On September 25, 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. The new 17 goals and 169 targets encompass a wide array of topics that include five main fields: people, prosperity, planet, peace and partnership. The path toward such adoption has not always been easy. Negotiations lasted more than two years, and some countries established complicating red lines. However, the final agreement eventually came through and Member States have a development agenda to follow beyond January 1, 2016.

The Post-2015 Development Agenda is the culmination of decades of conferences, meetings, summits, etc. in which State and non-State actors provided the discussions with insightful and valuable inputs, some of them directly coming from national or regional experiences.

This paper aims at presenting the Post-2015 Development Agenda in light of its social and international significance. Thus it is possible to understand why the new Sustainable Development Goals encompass such a broad group of topics and concerns. Also, it shows how sustainable development is not only focused on environmental affairs, but constitutes a holistic approach to the human way of living—economic growth, poverty eradication, peace and security, environmental preservation, rule of law, democratic institutions, education, health, etc.