Ideas, Beliefs, and Policy Linkages: Lessons from Food, Water, and Energy Policies

This chapter analyzes how topics are identified for the SDGs, the prospects for effective linkages between the individual topics, and longer term learning about managing complex issues. It compares the logics of substantive and tactical issues linkage. Empirically it looks at the presence or absence or epistemic communities as factors contributing to the identification of SDGs, and in particular which individual SDGs are compatible to build a more integrated approach to governing sustainability.

Introduction: Global Governance through Goal Setting

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.

Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Blended finance and public private partnerships are landmark mechanisms for sustainable development financing. They are flagged by development finance institutions as promising means to bridge the post-2015 development investment gap. However, the effectiveness of their potential contribution to financing the post-2015 development agenda remains far from certain. Not only do their definitions differ from one institution to another, but also their performance in leveraging funding and channeling it to the most needful goals and countries has not been properly assessed, mostly due to the lack of empirical evidence. In this chapter, we aim to explain why these two financing vehicles fall short of delivering on promises. We provide insight on some possible means to overcome their current limitations.

Toward a Multi-level Action Framework for Sustainable Development Goals

This chapter proposes a Multi-level Action Framework for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. It suggests that there should be three Action Principles, namely to govern sustainable development goals across levels and actors; to target drivers of change at the appropriate level; and to ensure horizontal and vertical coherence in action. It also argues that there should be three Action Mechanisms that should be put in place, namely developing human capacities, building institutional frameworks, and designing appropriate interventions. It demonstrates these principles and mechanisms through an application to the water governance field.

The Sustainable Development Goals and Multilateral Agreements

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.

Corporate Water Stewardship: Lessons for Goal-based Hybrid Governance

This chapter analyses the way in which the UN Global Compact Office (UNGCO) has attempted to mobilize the private sector to contribute to the attainment of MDG 7 through its initiative, the CEO Water Mandate. Since water governance represents a global environmental issue, which is characterized not only by the absence of an international regime, but also by the need for technical information on water resources that can be provided by major corporations, it requires goal-based hybrid governance, where successful governance depends on effective collaboration of corporate water users. As such, the UNGCO has found it necessary to contain the associated “risk of goal displacement” by engaging in “activation,” “orchestration,” and “modulation,” of which “orchestration” has proved central. The output of this process has been the concept of corporate water stewardship representing a shared knowledge base, which allows corporations to manage their physical, reputational, and regulatory risks.

Measuring Progress in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

The chapter argues that the global process that lead to the adoption of the sustainable development goals is synergistic with the decades-old ambition to redefine the framework of how society measures progress. The political interest in goals also brought renewed interest in measurement, but it is also raising the question whether standard ways of thinking about measurement will be enough to realize the SDGs transformative potential. Moving beyond its traditional conceptualization as a technical exercise, viewing measurement through the lens of political economy opens up new possibilities for understanding its potential as a transformative force. Conceptual aspects, actors and actor interests, mechanisms and institutions, and instruments are proposed for consideration both by the policy research community and by practitioners engaged in SDG implementation. The scope of inquiry would also need to go beyond questions related to the supply side and more explicitly address issues related to the use of measurement in policy design, monitoring, reporting and accountability mechanisms.

Conclusion: Key Challenges for Global Governance through Goals

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.

Conceptualization: Goal Setting as a Strategy for Earth System Governance

Mainstream thinking about governance focuses on rule-making and directs attention to the challenges of developing rules, promulgating implementing regulations, and dealing with matters of compliance and enforcement. But this is not the only method for meeting needs for governance in complex systems. An alternative strategy centers on goal-setting and features the establishment of clearcut priorities, the allocation of resources to address these priorities, the development of effective teams with a mandate to pursue goals, and the introduction of metrics to measure progress toward goal fulfillment. While goal-setting is more familiar to those working at subnational and even local levels, cases like the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals indicate that this strategy is usable in largescale settings as well. In some cases (e.g. the regime created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), rule-making and goal-setting are joined together in a single governance system. But goal-setting is a distinct governance strategy with a logic of its own. It makes sense in a variety of settings to compare and contrast the relative merits of goal-setting and other governance strategies in devising arrangements likely to prove effective in solving specific problems.

Lessons from the Health-Related Millennium Development Goals

This chapter first evaluates the MDGs achievements. The MDGs are evaluated positively for their achievements in poverty reduction, gender disparity in school education, gender equality and some of the health related goals. They have not succeeded in, among others, maternal mortality, sanitation and environmental sustainability. The critical weakness lies in the lack of implementation mechanisms. Lessons from the MDGs tell us that in order for the SDGs to be more effective they need to take into account a multilayered approach also tailored at regional and national levels providing a menu of options for actors to select from. Regarding the health related goals focus is on child mortality and the role of GAVI and Norway in this context and both these actors have contributed to a fairly high score on this goal and individual leadership has been particularly important. The lessons also underline the significance of mobilizing money. A final lesson relates to the virtue of combining UN and non-UN efforts. While the UN is necessary to secure legitimacy, smaller and more flexible bodies are often necessary to reach ambitious goals.