From Profit to Prosperity by D. Conterno

 

From Profit to Prosperity: Re-constitutionalising the SDGs with Human Rights Primacy and Bottom-Up Civic Capability by D. Conterno (2026)

ABSTRACT

This paper advances three integrated critiques and a constructive redesign proposal for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). First, it argues that the widely operationalised “People–Planet–Profit” triad (as used in triple-bottom-line practice) creates a structural antagonism between firm-level profit optimisation and civilisation-level flourishing under biophysical constraint. It proposes a disciplined substitution: “People–Planet–Prosperity”, where “profit” is an organisational residual and “prosperity” is a societal state characterised by capabilities, security, institutional trust and ecological integrity. Second, it argues that the SDG architecture, while “anchored in human rights”, lacks an explicit, enforceable Human Rights primacy layer, leaving implementation vulnerable to authoritarian drift, selective compliance and “rights-washing”. Third, it argues that a predominantly top-down compliance model (legislation imposed by states and SDG uptake driven by financial advantage) cannot deliver durable legitimacy or collective action at scale. Drawing on system analysis of market economics and sustainability, and on evidence for democratic and civic-space regression, the paper proposes an SDG “constitutional upgrade”: Human Rights as SDG-0 (a non-negotiable  foundation), planetary boundaries as binding constraints and prosperity metrics beyond GDP as the success function, delivered through bottom-up civic capability and polycentric governance. The result is a practical, enforceable pathway for implementing sustainable development that remains resilient under stress, conflict, and institutional decline.

KEYWORDS
SDGs; human rights; prosperity; triple bottom line; planetary boundaries; polycentric governance; civic capability; market economy; sustainability; education

 

1.      INTRODUCTION: THE SDG PROMISE AND THE IMPLEMENTATION PARADOX

The SDGs constitute a globally recognised framework with 17 Goals and 169 targets, intended to guide sustainable development policy and practice through to 2030. The United Nations human rights office (OHCHR) summarises the 2030 Agenda as a framework for “people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership”, explicitly noting its grounding in international human rights standards and its intent to “realise the human rights of all”. (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

Yet, the reality of SDG implementation exhibits a recurring paradox: SDG discourse often signals moral ambition, while the operating incentives in many economies remain anchored to profit, GDP growth, and short time-horizon optimisation. This paradox matters because sustainable development is not a branding exercise; it is a civilisational coordination problem under hard constraints, including resource throughput, ecological thresholds, and the stability of rights-respecting institutions.

This paper addresses three connected propositions aligned with CEN strategy:

(1) The “People–Planet–Profit” framing (as operationalised in triple-bottom-line practice) is structurally flawed under today’s political economy. The paper proposes a consistent “People–Planet–Prosperity” as the coherent alternative, even if not especially in the triple bottom line tradition.

(2) Human Rights must be elevated from implicit background principle to explicit first-order Goal (SDG-0) to prevent rights erosion from corrupting every other SDG.

(3) The prevailing top-down, compliance-first model is insufficient; durable SDG success requires bottom-up civic capability, truth-competence, and polycentric governance.

The argument is not anti-market. It is pro-reality: markets are powerful coordination tools for certain classes of problem, but sustainability and rights are not reducible to “one size fits all” market design.

 

2.      FROM “PEOPLE–PLANET–PROFIT” TO “PEOPLE–PLANET–PROSPERITY”

2.1 Clarifying the category error: profit is an organisational residual; prosperity is a societal condition
Profit (in standard accounting terms) is the residual after costs, accruing to an organisation’s owners and/or reinvested according to governance choices. Prosperity is not a residual; it is a multi-dimensional societal condition (capabilities, safety, health, education, social trust, environmental stability, and institutional integrity) distributed across a population and sustained across time.

Conflating these categories produces a predictable implementation pathology: an SDG programme can be declared “successful” because it is profitable, even when it increases extraction, displacement, surveillance, or inequality. That is not development; it is value transfer disguised as progress.

The original “triple bottom line” (TBL) popularised “People, Planet and Profit”, but its own originator later argued that it had been reduced to a superficial accounting tool rather than a transformational redesign of capitalism. (Elkington, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/06/25-years-ago-i-coined-the-phrase-triple-bottom-line-heres-why-im-giving-up-on-it).
Elkington also provides an accessible primary text describing the TBL framing and its evolution. (Elkington, n.d., https://www.johnelkington.com/archive/TBL-elkington-chapter.pdf).

The shift to “People–Planet–Prosperity” is therefore not semantic. It is a correction of the objective function.

