Speech by Chol Bunnag · SDG Move, Faculty of Economics, Thammasat University
· Astana, KazakhstanSpeaking time: 10–12 minutes ·

Distinguished guests, fellow scholars, esteemed colleagues — good morning.

It is a real honor to be here in Kazakhstan. We are gathered in a country that sits at the literal and figurative crossroads of Europe and Asia, and a country that has placed sustainable development squarely on its own national agenda. So, this is, in many ways, exactly the right place to ask the question we have come here to ask.

My name is Chol Bunnag. I am an Assistant Professor at SDG Move, in the Faculty of Economics at Thammasat University in Thailand. For the past decade, my colleagues and I have worked to translate the Sustainable Development Goals from a global aspiration into concrete national and sub-national policy — and to train the next generation of thinkers, public servants, and citizens who will inherit this agenda.

▌ The Core Paradox of the 2030 Agenda

Let me start with the paradox of the agenda we already have.

The SDGs are one of the most comprehensive sets of global goals humanity has ever agreed on. They speak to the least developed and the most developed alike — to a farmer in Northeast Thailand, to a steelworker here in Kazakhstan, to a software engineer in Berlin. That comprehensiveness is their power. And it is, at the very same time, the exact reason they are so difficult to deliver.

▌ Two Mandates for Global Governance

That paradox sits behind the two questions I want to put on the table today — two questions that should sit at the heart of whatever we choose to call the agenda beyond 2030.

The first: How can we push this agenda forward more effectively — not just for today, but for tomorrow?

The second: In a world where artificial intelligence leapfrogs every few months, where geopolitics tears at the fabric of multilateralism, and where the impacts of climate change refuse to stay inside any predictive model — does this transformative agenda itself need to be transformed? Or is incremental change enough?

I think of these as two distinct mandates. The first is about upgrading the hardware of how we implement. The second is about updating the software of what we are actually trying to do. Let me take each in turn.

▌ The Unforgiving Reality of Current Implementation

Before I get to the hardware, allow me to name the reality we are facing.

To be fair to governments — and I say this as someone who works closely with public officials in my own country — they have been working hard. But the data is unforgiving. Globally, only about seventeen percent of SDG targets are on track for 2030. Single-issue analysis and siloed ministries are simply failing to deliver integrated results.

This is why, from Thailand’s experience, I want to highlight four interlocking areas where the post-2030 architecture needs to be far more explicit than the current one. I think of these four together as upgrading the hardware.

▌ Upgrading the Hardware: Financial Mobilization

The first hardware upgrade is finance.

According to UNDP, the financial resources required to achieve the SDGs already exist in the global economy. The problem is not that the money is missing — it is that the money is not being mobilized to where it is needed.

Worse, the traditional international financial architecture often works against development. A poor country that needs capital the most is charged the highest interest rate, because it is judged the riskiest. This is, quite literally, a system that punishes the patient for being sick.

If we are serious about the next agenda, international financial institutions must reform themselves. We need innovative mechanisms at the international level — new instruments, new risk-sharing arrangements, new ways of pricing development — so that capital flows toward, not away from, the countries that need it most.

▌ Upgrading the Hardware: Orchestrating Collective Action

The second hardware upgrade is indicators — and the way we orchestrate implementation.

We have learned in Thailand that you cannot run a whole society through hierarchical, top-down implementation alone. Most of the actors that matter — businesses, universities, local governments, civil society organizations — sit outside that hierarchy. They need a different kind of governance: one that orchestrates collective action rather than commanding it.

But here we hit a real problem. There is a disconnect between what these non-governmental sectors actually do and what the national SDG status looks like. A company, a university, or a province cannot easily tell whether its action is genuinely moving the national needle.

So, we should think more seriously about sectoral goals and sectoral indicators — at the national, regional, and global level — with proper review processes for each sector, and clear linkages back to the national picture. Only then can collective action be truly orchestrated, not merely encouraged.

▌ Upgrading the Hardware: Integrated Policymaking Tools

The third hardware upgrade is the toolkit that supports integrated, inter-agency policymaking.

If individual ministries cannot see the integrated impact of their policies across the economic, social, and environmental pillars, integration remains a slogan rather than a decision.

