Sustainable development without illusions: What Water Law Reveals About the SDGs

https://doi.org/10.63189/JYAT4504

The Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs)^[1]  are often criticised for their lack of legal force. From a doctrinal perspective, the criticism is familiar and, to a large extent, justified. The SDGs do not create binding obligations, establish enforcement mechanisms, or provide judicial remedies. For lawyers trained to evaluate normativity through compliance and accountability, their practical relevance can therefore appear limited.

Yet this critique, while accurate, misses the more troubling issue. The problem with the SDGs today is not their legal weakness, but their legal comfort. They are invoked so frequently, and so uncritically, that they have become part of the background noise of governance. Their presence signals alignment, but rarely provokes structural change. In water governance, this hollowing out of sustainable development is particularly visible.

Water has an unusual capacity to expose the limits of legal abstraction. It resists being regulated in isolation. It is at once an environmental resource, a public service, an economic input, and a precondition for the enjoyment of fundamental rights. Legal systems, however, continue to address these dimensions separately, through fragmented regimes that rarely speak to one another. Environmental law pursues ecological objectives. Economic regulation focuses on cost recovery and efficiency. Public service law addresses continuity and access. Human rights law frames minimum standards of protection. Each field operates with internal coherence, yet the system as a whole remains disjointed.

The SDGs were not designed to resolve this fragmentation through binding rules. Their function is different. They articulate the interdependence of policy fields that law has traditionally regulated in isolation. Nowhere is this interdependence more apparent than in relation to water. Although water appears explicitly in only one^[2] of the SDGs, it underpins nearly all of them. Public health, food security, energy production, climate adaptation, poverty reduction, and non-discrimination, and meny more, all depend, in practice, on access to safe and affordable water. Treating water as a sectoral concern therefore weakens the internal coherence of sustainable development itself. In tariff regulation, cost-recovery measures adopted to meet environmental objectives may reduce affordability for certain users. References to the SDGs often accompany such measures, without providing criteria for resolving the resulting legal tension. A similar tension arises where abstraction permits are issued to support agricultural or industrial use, while environmental objectives require reduced water withdrawals to protect ecosystems. References to sustainable development may accompany both objectives, yet the legal framework often provides no rule for prioritisation when they conflict. In practice, the SDGs coexist with unresolved regulatory choices.

This becomes particularly problematic when the language of sustainability is used to obscure rather than confront legal choices. Water governance is inherently distributive. Decisions on abstraction limits, pollution thresholds, tariff structures, or infrastructure investment allocate costs and risks across society. They are not neutral technical exercises, but normative decisions embedded in law. Yet references to the SDGs often serve to depoliticise these choices, presenting them as inevitable or consensual. Sustainability increasingly serves to make policies look responsible, while avoiding clear responsibility and accountability.

The limits of this approach are increasingly exposed by climate change. Many legal regimes governing water continue to rely on assumptions of stability and predictability. Historical baselines shape environmental standards, infrastructure planning, and service obligations. Growing hydrological variability renders these assumptions increasingly untenable. Droughts, floods, and systemic water stress are no longer exceptional events; they are structural conditions. Environmental objectives lose credibility if they protect yesterday’s hydrological realities rather than tomorrow’s risks. Social guarantees lose meaning if infrastructure failure undermines access in practice.

Here, the SDGs reveal their latent legal significance. Their forward-looking orientation forces law to engage with long-term risk, uncertainty, and intergenerational responsibility. This does not transform them into enforceable norms, but it does challenge the sufficiency of existing legal frameworks. In water law, ignoring this challenge is no longer defensible.

The SDGs are frequently invoked in debates, yet they remain silent on a number of questions. This silence is often exploited. References to sustainable development are used to justify incompatible regulatory choices, allowing conflicting objectives to coexist without resolution. In this sense, the SDGs expose contradictions rather than correcting them.

This does not render them irrelevant. On the contrary, it reveals their proper role. The SDGs should not be treated as a checklist of achievements, nor as a substitute for legal analysis. Their value lies in exposing the consequences of fragmentation and forcing law to acknowledge the systems it governs. In water law, they highlight the disconnection between environmental ambition, economic regulation, and social protection. They make visible the gap between normative claims and institutional capacity.

If sustainable development is to retain legal meaning, it must move beyond comfortable references and confront structural trade-offs. Water law leaves little room for evasion. Affordability limits cost recovery. Environmental protection constrains economic use. Climate adaptation requires long-term investment and binding planning duties. These tensions cannot be dissolved through aspirational language. They require legal frameworks capable of prioritisation, coordination, and enforcement.

The SDGs do not resolve these tensions, and they were never meant to. Their contribution is more demanding. They force law to abandon the illusion that sustainability can be achieved through isolated norms and incremental adjustments. In the governance of water, sustainable development is not a matter of aspiration, but of institutional design. Whether law is willing to acknowledge this may ultimately determine whether the SDGs remain a meaningful reference point, or merely a familiar phrase in an increasingly fragile regulatory landscape.

^[1] United Nations General Assembly, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN Doc A/RES/70/1 (25 September 2015).

^[2] UN General Assembly, 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, A/RES/70/1 (2015), esp. Sustainable Development Goal 6 on clean water and sanitation.