Reimagining the Sustainable Development Goals: Centering Nature’s rights for a more-than-human future

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are often celebrated as the global blueprint for achieving sustainability. Beneath their integrative language, however, lies a persistent anthropocentrism that centers human progress while relegating Nature to the status of backdrop, resource, or beneficiary. This article offers a critical, interpretive, and ecocentric re-reading of three Goals that anchor the economic, environmental, and social pillars of the SDG architecture: SDG 1 (No poverty), SDG 15 (Life on land), and SDG 16 (Peace, justice, and strong institutions). Through this analysis, we trace how the logics of growth, management, and governance reproduce human exceptionalism even within sustainability discourse. Drawing on Indigenous ontologies, environmental jurisprudence, and multispecies justice theory, we advance a reimagination of the three Goals alongside SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) as a framework for interspecies governance. We outline a set of interrelated structural shifts to reorient sustainability governance, including shifts toward legal accountability for ecological harm, relational governance, epistemic pluralism, multispecies monitoring, and justice centered institutional transformation. These shifts redefine partnership as a moral and ecological relation rather than a managerial device. By positioning ecosystems and species as co-authors of sustainable futures, this reconfiguration proposes an ecocentric architecture of global governance capable of addressing intertwined human and ecological vulnerabilities through reciprocity, shared responsibility, and planetary care.