Global governance and the Sustainable Development Goals

Author(s):  
Alexandra R. Harrington
Author(s):  
Norichika Kanie ◽  
Steven Bernstein ◽  
Frank Biermann ◽  
Peter M. Haas

This chapter lays out a research agenda to assess conditions, challenges, and prospects for the Sustainable Development Goals to pursue this aim. First, the chapter discusses goal setting as a global governance strategy. Second, to contextualize the Sustainable Development Goals, it discusses the unique nature of the modern challenges that the Sustainable Development Goals must confront and review the historical and political trajectory of sustainable development governance, including the evolution from a primarily rule-based to a more goal-based system and the experience of the earlier Millennium Development Goals. Third, the chapter reviews the negotiating history of the Sustainable Development Goals. Then, the chapter elaborate on how the chapters are organized to address the three questions that guide the book.


Author(s):  
Arild Underdal ◽  
Rakhyun E. Kim

This chapter explores goal setting, as exemplified by the Sustainable Development Goals, as a governance strategy for reforming or rearranging existing international agreements and organizations so as to enhance their overall performance in promoting sustainable development. It discusses the political and entrepreneurial challenges peculiar to bringing existing international institutions into line, and identifies the conditions under which goal setting could be an effective tool for orchestration. The chapter concludes that, because of their ecumenical diversity and soft priorities, the Sustainable Development Goals are not likely to serve as effective instruments for fostering convergence. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides neither an overarching norm that can serve as a platform for more specific goals nor an integrating vision of what long-term sustainable development in the Anthropocene means. In the absence of such an overarching principle and vision, the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on global governance will likely materialize primarily as spurring some further clustering of existing regimes and organizations within crowded policy domains. The Sustainable Development Goals cannot be expected to generate major architectural reforms that will significantly reduce the fragmentation of the global governance system at large.


Author(s):  
Frank Biermann ◽  
Norichika Kanie

This chapter summarizes some key findings of the book, discuss the challenges for, and opportunities of, the Sustainable Development Goals by identifying several conditions that might determine their successful implementation, and also suggest some possible avenues for further research. The approach of “global governance through goals”—and the Sustainable Development Goals as a prime example—is marked by a number of key characteristics, including its detachment from the international legal system, weak institutional arrangement, global inclusion and comprehensive goal-setting process, and granting much leeway to national choices and preferences. Those characteristics are reflected in the challenges for implementation, including those of developing indicators and institutional arrangements, tailoring implementation at national or stakeholder levels, and securing policy integration. Further research is needed in addressing these challenges, which requires inter- and transdisciplinary research development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Dustin Kuan-Hsiung Wang

Abstract The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) clearly address the difference as well as recognize the correlations among seventeen sustainable development dimensions. The SDGs also play an important role for the international community to pay attention to our future living. Taking oceans for instance, they are the biggest ecosystems on our planet, and their health are essential to our survival. In terms of conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resource under SDG 14, several targets were agreed upon by the UN member States to help guide decision-making with regard to oceans, such as conserving marine and coastal areas in agreement with international and national laws and using the latest scientific information. This article mainly focuses on the matters of conserving and managing international fishery resources. It also addresses the issues between international law and global governance with perspectives on the implementation of SDG 14. This article concludes that in order to effectively implement international fishery laws and to reach the targets that SDGs have postulated, eliminating the commercial benefits might be the necessary consideration in filling the gap between international fishery law and fishery governance.


In September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as an integral part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals mark the most ambitious effort yet to place goal setting at the center of global governance and policy. This book is the first book addressing global governance through goals, asking three sets of questions. First, the book studies in detail the core characteristics of goal setting in global governance, asking when it is an appropriate strategy in global governance and what makes global governance through goals different from other approaches such as rule making or norm promotion. Second, the book analyze under what conditions a goal-oriented approach can ensure progress toward desired ends; what can be learned from other, earlier experiences of global goal setting, especially the Millennium Development Goals; and what governance arrangements are likely to facilitate progress in implementing the new Sustainable Development Goals. Third, the book studies the practical and operational challenges involved in global governance through goals in promoting sustainability and the prospects for achieving such a demanding new agenda. The book revealed that the approach of “global governance through goals”—and the Sustainable Development Goals as a prime example—is marked by a number of key characteristics, but none of those is specific to this type of governance. Yet all these characteristics together, in our view, amount to a unique and novel way of steering and distinct type of institutional arrangement in global governance.


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