For almost 30 years, we have been exploring how liveliness and creativity can be integrated into Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and what kinds of learning experiences they can inspire. During this time, formal education has mostly taken place in closed rooms, groups, or institutions—and largely still does today. Experts design, shape, and negotiate educational offerings in workshops, conferences, and meetings—behind closed doors. People may step outside during breaks, but many ideas, questions, people, perspectives, themes, and challenges remain outside—left at the door.

With the globalgoals.hamburg project, we aim to take discussions about sustainable development and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) out into public spaces and directly to people—beyond narrow expert circles and closed event rooms. The goal is to allow as many people as possible to actively engage with these topics and the necessary changes they entail.

By making the broader context of the SDGs in Hamburg more visible, we hope to spark questions and seek answers together with many others—without prescribing them. What moves people with the most diverse knowledge, experience, work, and life contexts when it comes to equitably deciding what kind of world we and our children want to live in, and which decisions and actions can lead us there? The SDGs provide comprehensive targets: ending poverty and hunger, taking climate action, eliminating discrimination, realizing human and children’s rights, ensuring decent work, and much more. But achieving such ambitious goals is impossible without broad engagement, active participation, and inclusive involvement of civil society—and without a deep sense of being affected and being addressed. To do this, we need courage, confidence, humor, and passion to open ourselves to both possible and impossible future scenarios.

We are aware that the 17 SDGs contain numerous inconsistencies and contradictions, particularly due to a growth ideology—most clearly formulated in SDG 8—that stands in stark contrast to the finite nature of resources and to visions of fundamental global justice. The structural causes of poverty and social inequality, which are reinforced by the global economic, financial, and trade system, are not adequately addressed in the SDGs (see also the positions of the German umbrella organization for development-focused NGOs, VENRO). The significance of these contradictions has become increasingly apparent in recent years through the consequences and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as through resource conflicts and the wars that have resulted from them. Therefore, it is essential to identify and name the political and economic interests behind the SDG targets.

The transition to a socially just and ecologically responsible sustainable development—which we continue to hold as a utopian long-term goal—appears to us fundamentally as a cultural task. By “cultural,” we mean the totality of human expressive potential, a full-sensory interaction with the living and material environment, and a critical examination of political (power) structures and prevailing value systems. We hope that art and creative design can serve as catalysts for open-minded—and sometimes uncomfortable—perspectives on new development paths, which the discussion around the Global Sustainable Development Goals urgently needs.

Conversations with and texts by street artists, musicians, artists, directors, curators, and gallery owners have accompanied us in our step out into public space, offering us new insights and inspiration (for example, the Berlin art project “Okkupation”). Through exchange with other art, sustainability, and educational initiatives, as well as with the public, a creatively critical interest in a discourse on the SDGs (not only in Hamburg) and in their artistic implementation has emerged. This continues to motivate us again and again!