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In 2015 the world set itself 17 very ambitious targets: the Sustainable Development Goals. To end hunger, eradicate poverty, ensure health and education for all.

But are the SDGs over ambitious? And who decides who is meeting them, and who is backsliding? These are just two of the questions that host Imogen Foulkes puts to:

Martin Gutmann, Editor of a multi-author research project on the history of the SDGs, and lecture at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts. Claire Somerville, Lecturer and Executive Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute Geneva. Frederic Perron-Welch, a Junior Visiting Fellow in International Law at the Graduate Institute, and Mukta Dhere, Alumna and Project Coordinator of the Advancing Development Goals Contest at the institute.

"If nothing else, the SDGs have given us a common vocabulary, and a common framework, and I think that is very powerful in its own right," says Gutmann.

"They are ambitious and clearly unachievable in terms of the framing of the wording in the targets. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem," adds Somerville.

"If everyone is in the tent now, because the SDGs are universal, is everyone being held to the same standards?" asks Perron-Welch.

Dhere adds a note of optimism: "We all have this incessant desire to make this world a better place, and I think the SDGs are exactly the tools that we need to do that."

This episode was recorded on October 19 in front of a live audience at the Graduate Institute Geneva. The institute is a partner of SWI swissinfo.ch and the Inside Geneva podcast.

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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang