The Development Agenda’s Forced Evictions Gap
Joseph Schechla
Eviction, forced displacement, and tenure insecurity were actively discussed during the negotiations of the 2030 Agenda [AR ], but they were not codified explicitly in SDG 11. Instead, they were either excluded, subsumed, diluted, and redistributed across broader targets (especially 1.4 and 11.1) and other SDGs due to political, technical, and institutional pressures.
In the 2030 Agenda negotiations, human rights mechanisms (e.g., two successive Special Rapporteurs on housing [AR]), civil society platforms (e.g., Habitat International Coalition), and Global South delegations concerned with informal settlements and land dispossession urged including these issues in the Agenda.
The Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was the primary intergovernmental mechanism responsible for crafting the 17 goals and 169 targets that form the core of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. Established following the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, the OWG met thirteen times between March 2013 and July 2014 to develop this Agenda. That process (2013–14) included stronger formulations such as “ensure secure tenure” and “prevent forced evictions,” consistent with human rights treaty obligations (GC Nos. 4 and 7) and standing commitments of the Habitat II Agenda. However, these references did not survive intact into the final SDG text.
Eviction could be considered as implicit within SDG 11’s Target 11.1 (“ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing…”), but explicit mention and any corresponding Goal, Target or indicator were omitted. This is despite the additional fact that eviction is an eminently measurable phenomenon, and states are already obliged to report (para. 54) on the practice within their jurisdiction and effective control every five years as parties to ICESCR.
Across other SDGs, eviction-related concerns were effectively diluted, diffused and dispersed, as in SDG 1.4’s inferior reference to “secure access to [AR] land and property,” SDG 5’s Target 5.a on reforms “to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources.” It is left to interpretation whether to include forced eviction issues under SDG 10’s pursuit of inequality and displacement dynamics, and SDG 16’s call for improved access to justice and legal protection.
Structural exclusion
In early drafts of the 2030 Agenda, OWG focused on sustainable cities and human settlements to include such formulations “ensure access to adequate housing…with secure tenure and protection against forced evictions” and, in some iterations, “upgrade slums and prevent forced evictions and displacement.” This explicit language, although consistent with states’ human rights treaty obligations, became diluted by reactionary forces, largely bracketing and, eventually, removing forced eviction language. Ultimately, reference to “security of tenure” was relegated to indicator 1.4.2 with reference to land and the pursuit of disaggregated statistics on gender-wise distribution.
Four structural reasons rooted in negotiation dynamics are responsible for dismissing the issue of forced eviction as anathema to the sustainable development agenda:
1. Political sensitivity (state sovereignty & land control): Explicit language on eviction would constrain state-led development projects and otherwise-motivated population transfer and demographic manipulation through forced removals of targeted communities and specific populations. This positioning deviated from the 6–year-old Habitat I recognition that “The ideologies of States are reflected in their human settlement policies. These being powerful instruments for change, they must not be used to dispossess people from their homes and their land, or to entrench privilege and exploitation. The human settlement policies must be in conformity with…human rights” (para. 3).
Such constraints would challenge large-scale infrastructure, urban renewal, and land commodification schemes, as well as raise further legal accountability risks for state actors and institutions under binding international human rights law obligations. Moreover, such inclusion could lead to transferring the same duties to the realm of voluntary development commitments, where human rights application is assumed to be discretionary at best. Therefore, many states resisted wording that could be interpreted as limiting eviction powers or requiring reparations for such “gross violations” that the General Assembly had already adopted in 2006 [AR] after 30 years of deliberation on its legal definition.
2. Indicator politics (what political consensus determined could be measured globally): Since the SDG framework is indicator driven. Evictions were excluded because some states argued that no globally standardized eviction dataset, despite the aforementioned reporting obligation of states parties to ICESCR and the prospect of the (progressively defunded) Treaty Body System maintain such a database. Negotiations over Targets and Indicators were complicated by state delegations claiming that eviction processes vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (formal/informal, rural/urban, legal/extra-legal) and states’ demonstrated reluctance to report such politically sensitive data.
3. Conceptual narrowing of SDG 11: During negotiations, SDG 11 shifted toward technical and urbanist preferences to focus rather on urban management and service delivery, infrastructure and physical planning, and measurable material conditions (slums, transport, land use). This technocratic framing sidelined human rights-regulated issues such as eviction, dispossession, destruction, privatization, and land grabbing.
4. Deliberate “mainstreaming” across goals: Rather than anchoring eviction prevention and remedy in SDG 11, negotiators adopted a strategy of “horizontal integration” under the “leave no one behind” slogan. This semantic projection seemingly obviated the need for specifying forced eviction practices against targeted communities who became subsumed as generic subjects of underdevelopment and deprivation everywhere, therefore rendering nowhere operationally specific.
State rationale
No single formal voting record survives the negotiations toward the 2030 Agenda, since the OWG worked by consensus. However, some negotiation records, position papers, and drafting behavior allow a clear geopolitical mapping of the competing interests at play.
A core bloc resisting forced-eviction prohibitions in the 2030 Agenda included large emerging economies, including India, China, Brazil and South Africa. Their rationale included the need for urban transformation at grand scale, including through mega-projects, infrastructure corridors, slum clearance as instruments for the governing informality, whereas large populations occupy legally insecure settlements. In such circumstances, the states preferred policy flexibility (i.e., impunity) and to avoid binding language that could trigger litigation, impede relocation programs and, thereby, constrain the state’s material developmental capacity.
Certain land-centralized states such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar sought to preserve their state-dominant land ownership systems and a high reliance on expropriation and redevelopment. They opposed human rights-based scrutiny of land governance.
Developed economies, including key actors such as United States, United Kingdom and Australia, insisted to avoid rights-based obligations in SDGs, preferring instead non-justiciable development language estranged from human rights and corresponding state obligations. These states sought to evade domestic and international challenges to their austerity programs, housing crises and Indigenous land issues. Instead, they favored references only to “housing access” and resisted the “legal prohibition of eviction.”
On the other hand, active proponents of explicit eviction language included such key actors as Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and some EU states (e.g., Germany and more-moderate Finland). This position was echoed by civil society blocs (e.g., HIC) and UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing. They sought coherence with the human rights-based framing of development aligned with standing ICESCR obligations and Habitat Agenda commitments.
Structural consequence
The resulting omission of forced eviction and its de-development consequences from the 2030 Agenda have produced a known accountability gap and a distortion of the sustainable development process. It permits countries and cities, in their VNRs and VLRs, respectively, to report progress on SDG 11 (e.g., reducing slum percentages), while simultaneously carrying out mass evictions outside the SDG reporting criteria. Empirically, civil society (e.g., HIC-HLRN’s VDB [AR]) and even UN-linked reporting frameworks now track eviction separately (e.g., local indicators like “number of evictions” and “affected persons”) rather than through the review of SDG 11 itself.
Bottom line
Eviction and, in particular, forced eviction, were central to negotiations, especially via tenure security debates. However, the scramble to the lowest common denominator of consensus-driven negotiations of politically interested actors, intentionally softened and removed explicit citation of forced eviction in the final 2030 Agenda text. As a result, SDG 11 reflects a political compromise favoring measurable urban development over enforceable housing rights.
What survived the politically dominated negotiations was a SDG11 that sought “By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums.” It made no explicit mention of eviction, displacement or tenure security.
Recommendations:
Since the current SDG 11 uses Indicator 11.1.1 (slums/informal housing) as a proxy for more-specific measurements, it does not capture eviction dynamics. This anomaly must be corrected in the post-2030 Agenda.
Direct incorporation of international human rights law language is needed in the current and improved forthcoming development agenda. In particular, explicit language should to inform and make meaningful “adequate housing,” “the continuum of tenure,” “legally protected tenure security,” “prevention from, and remedy for forced eviction.” These terms reflect prevailing norms and established doctrine such that “security of tenure… protection against forced evictions” forms a core component of adequate housing and a high development priority across the globe.
Needed now, and to be made explicit in the post-2030 Agenda is to break from dominant managerial urbanism that treats housing as a service-delivery problem, slums as an infrastructure deficit, and forced eviction as a legitimate policy tool.
Explicit prohibition language on eviction in the sustainable development agenda would operationalize existing human rights law, with its prior and permanent, individual, collective, domestic and extraterritorial state obligations, and make monitoring of the SDGs more relevant and meaningful.
The development indicator regime also has to fulfill the promise to pool assets across the System, including scattered data, and to provide globally comparable metrics. This could be achieved, in part, by resourcing the Treaty System—the neglected backbone of multilateral system—to compile the data required of states to fulfill their binding obligations and ensure coherence of the global order.
Given the lessons cited above, all stakeholders should be vigilant about, and resist the descent to lowest common-denominator wording. That would mitigate the gap in state accountability to development commitments and enforceability of binding obligations.
Conclusion
Eviction and its negative consequences for sustainable development were removed from the 2030 Agenda not because they were marginal, but because they were too central, too specific, too political, and too legally consequential to survive consensus-based global policy formulation. The forces liable for this omission are known and not forgotten.
As the post-2030 development agenda becomes an ever-advancing prospect, Major Groups and Other Stakeholders, UN Charter-based specialized organizations and progressive governments have a critical role to play. We now take these lessons and discoveries into the post-2030 development debate.
Image: Graphic depicting a bulldozer razing SDG11. Source: HLRN Archive.
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