Padilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “The UN 2030 Agenda and the SDGs,” Ch. 5.5, p. 253] SPark
Thus it seems quite clear that sustainable development supposes a displacement of the neoliberal ideology from its current hegemonic position of mainstream economics and that the criteria that should guide both national and global public policies require cosmopolitan global governance based on the well-being of both the people and the planet. Hence, neither unlimited growth nor consumerism should be regarded as suitable parameters for the assessment of sustainable development. Instead the principles of doing things better and doing things well suggested by Göpel (2016) should be used. Doing things better means discontinuing the production of nonrecyclable goods, either because they areharmful to the environment or to stop the excess of waste and garbage. Doing things well means decoupling production from the imperatives of growth, because if the satisfactionof human needs and respect for natural ecosystems are the paramount objectives of sustainable development, they mustprevailover growth, and new parameters (such as Buthan’s ‘gross national happiness’) must be found to assess progress and social well-being.
