The Transformative Power of Sustainable Development Goal 16: The Rule of Law, Controlling for Nuance, and Unlocking Potential

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Marie Brown
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Frauke Lachenmann

The negotiation process of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) process was extremely ambitious. It sought to remedy all the shortcomings of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) by ensuring transparency, ownership of the countries of the Global South, strong involvement of civil society groups and stakeholders, and creating a truly transformative set of sustainable development goals. Yet, it did not manage to avoid all the mistakes that were characteristic of the formulation of the MDGS. In addition, it struggled with its very own problems. The article traces the developments and debates that led to the formulation of Goal 16 on the rule of law. It shows that the success of this ambitious goal largely depends on the refinement of the indicator framework and the review mechanism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Sansom Milton

AbstractSustainable Development Goal 16 commits to ‘promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’. While the concerns of SDG16 with violence reduction, rule of law, and governance are relevant to all societies, this paper focuses on fragile and conflict-affected countries, many of which have the hardest task in achieving SDG16. It analyses how higher education can contribute towards—or detract from—SDG16 through teaching, research, governance, and external leadership. It then analyses four dynamics influencing the agency of universities in fragile and conflict-affected contexts in engaging with SDG16: resource mobilisation and the public good; securitisation; academic freedom, insecurity, and politicisation; and tensions between demands for localisation and the universalising logics of liberal peacebuilding models and the SDGs.


Author(s):  
Martin Wählisch

This chapter examines normative principles for peacemakers and peacebuilding that define the parameters for just and sustainable peace in the UN system. It argues that an ‘imperfect’ peace is better than ‘just war’. It shows that UN notions of peace have been developed through practice. It explores how just peace approaches intersect with the UN peacebuilding architecture and Sustainable Development Goal 16. The author identifies core principles which shape UN post-conflict transitions, such as national ownership, inclusivity, rule of law, effective leadership, coordination, and accountability.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahereh Dehdarirad ◽  
Kalle Karlsson

AbstractIn this study we investigated whether open access could assist the broader dissemination of scientific research in Climate Action (Sustainable Development Goal 13) via news outlets. We did this by comparing (i) the share of open and non-open access documents in different Climate Action topics, and their news counts, and (ii) the mean of news counts for open access and non-open access documents. The data set of this study comprised 70,206 articles and reviews in Sustainable Development Goal 13, published during 2014–2018, retrieved from SciVal. The number of news mentions for each document was obtained from Altmetrics Details Page API using their DOIs, whereas the open access statuses were obtained using Unpaywall.org. The analysis in this paper was done using a combination of (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modelling, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. The covariates included in the regression analysis were features related to authors, country, journal, institution, funding, readability, news source category and topic. Using topic modelling, we identified 10 topics, with topics 4 (meteorology) [21%], 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation) [18%] and 8 (ecosystems and biodiversity) [14%] accounting for 53% of the research in Sustainable Development Goal 13. Additionally, the results of regression analysis showed that while keeping all the variables constant in the model, open access papers in Climate Action had a news count advantage (8.8%) in comparison to non-open access papers. Our findings also showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation), even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets.


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