The global university sector needs to play a “prominent” part in shaping the next iteration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the Irish diplomat who helped bring them into being.

David Donoghue said the sector had not been given a “fulsome” role when he and fellow negotiators formulated the 17 goals in 2015. But universities’ determination to embrace the SDGs “as a framework which is relevant to all of their activities” had come as a “pleasant surprise” to Donoghue and other United Nations (UN) delegates.

Now, as the framework enters an “awkward transition period” – with the 2030 deadline approaching, and just 17 per cent of the goals’ 169 targets “on track” to be achieved by then – the sector must assert its weight.

“As we’re preparing for the civil society input into the next agenda, [the] higher education sector needs to be quite prominent – more, perhaps, than it was last time,” Donoghue told ߣߣ��Ƶ’s Global Sustainable Development Congress (GSDC) in Jakarta.

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“I hope that the higher education sector can organise itself so that it can, as it were, make sure that its voice is heard quite loudly. It has a particular status…as one of the actors with kind of wide universal appeal. It needs to work with member states at the UN who are supportive. It needs to identify countries who can advance their interests at the negotiation table.”

The conference heard that universities faced a period of “uncertainty”, having reoriented their strategies around a framework that “possibly expires in three or four years”.

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Donoghue, whose diplomatic achievements include helping negotiate Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, said the framework’s post-2030 prospects were difficult to anticipate in the face of “imponderables” including the Trump administration’s hostility, wavering financial support and a “geopolitical sense of drift” that had left countries with “less willingness to cooperate on benign agendas like this”.

He said the SDGs’ “ambitious” – even “utopian” – agenda had been intentionally demanding. “It was always going to be extremely difficult to achieve…all the targets for all countries within the 15-year period [but] the world, as a whole, wanted to stretch itself.”

That overall sense has not disappeared, he told the conference. “The mood of the world is that we should have a global framework like this, even if we will need longer to achieve it. My guess is that we will…go forward with something very like the present SDGs.”

One possibility, he said, is that the targets will simply be updated to a revised deadline of 2035 or 2040, without any formal renegotiation of the goals. “At a time when some countries are turning away from the SDGs, the idea of simply rolling it over without creating an entirely new framework – that has merits,” Donoghue told the forum.

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Impact analyst Patricija Zizyte said universities should “step up” to help secure the framework’s future rather than simply allowing the SDGs to expire and be expunged from institutional strategies.

Zizyte, co-president of the Oikos international network of students, said people in universities tended to be too “responsive” to changing agendas. “Respond a bit less and create a little bit more,” she urged GSDC delegates. “Imagine the future that you want to see, and create it. That’s how we’re going to build the post-2030 agenda.”

Donoghue said students and other young people would play a “vital role” in the framework’s evolution. “The future of this agenda is not with old folk like me, it’s with young people worldwide,” he told the conference. “It is made for their world.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com