The Ontology of Incoherence: How the Sustainable Development Goals Naturalize the Growth–Ecology Contradiction

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are widely presented as an integrated framework for social, economic, and environmental progress, yet recent assessments indicate substantial implementation shortfalls. This scoping review maps post-2015 scholarship on one of the framework’s most contested fault lines: the relationship between Goal 8 (economic growth) and the ecologically oriented goals, especially Goals 6, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Following established scoping review guidance, 32 sources published between 2015 and 2026 were identified from Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, citation searching, and selected grey literature. The synthesis indicates four main patterns in the included corpus. First, a substantial share of the reviewed literature characterizes continued growth-centred development and ecological sustainability as difficult to reconcile under current technological and institutional conditions, particularly given evidence on material throughput, emissions, and planetary boundaries. Second, the corpus recurrently describes three mechanisms through which this tension is muted within the SDG architecture: the rhetorical absorption of ecological limits into “green growth” discourse, strategic vagueness in targets and indicators, and the marginalization of alternative development ontologies. Third, the review synthesizes these mechanisms under the interpretive concept of paradigmatic stacking. Fourth, the corpus identifies alternative resources for a successor framework, including relational and plural conceptions of well-being associated in the reviewed literature with Ubuntu, Buen Vivir, and Gross National Happiness. Taken together, the findings suggest that debates about SDG underperformance cannot be reduced to implementation alone but also involve questions of conceptual design. The article concludes by outlining ontological pluralism as a possible direction for post-2030 framework design.