During the holidays, I took a rare moment to step back. I write constantly, and when I don’t, I get restless. My brain doesn’t sleep unless ideas are put somewhere. I told myself I wouldn’t work until after January 1st. 2025 has been a blistering year, and the pause was overdue. Yet here I am on December 29th, back at my desk. Last night, I was doomscrolling on social media and came across a post from the UN Secretary-General urging the world to “get the Sustainable Development Goals back on track.”

I laughed out loud.

Not because the SDGs don’t matter. They do. They are among the most comprehensive and morally necessary commitments the global community has ever articulated. But the language in that post assumed the problem was one of momentum, not permission. As if the SDGs were briefly derailed by bad luck, geopolitical turbulence, or insufficient effort, and could be nudged back into place with renewed urgency.

That framing is not hopeful. It is wrong.

The SDGs are not failing because we are not trying hard enough. They are failing because we are pursuing absolute goals through systems that only authorize incremental change. That approach has a name: sanctioned incrementalism. And until we confront it directly, no amount of acceleration rhetoric will save the goals we claim to care about.

The SDGs are threshold commitments. End extreme poverty. Halt biodiversity loss. Stay within climate limits. Ensure access to clean water, health, safety, and dignity. These are not directional aspirations. They describe conditions that must be met, not trends that merely need to improve. Either the world reaches them, or it doesn’t.

Yet almost every mechanism designed to deliver the SDGs treats them as trend-management exercises. Governments celebrate percentage reductions. Corporations report year-over-year efficiency gains. Institutions publish dashboards filled with green arrows and “on track” indicators while the underlying systems continue to deteriorate.

Effort increases. Outcomes do not.
Credibility erodes.

This is not a data problem. We are drowning in metrics, frameworks, disclosure regimes, and dashboards. It is not a commitment problem either. Public endorsement of the SDGs is nearly universal. Conferences are full. Reports are glossy. Statements are sincere.

It is a governance problem!

Sanctioned incrementalism is the formal approval of incremental improvement in situations where decision-makers already know that operating within ecological or social limits is not achievable in time. It is not denial. It is not ignorance. It is permission. Permission to continue harm while promising that improvement will eventually arrive.

This is how it plays out in practice. Leaders publicly acknowledge system limits—climate budgets, biodiversity thresholds, social minimums. The science is clear. The warnings are well established. Then, in the same decision cycle, they approve projects, investments, and policies that continue to violate those limits, justified by the promise of gradual improvement. The activity is allowed to continue because it is “getting better,” even when everyone involved knows it is still making the goals unattainable.

This is not transition.
It is delay with a moral gloss.

Incremental improvement is not inherently wrong. Incrementalism is exactly what you do when you are already operating within a safe space and want to optimize performance. But when you are operating outside limits—and much of the global economy already is—incrementalism becomes an evasion strategy. It avoids the one decision that actually matters: refusal.

Some activities must shrink.
Some must stop.
Some must never be approved in their current form.

The SDGs quietly assume this. Their implementation machinery almost never allows it.

That is the structural contradiction at the heart of the SDG enterprise. The goals describe a world that requires sufficiency, while the systems tasked with delivering them are designed to avoid saying no. Approval processes reward continuity, not correction. Sustainability programs are built to manage harm, not to end it.

So we accelerate. We scale. We finance. We innovate. We announce new initiatives and longer roadmaps. And we keep authorizing what cannot be made sufficient in time.

Then we act surprised when the targets slip and declare the goals “off track.”

You cannot achieve absolute goals with relative permission.

As long as leaders are allowed to approve incremental progress where sufficiency is already known to be required, the SDGs will remain a global performance theater. Language will improve. Reports will thicken. Stakeholder engagement will deepen. The outcomes will continue to miss.

This is why so many sustainability professionals feel trapped. They are asked to optimize within constraints that guarantee failure, then explain why the goals remain elusive. They are praised for effort and blamed for outcomes they were never empowered to control. The problem is not their competence. It is the authorization logic above them.

A sustainability program without a stop condition is not a transition strategy. It is an extension strategy. It exists to make unsustainable activity governable for longer.

Calling the SDGs “off track” obscures this reality. It suggests we are moving in the right direction, just not fast enough. In many cases, that is simply untrue. We are moving in a direction that remains incompatible with the goals themselves, and we are doing so with full awareness.

Sanctioned incrementalism is a choice. It is the choice to continue harm while hoping improvement arrives before the system fails. When that hope is knowingly unfounded, the choice is no longer pragmatic. It is complicit.

If the SDGs are to mean anything beyond aspiration in the second half of this decade, this has to end. Not with better messaging. Not with more urgency language. Not with another round of indicators.

With fewer approvals.

Refusal must be restored as a legitimate governance outcome. Not as an act of moral purity, but as a basic requirement of decision integrity. Until leaders are willing to say “this cannot proceed,” sustainability will remain a story we tell ourselves while the conditions it depends on continue to unravel.

Governments, institutions, and corporations must decide—now—whether the SDGs are constraints or slogans. If they are constraints, sanctioned incrementalism has no place in sustainability governance. If they are slogans, we should say so openly and stop wasting time, money, and credibility pretending otherwise.

January 1 is a good moment to choose.