By E. Deborah Martinez Aguilar
Why do sustainability plans so often fall short? The problem lies not in the strategic intentions but the very language of these agendas, which build invisible walls that decide from the start who and what is excluded.
Every few years, the world is presented with a bold new plan for a sustainable future. From climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN), these blueprints promise prosperity without collapse. And yet, despite their ambition, a quiet unease lingers. Whole communities, from farmers, ranchers, and indigenous populations to small- and medium-sized businesses affected by the green transition, feel invisible within these visions. This is not paranoia, nor necessarily the result of a Machiavellian design. Rather, it reflects a recurring tendency of institutional discourses, regardless of ideology or power dynamics.
In our recent research, we examined how institutional sustainability discourses are structurally built to exclude forms of otherness. Drawing on the vocabulary of deconstruction, we call this operation “logocentric closure”: a mode of constructing discourses rooted in Western epistemic traditions that privilege reason, coherence, and systematicity. This hegemonic formation is reproduced by diverse institutional actors that adhere to this mode of thinking, including international organizations, state agencies, expert networks, and corporate-policy coalitions, as previous research has noted. These institutions perpetuate such traditions as though they are universally shared ontologies and social conventions.
From the moment the “architects” draw it, the blueprint determines what is included and what is cast out, building walls that do not just allow some to fall through the cracks but exclude them in the first place.
The Architecture of Exclusion
Although various arrangements have been identified as exclusionary structures, whether rooted in intentional design or contextual conditions, we argue, drawing on deconstruction literature, that Organizational Arrangements (OAs) and Moral Articulations (MAs) act strongly as internal forces to secure closure from within. OAs set the blueprint of the discourse, establishing positions, hierarchies, and internal logics that elevate some propositions while sidelining others. MAs then attach normative force to that blueprint, casting the arrangement as ethically necessary and policing its boundaries, thereby legitimizing the discourse above others. This dual operation creates a peculiar form of closure, one that forecloses alternative articulations by simultaneously delegitimizing them as structurally incoherent and morally suspect.
Consider economic growth as an example. An OA might place it at the top of the hierarchy of priorities, determining it necessary for sustainability. The corresponding MA then reinforces this arrangement by recognizing it as the only responsible and fair path to end poverty. By prioritizing growth and framing it as a moral imperative, the discourse creates a closed system that predetermines what is acceptable and what is not, ensuring that challenges to growth-centered sustainability are excluded as both impractical and immoral before they can gain traction, thus rendering such discourses exclusionary from their very origin.
Leave No One Behind?
The UN’s 2030 Agenda illustrates this logocentric closure. Its central MA, “leave no one behind,” sounds unassailable. But scratch at the words, and their exclusions appear.
The verb “leave” reflects an OA that assumes movement, as “to leave” implies abandoning a specific state. Yet the path of transition it presents is not open to interpretation: It draws on Western-centered lifestyles in which scientific education, for instance, is prioritized, alongside democratic regimes and liberal economies. This leaves little, if any, room for alterities such as indigenous knowledges, communal forms of political organization, or degrowth models, thereby excluding them from the conversation.
Similarly, “no one” gestures toward universality but collapses difference, erasing identities unrecognized by the “someone” in the discourse. Non-binary people, for example, are absent from the agenda. Even nature itself is reduced to a managerial object that serves human needs. This reduction is explicit when the Agenda brackets “Mother Earth” as merely a “common expression” used in some parts of the world, rather than recognizing it as a legitimate epistemic framework. Meanwhile, the text repeatedly recodes the planet as “natural resources” and “services” for “present and future generations,” reframing nature from a relational entity to a strategic asset for human use. Within this OA of managerial ordering, the universalist MA, “for all,” legitimizes what the arrangement excludes so that the claim to speak for everyone becomes the very mechanism that silences what does not fit.
Finally, “behind” crystallizes both tools at once. As an OA, it presupposes a linear path of development in which some nations are always “ahead” and others are permanently lagging, converting material asymmetries into a structural hierarchy of progress. This temporal ordering echoes postcolonial critiques of “civilization” and “development” discourses that naturalize inequality by casting non-Western societies as occupying earlier stages of a singular, hegemonically defined trajectory. As an MA, it naturalizes this hierarchy as a deficit to be corrected, portraying developing nations as lacking and burdened with the obligation to “catch up” to an unspoken norm set by industrialized economies. Lost in this framing are alternative trajectories of prosperity, ways of living that do not measure success through the metrics of growth, speed, or modernization but through other registers of collective well-being, such as care-centered development models or Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Development Index.
Real-World Consequences
This critique of institutional discourse is not offered as cynicism, nor as a call to abandon global agendas. Rather, it is an invitation to read them differently, to remain attentive to the alterities they displace.
The UN’s own 2025 report on the Sustainable Development Goals makes the stakes clear: While millions of lives have improved since 2015, only 35 percent of the targets are on track, and nearly one-fifth are moving backward. These failures are not incidental. They reveal how structural closures in sustainability discourses feed into what the UN itself calls a “global development emergency.” Rising inequality, accelerating climate breakdown, and the fiscal squeeze in developing nations are not just background obstacles. They are the direct, material consequences of blueprints that foreclose alternative futures.
The aim of our analysis is empowerment. By exposing the hidden architecture of exclusion, we sharpen our ability to read sustainability plans critically and to press for visions that remain radically and genuinely open to diverse ways of being, knowing, and flourishing.
Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was a Global Forum Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
