The year 2015 was meant to be one of change in the UN system (Puplampu, Hanson, Shaw, 2017). Instead, the inauguration of a populist era symbolised by the Trump Presidency's unilateralism and Prime Minister May's Brexit ambitions served to complicate any notion of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, despite the courageous initial SDG 2016. Conversely, after a decade-and-a-half of the BRIC(S), global development has achieved its own momentum, symbolised by what Jan Nederveen Pieterse characterises as the shift from a North-South global axis to a South-East one.

This timely collection, by eminent analysts on important cases, goes well beyond the SDGs to present an overview of development in an unexpectedly ‘post-multilateral’ world (Warner, Shaw, 2017). Happily, its mix of established and rising scholars from the global South as well as the endangered North transcends the divide between academy and policy, university and think tank. It presents a universe of very global challenges, which contemporary competitive nationalisms cannot begin to address.

Given exponential global inequalities, the legacy of the era of MDGs needs to be superseded by more than the SDGs. This is particularly apparent given the undeniable nature of climate change, thus another landmark from 2015 – the Paris Climate Accord & Climate Alliance of COP21 – will need more attention than ever; hence the growing recognition of the increasingly central water-energy-food (WEF) nexus. A range of ‘development’ issues, which cannot be overlooked or postponed, will also need attention. These include the pressures of migration, the impact of a burgeoning global middle class, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the ubiquity of illegal networks characterised by transnational organised crime (TOC), the proliferation of non-traditional security (NTS) threats and the irreversibility of religious fundamentalisms, many exacerbated by global medias.

Such an extensive, unanticipated development agenda post-2015 cannot begin to be addressed by traditional analyses or policies. This timely volume points to ways to transcend the SDGs and the MDGs to advance sustainable development. I have recently been honoured to serve as the foundation director of a new PhD on Global Governance and Human Security at the University of Massachusetts Boston; this offers novel ways to respond to such global challenges. Such imperative curriculum reform and related networks of innovation will need to become widespread if SDGs are to be identified, let alone addressed, in a post-multilateral era (Shaw, 2017).