it supports delivery of the SDGs. In Colombia, sustained advocacy led to the 2025 #SonNiñasNoEsposas (‘They are girls, not wives’) law banning child marriage. In The Gambia, civil society is working to eradicate female genital mutilation, leading the campaign to reject attempts to reverse a 2015 ban on the practice. These are just two of many recent wins for SDG 5 on gender equality. In Nepal, local organisations have made monitoring the goals more inclusive by supplying data on excluded communities that official statistics miss.

Yet the HLPF gives civil society little formal standing. Civil society was in the building all week — CIVICUS co-organised sessions on civic space and the SDGs, supported a global forum on the future of multilateralism and ran a workshop on the post-2030 agenda — but it doesn’t get a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Showing up can also be dangerous. In 2025, most civil society representatives from El Salvador withdrew over fears of reprisals. Activists elsewhere describe similar threats for exposing gaps between official reporting and reality on the ground, often with little practical support from the UN despite guidelines that are supposed to protect them.

SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions is meant to be the foundation for the other 16 goals. Target 16.10 commits states to protecting fundamental freedoms, but it’s routinely ignored. The CIVICUS Monitor has tracked year-on-year regression in civic space conditions since the SDGs came into effect. Organisations that help implement, localise and monitor the SDGs face growing restrictions on their ability to advocate, participate in public life and raise funds. Activists who call out corruption and impunity face reprisals. Where civil society can’t operate freely, the goals it should help implement and monitor can’t be met.

Shaping what comes next

Formal negotiations on a post-2030 framework won’t start until the 2027 summit, but the manoeuvring is already under way. Some states and UN officials have suggested simply extending the current goals rather than negotiating new ones, on the reasonable logic that reopening them in today’s political climate risks producing something weaker. But the current framework wasn’t built for a world of growing authoritarianism, accelerating climate breakdown, coordinated backlash against gender equality, increasing militarisation, collapsing multilateral cooperation and rapid technological development. A post-2030 agenda will have to take account of all this, along with the financial strain on the multilateral system.

Civil society isn’t waiting to be asked. Forus, a network of national civil society platforms and regional coalitions, has set out three scenarios for how the post-2030 process could unfold — continuity, reset or fragmentation — and argues that whichever path prevails, any new framework must put accountability, civic space, reform of financing and localisation at its centre. The UNMute initiative, backed by over 50 states, is urging reforms to help civil society have more of a say, including a UN civil society envoy, workable visa processes for global south activists and a dedicated International Civil Society Day at the UN.

Several upcoming moments will test whether the pressure tells. Next year’s Commission on the Status of Women, the Economic and Social Council’s Youth Forum, the SDG Summit and the Pact for the Future review in 2028 all offer the opportunity to bring civil society into the process, identify where implementation is failing and match ambition with achievement.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org