Fortunately, we now have the beginnings of a serious toolkit. The Millennium Institute’s iSDG model is a system-dynamics simulation that lets policymakers run what-if scenarios across all seventeen Goals and see how a policy in one area ripples into others. The Stockholm Environment Institute’s SDG Synergies approach uses cross-impact matrices to map how targets reinforce or undermine one another, uncovering the indirect ripple effects that single-issue analysis tends to miss. Add to these the International Futures model and a growing family of integrated assessment models, and we have a real direction of travel: quantitative, open-source, integrated evidence to support cabinet-level decisions.

The post-2030 agenda should explicitly call for the development, the open-sourcing, and the institutionalization of such tools in national policy processes. This is how we move from sustainability slogans to integrated sustainability decisions.

▌ Upgrading the Hardware: Politics and the People

The fourth and final hardware upgrade is politics — and the people behind it.

In the end, none of this happens without political leadership. The European Union has shown what is possible when leadership is serious — ambitious instruments, binding policies, real implementation. But political leaders, in every system, ultimately answer to their constituents.

That makes public awareness the deciding factor. The next agenda’s means of implementation should explicitly recognize the role of public media in keeping sustainable development information flowing into society on a regular basis — not as a niche topic, but as part of everyday public conversation.

And Target 4.7 — Education for Sustainable Development — must be elevated as a flagship of the post-2030 era. Because the educated citizen of today is the voter, the entrepreneur, and the policymaker of 2040. If we want a generation that wants to change the world, we have to teach them why, and how.

▌ Updating the Software: Transforming the Agenda

That covers the hardware. But hardware alone is not enough. We also need to update the software — to revisit what the transformative agenda itself is trying to do.

My honest answer to the second question is: yes, in part — but carefully. We must keep the core intact. The needs of the least developed countries — the focus on poverty, hunger, health, and basic dignity — those issues do not become less urgent because the world has changed. They become more so. But the means of implementation, and SDG 17 in particular, need a substantial rewrite to match a changed world.

▌ Updating the Software: Governing Digital Technologies

The first software update concerns digital technology.

We are living through a digital revolution — generative AI, agentic AI, and whatever follows them — and these technologies will either pull humanity toward the SDGs or push us sharply away. The post-2030 framework must be explicit that digital transformation is to be governed in service of sustainable development, not in spite of it. That is a deliberate, multilateral choice. And we should make it.

▌ Updating the Software: Geopolitical Equity

The second software update concerns geopolitics.

In the past five years we have seen international conflicts — including conflicts initiated by powerful states — that affect every country, yet are decided by a very small number. I would respectfully suggest that the broader UN membership, beyond the Security Council, should have a stronger voice when international peace and intervention are at stake. Every country bears the consequences. Every country deserves a say.

▌ Updating the Software: Agile and Structured Revision

The third software update — and perhaps the most practical reform of all — concerns the revision cycle itself.

We should design the post-2030 agenda so that it can be revised more regularly. Not once every fifteen years, but at shorter, structured intervals — much closer to the model of the Paris Climate Accord, with its rolling stocktakes and its updated national contributions. The world will not stop changing in 2031. Our framework should not pretend otherwise.

▌ The Transition Matrix: 2030 vs Beyond 2030

Let me put hardware and software side by side, before I close.

On finance: we move from risk-punitive capital flows to genuine risk-sharing mechanisms. On governance: from top-down hierarchical commands to orchestrated collective action through sectoral indicators. On policy tools: from siloed, single-issue analysis to cross-impact simulated decisions. And on the revision cycle: from a fifteen-year static framework to agile, rolling stocktakes.

That, in one slide, is the transition we need to make between the 2030 agenda we have and the Beyond 2030 agenda we need.

▌ From a Shared Language to a Shared Operating System

Which brings me to my closing thought.

The SDGs gave us a shared language. The post-2030 agenda has to give us a shared operating system — hardware that actually works, and software that is willing to learn and revise as the world keeps moving.

▌ Governing a Shared Planet

Thirty years ago, no one in my country could have easily predicted that a Thai economist would be standing here in Astana, talking with colleagues from across two continents, about how to govern a planet together. That fact alone tells us something about what global agendas can do when they are taken seriously.

If we can build that shared operating system, we will not just be transforming an agenda. We will be transforming our capacity to govern ourselves on the one planet that we all share.

Thank you very much.

Last Updated on June 2, 2026