Hans Sakkers

In 2015 the United Nations declared an ambitious programme, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With similar aspirations to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the SDGs claim is to make a difference in terms of justice and sustainability on a global scale. Both UN frameworks speak to the global imagination, but what do they do in (local) practice(s)? Recently the claim was made that human rights are ‘not enough’ (Samuel Moyn); but are the SDGs going to be enough? While current research focuses on the governance aspect of the SDGs and the efficiency of their implementation by national governments, little attention has been paid to the localisation process. Exploring the SDGs as a social imaginary of a moral order (Charles Taylor) and linking this to a framework of ‘localizing human rights’, we determine whether and in what way the SDGs might be a source of inspiration in some pioneering city-initiatives. Developing a typology of localisation approaches we argue for a move from the dominant implementation approach towards a translation one (foregrounding culture and human rights) to enable more reciprocity between the local and the global and therewith to take locality more seriously in realising the SDGs promise for change.

This article describes how the Human Rights Coalition in Utrecht developed, and it explores how this local Coalition could be seen as a form of urban utopianism and urban social dreaming, as discussed in this volume. First, the local human rights approach is described and the organisational aspects of the Coalition and its main characteristics are delineated; reflections from some members of the human rights coalition follow; in a few parenthetical boxes within the text, we provide excerpts from blog posts by Coalition members; we then draw together some cautious conclusions about the impact that the local nurturing of human rights can have on urban social dreaming.