Indigeneity, Culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 1-17

3. Leaving Nobody Behind: Policy Integration, Policy Reform

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 19-37

4. Indigenous Peoples: Policy, Culture and the Sustainable Development Goals

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 39-66

5. Freedom and Culture: Beyond Egalitarian Justice

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 67-87

6. The Just State

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 89-111

7. Participation and Presence

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 113-132

8. National Values, the Goals and the Right to Self-Determination

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 133-157

9. Self-Determination, Participation and Leadership

   • Dominic O’Sullivan

   Pages 159-188

10. Quality Education

    • Dominic O’Sullivan

    Pages 189-210

11. Economic Growth

    • Dominic O’Sullivan

    Pages 211-232

12. Data Sovereignty—What is Measured and Why?

    • Dominic O’Sullivan

    Pages 233-256

13. Conclusion

    • Dominic O’Sullivan

    Pages 257-267

14. Back Matter

    Pages 269-277

    PDF

This is the first scholarly book to examine the UN Sustainable Development Goals from an indigenous perspective and, specifically, with reference to the right to self-determination. It refers to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and domestic instruments such as New Zealand’s Tiriti o Waitangi to suggest how the goals could be revised to support self-determination as a more far-reaching and ambitious project than the goals imagine in their current form. The book primarily draws its material from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to support analysing the goals’ policy relevance to wealthy states and the political claims that indigenous peoples make in established liberal democracies.

• Indigenous self-determination
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Culture and Politics
• Culture and Policy-making
• Maori self-determination
• Maori politics

“A robust, well-theorised, and incisive critique that exposes the inattention of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to the histories, legacies, voices, aspirations, and authority of Indigenous peoples. A timely contribution to contemporary debates on nationhood, sovereignty, Indigenous recognition, and social justice.”

---Professor Tanya Fitzgerald, The University of Western Australia, Australia

“Asserting that Indigenous self-determination is ‘colonialism’s antithesis’, O’Sullivan navigates the interconnected relationships between culture, self-determination, and sustainable development, affirming that continued policy failure in indigenous affairs is not inevitable, and his text presents essential considerations for Indigenous self-determination in multiple indigenous Nations globally.”
---Dr Jessa Rogers, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

"A leader in indigenous political theory, O'Sullivan produces a series of arguments that wrench the UN's Sustainable Development Goals from their non-indigenous biases, in order to preserve the hope that they might serve the whole of humanity. A formidable work of indigenous political theory from one of this emerging discipline's foremost scholars."
---Dr Lindsey MacDonald, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

• Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia

  Dominic O’Sullivan

Dominic O’Sullivan is Professor of Political Science at Charles Sturt University, Adjunct Professor at the Auckland University of Technology and Academic Associate at the University of Auckland. He is from the Te Rarawa and Ngati Kahu iwi of New Zealand, and this is his ninth book. The most recent, Sharing the Sovereign: Indigenous Peoples, Recognition, Treaties and the State was published by Palgrave in 2021.