2.2 Why profit maximisation becomes adversarial under biophysical constraint (step-by-step reasoning)
Where accuracy and causality are contested, the mechanism must be explicit. The structural conflict can be stated as follows.

Step 1: The economy is embedded in the biosphere, not separate from it. Production requires energy and materials; waste returns to ecosystems. This is not ideology; it is physical law.

Step 2: As resource throughput rises, so do ecological pressures and boundary risks. UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook reports that resource use has surged, driving escalating environmental impacts and requiring “bending the trend” in resource consumption. (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP], 2024, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/44901/Global-Resource-Outlook_2024.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=3).

Step 3: Planetary systems exhibit thresholds and non-linear risk. The planetary boundaries framework defines a “safe operating space” for human development and emphasises that boundaries are placed “upstream” of thresholds to buffer uncertainty. (Steffen et al., 2015, https://healthy.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Week-1-Steffen_PlanetaryBoundaries_2015.pdf).

Step 4: In a profit-centred competitive system, firms face selection pressure to externalise costs where regulation or social sanction is weak. This is a known coordination failure: benefits are private; costs are socialised.

Step 5: When growth and profit remain the primary success metric, even “green” transitions can become throughput expansions (for example, minerals, land use, supply chain pressures), unless bounded by explicit ecological constraints and rights protections.

Step 6: Therefore, profit can only be an instrument within a constitution of constraints (rights + boundaries). When it becomes the purpose, “People” and “Planet” are treated as input factors and waste sinks.

This is not a moral accusation; it is a systems diagnosis. It aligns with the market-economy sustainability analysis provided in the Triodos/Erasmus paper, which finds that neoclassical system components are “predominantly defined in terms of economic growth” and that market exchange “fosters (over)production and consumption of private goods, crowding out public goods and preservation of the commons”. (Schoenmaker & Stegeman, 2022/2023, attached document).

The peer-reviewed version is indexed with DOI details and reproduces the same core abstract claims. (Schoenmaker & Stegeman, 2023, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36575742/).

2.3 The implementation reality: “prosperity” declared, “profit” operationalised
A crucial nuance: the UN’s own framing is “people, planet, prosperity…”. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).
So, the critique is not that the UN formally wrote “profit” into the SDGs. The critique is that much SDG implementation has been captured by financialised incentive structures where “SDG alignment” is pursued insofar as it improves profitability, reduces regulatory friction, or unlocks capital at lower cost. In such conditions, “prosperity” is rhetorically affirmed but operationally subordinated.

This is why “People–Planet–Prosperity” must be treated as a governance architecture, not a slogan: prosperity must be defined, measured, and enforced as the success function.

3.      HUMAN RIGHTS AS SDG-0: THE MISSING CONSTITUTIONAL LAYER

3.1 The SDGs are anchored in human rights, yet not protected by a first-order human rights Goal
OHCHR is explicit: the 2030 Agenda is “unequivocally anchored in human rights”, grounded in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and aims to “realise the human rights of all”. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

At the same time, OHCHR also notes gaps and risks, including where implementation may become inconsistent with rights if accountability architecture and indicators are weak, and where targets can be limited by national law in ways that undercut universal standards. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

Conscious Enterprises Network (CEN)’s position is that implicit anchoring is insufficient under conditions of institutional stress. The SDGs require an explicit constitutional layer: Human Rights as SDG-0, non-negotiable and testable, such that any SDG policy, finance product, or corporate programme failing rights tests is disqualified from “SDG contribution” status.

3.2 Why primacy matters: rights erosion corrupts every SDG instrument
If rights protections weaken (freedom of association, expression, due process, access to remedy) then SDG action becomes vulnerable to three predictable corruptions:

(1) Coercive sustainability: environmental or development policies imposed without participation, safeguards, or remedy, producing backlash and instability.

(2) Selective development: benefits delivered to favoured groups while marginalised populations experience displacement, surveillance, or exclusion.

(3) SDG capture: elites use SDG language to legitimise extraction and control.

OHCHR itself stresses that people must be empowered to hold governments accountable and that robust accountability mechanisms are needed, including for non-state actors, referencing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a framework for private sector accountability. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

3.3 Evidence of democratic and civic-space regression relevant to SDG viability
Human rights have been “receding” in Europe and the United States. The strongest confirmable formulation is this: multiple reputable monitoring bodies report democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space and weakening rule-of-law conditions in parts of Europe and the US, which directly undermines SDG accountability and participation.

For the EU context, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe’s Rule of Law reporting highlights concerns including shrinking civic space, pressure on justice systems, media freedom threats and restrictions on protest across parts of the EU, describing a “democratic recession” deepening in 2024. (Civil Liberties Union for Europe, 2025, https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/rolreport2025-pressrelease/45331).

For a global comparative lens, V-Dem’s Democracy Report documents long-run autocratisation trends and provides a systematic dataset-based account of declining democratic attributes across countries. (V-Dem Institute, 2025, https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf).

For the US country monitoring perspective, Freedom House provides structured scoring and qualitative assessments of political rights and civil liberties, which is relevant to the institutional conditions required for SDG accountability. (Freedom House, 2025, https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2025).

These sources do not prove a single linear story of rights decline everywhere. They do establish that SDG implementation cannot assume stable liberal-democratic conditions. That is precisely why Human Rights primacy must be explicit and enforceable.

3.4 A concrete proposal: Human Rights as SDG-0 with “No-Trade-Off” rules
CEN can articulate Human Rights primacy operationally through five enforceable rules.

Rule A: No SDG credit for rights violations. Any programme violating core rights (non-discrimination, freedom of association, due process, access to remedy) is excluded from SDG reporting and financing labels.

Rule B: Participation is not optional. SDG planning requires documented civic participation and protection of dissent, not merely consultation.

Rule C: Remedy is part of delivery. Corporate and state SDG projects must provide accessible grievance mechanisms and restitution pathways.

Rule D: Data disaggregation and transparency are mandatory. This follows OHCHR’s emphasis on disaggregation to prevent “averages” masking harm. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

Rule E: Independent review under stress. When emergency powers expand or conflict intensifies, SDG commitments must be re-tested because that is when rights failures cluster.

4.      WHY A TOP-DOWN, INCENTIVE-LED MODEL IS NAÏVE: LEGITIMACY, TRUST, AND SYSTEM DESIGN

4.1 The market-economy sustainability diagnosis supports the critique
Schoenmaker & Stegeman analysis is directly relevant. It concludes that a “one size fits all” economic mechanism design cannot deliver sustainability outcomes, and that sustainability requires explicit recognition of distinct domains (ecological, social, economic) and governance options beyond markets and state intervention, including private collective decision-making. (Schoenmaker & Stegeman, 2022/2023).

The peer-reviewed abstract provides the same core claims in condensed form. (Schoenmaker & Stegeman, 2023, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36575742/).

This undermines the assumption that SDGs can be “implemented” mainly by tightening regulation at the top while leaving the success function of the economy as growth and profit.

4.2 Neoliberal policy constraints: inequality, fragility, and the trust deficit
Within the broad family of neoliberal policy prescriptions (especially capital account liberalisation, austerity and an over-reliance on market discipline) credible institutions have argued that some elements have increased inequality and reduced resilience. The IMF’s Finance & Development piece “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” states that some neoliberal policies have raised inequality, which in turn can reduce the durability of growth and contribute to instability. (Ostry, Loungani, & Furceri, 2016, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm).

Whether one agrees with the full political framing, the SDG implication is straightforward: if legitimacy and trust are weak, a top-down compliance model triggers resistance, evasion, and polarisation, particularly when policies require sacrifice or behaviour change.

4.3 Polycentric governance: why bottom-up capability is a design requirement
Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance provides a core theoretical and practical point: single global or single-centre solutions for complex collective action problems often fail to generate sufficient trust and sustained cooperation; instead, multiple centres of action at different scales can produce learning, reciprocity, and resilience. (Ostrom, 2009, https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/480171468315567893/pdf/WPS5095.pdf).

This directly supports CEN’s stance: SDGs cannot be “done to” people. They must be “done by” people, through civic capability, local agency, and distributed accountability.

5.      EDUCATION AND TRUTH-COMPETENCE AS THE BOTTOM-UP ENGINE

5.1 Education for sustainable development is already an UN-recognised lever, but it is under-powered
UNESCO’s “Education for sustainable development: a roadmap” positions education as a central driver for achieving the SDGs, emphasising policy, learning environments, educator capacity, youth engagement, and community action as implementation pathways. (UNESCO, 2020, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark%3A/48223/pf0000374802).

CEN’s contribution is to sharpen the education proposition: SDG education must include “truth-competence” (the ability to detect manipulation, resist disinformation, and reason ethically under pressure), because SDG failure is frequently driven by narrative capture, not a lack of technical solutions.

5.2 A CEN bottom-up model: Civic capability, not compliance
A bottom-up approach is not “soft”. It is governance-realistic. It builds the human infrastructure without which legislation and incentives collapse under stress. A CEN-aligned model would include:

(1) Early-age civic literacy: rights, responsibilities, systems thinking, and ecological constraint.

(2) Community-scale measurement: locally legible dashboards tied to rights and boundaries, not only financial KPIs.

(3) Participatory budgeting and deliberation: institutionalised citizen panels and worker/community representation in SDG trade-offs.

(4) Protective civic space: legal and cultural protections for protest, journalism, whistleblowing, and independent science.

The EU civic-space concerns raised in Liberties’ reporting underline why this is non-negotiable: when civic space shrinks, the SDGs become an elite performance. (Civil Liberties Union for Europe, 2025, https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/rolreport2025-pressrelease/45331).

6.      AN SDG “CONSTITUTIONAL UPGRADE”: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR PEOPLE, PLANET, AND PROSPERITY

6.1 The three-layer architecture
Layer 1: Human Rights Primacy (SDG-0)
A binding foundation: rights-consistent implementation, participation, non-discrimination, remedy, and transparent accountability, aligned with OHCHR’s requirements and cautions. (OHCHR, 2015, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/MDGs/Post2015/TransformingOurWorld.pdf).

Layer 2: Planetary Boundaries as constraints
A biophysical “constitution” defining non-negotiable ecological limits and risk buffers, using the safe-operating-space approach. (Steffen et al., 2015, https://healthy.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Week-1-Steffen_PlanetaryBoundaries_2015.pdf).

Layer 3: Prosperity as the success function
Prosperity measured as durable capability and wellbeing within rights and boundaries. UNEP’s resource trend diagnosis makes clear that prosperity must be decoupled from escalating resource throughput. (UNEP, 2024, https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/44901/Global-Resource-Outlook_2024.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=3).

6.2 Why this is “revolutionary” in governance terms (but conservative in evidence terms)
It is revolutionary because it changes what counts as success and what is permitted as a means. Many current SDG implementations treat profit and growth as the default success proxy; rights and ecology become “mitigations”. CEN inverts this: rights and boundaries are the constitution; prosperity is the goal; profit is permitted only as an instrument consistent with those constraints.

It is conservative because it aligns with the strongest available institutional statements: OHCHR’s insistence on rights anchoring and accountability, UNEP’s warning on resource spikes, and the scientific framing of safe operating space.

6.3 Practical enforcement: “SDG integrity tests”
To prevent “SDG theatre”, CEN can formalise integrity tests for any SDG-labelled initiative:

Test 1 (Rights): Does it reduce discrimination, expand civic agency, and provide remedy? If not, it fails.

Test 2 (Boundaries): Does it reduce absolute pressures on relevant ecological limits, not merely relative efficiency? If not, it fails.

Test 3 (Prosperity): Does it measurably improve capabilities and security for those worst off, without offshoring harm? If not, it fails.

Test 4 (Governance): Is oversight independent, and are data auditable? If not, it fails.

This design directly reflects Schoenmaker & Stegeman’s conclusion that sustainability requires multi-domain governance and cannot be delivered by a single mechanism design. (Schoenmaker & Stegeman, 2022/2023).

 

7. CONCLUSION

The SDGs remain one of the most important global coordination instruments available. Yet their success cannot be assumed on the basis of rhetoric, finance, or top-down legislation alone. Under contemporary conditions (resource acceleration, boundary risks, and documented democratic and civic-space pressures) the SDGs require a constitutional upgrade.

CEN’s contribution is a coherent reframing and implementation architecture:

1. Replace the operational triad of “People–Planet–Profit” with “People–Planet–Prosperity”, explicitly distinguishing organisational residuals from societal flourishing.
2. Establish Human Rights primacy as SDG-0, not as implicit background language, thereby hardening the SDGs against authoritarian drift and “rights-washing”.
3. Shift from compliance-first top-down models to bottom-up civic capability and polycentric governance, using education and truth-competence as the durable engine of collective action.

If civilisation is to become prosperous rather than merely profitable, the SDGs must be treated as a lived constitutional project. They must be rights-first, boundary-bounded, prosperity-measured, and people-powered.

REFERENCES

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Elkington, J. (2018, June 25). 25 years ago I coined the phrase “triple bottom line.” Here is why it is time to rethink it. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/06/25-years-ago-i-coined-the-phrase-triple-bottom-line-heres-why-im-giving-up-on-it

Elkington, J. (n.d.). Enter the triple bottom line (chapter PDF). https://www.johnelkington.com/archive/TBL-elkington-chapter.pdf

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