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Edited by
Helge Jörgens, Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Portugal,Nina Kolleck, Universität Potsdam, Germany,Mareike Well, Freie Universität Berlin
Focusing on three initiatives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat – the Momentum for Change Initiative, the Lima–Paris Action Agenda, and the Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action – this chapter studies how an international environmental bureaucracy can evolve from a low-key and servant-like secretariat to an actor in its own right. It argues that international environmental secretariats increasingly take on the role of an orchestrator that seeks to shape policy outcomes through changing the behavior of others. Using orchestration as a conceptual lens, the chapter identifies new types of influence of international bureaucracies. The forms of influence that the UNFCCC Secretariat exerts include in particular (i) awareness-raising, (ii) norm-building, and (iii) mobilization. This new way of how soft power is deployed underscores the increasingly proactive role of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The chapter concludes that the UNFCCC Secretariat is currently “loosening its straitjacket” by gradually expanding its original mandate and spectrum of activity. It is no longer a passive bystander but has adopted new roles and functions in the global endeavor to cope with climate change.
This article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals, it remains unclear how such cases can be upscaled and develop a broader political impact to accelerate the global endeavor to achieve sustainable development. We hence raise concerns about the overall effectiveness of governance by goal-setting and raise the question of how we can make this mode of governance more effective.
Technical Summary
A recent meta-analysis on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shown that these global goals are moving political processes forward only incrementally, with much variation across countries, sectors, and governance levels. Consequently, the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development remains uncertain. Against this backdrop, this article explores where and how incremental political changes are taking place due to the SDGs, and under what conditions these developments can bolster sustainability transformations up to 2030 and beyond. Our scoping review builds upon an online expert survey directed at the scholarly community of the ‘Earth System Governance Project’ and structured dialogues within the ‘Taskforce on the SDGs’ under this project. We identified five governance areas where some effects of the SDGs have been observable: (1) global governance, (2) national policy integration, (3) subnational initiatives, (4) private governance, and (5) education and learning for sustainable development. This article delves deeper into these governance areas and draws lessons to guide empirical research on the promises and pitfalls of accelerating SDG implementation.
Social Media Summary
As SDG implementation lags behind, this article explores 5 governance areas asking how to strengthen the global goals.
This chapter takes stock of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals within countries. It explores the various initiatives taken by national governments, sub-national authorities, the corporate sector and civil society, and assesses their strategies and approaches to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in their spheres. The chapter finds that the steering effects of the global goals are so far mainly present in political discourse. While we also witness the emergence of new types of institutions, relationships and partnerships, they apparently reproduce existing structures and priorities of key players, indicating selective goal implementation. What we observe the least are steering effects on the (re-)allocation of resources. Thus, the chapter suggests that the Sustainable Development Goals are not (yet) leading to fundamental change and the voluntary nature of the 2030 Agenda makes it fairly easy for actors to implement the global goals in a way that benefits their self-interests.
This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. Selecting the most suitable method for a particular research question requires understanding their main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The chapter highlights that all methods and tools need to be combined to comprehensively assess the political impact of the goals, the progress towards their achievement, and their overall transformative potential. As data gaps and unequal geographical coverage still hamper a broader understanding of the political impact of the globalgoals, we need to build bridges across language communities, disciplines and methodological camps, which still work very much in isolation.
In 2015, the international community adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets as part of a global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ambition expressed in these goals is unprecedented; the Agenda aims at nothing less than ‘Transforming Our World’. But can this prominent example of global goal-setting, as a new central approach in global governance, help resolve the pressing challenges of economic development, poverty eradication, social justice and global environmental protection? This chapter sets out the central questions our scientific assessment aims to address, as well as the conceptual framework for evaluating the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals. We start with providing an account of the novelty of the Sustainable Development Goals. We then conceptualize the steering effects of global goals as encompassing any behavioural changes of political, economic and societal actors, including normative, institutional and discursive changes. Finally, we detail the assessment process and scope of our meta-analysis, and outline the assessment areas that form the organizing principle for the following chapters of the book.
The final chapter brings the insights of the book together under the overarching question of whether the Sustainable Development Goals have had any political impact after their adoption in 2015. The chapter draws the conclusion that the Sustainable Development Goals have so far had only limited effects in global, national and local governance. We mainly see discursive effects of the goals with some normative and institutional effects as well. The global goals have however not (yet) become a transformative force in and of themselves. Their effects are neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 2030 Agenda and the 17 goals with their 169 targets constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national implementation, translation to the local level, and dissemination across societal sectors remain a political process.
This chapter focuses on the national level and studies interlinkages, institutional integration and policy coherence in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. After defining key terms, the chapter reviews how perspectives on interlinkages have shaped a new discourse, followed by an analysis of the steering effects of the global goals on institutional integration and policy coherence. The chapter finds that some measures have been taken by national governments to advance institutional integration through coordination by central agencies and inter-ministerial exchanges. Growing policy coherence, however, is not clearly observable. Existing barriers in political-administrative systems preventing institutional integration and policy coherence have not vanished with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although recent studies have considerably enhanced knowledge on the conceptual understanding of interlinkages, integration and coherence, empirical data about how these concepts play out in practice at national level is still very limited.
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
We summarize some of the past year's most important findings within climate change-related research. New research has improved our understanding of Earth's sensitivity to carbon dioxide, finds that permafrost thaw could release more carbon emissions than expected and that the uptake of carbon in tropical ecosystems is weakening. Adverse impacts on human society include increasing water shortages and impacts on mental health. Options for solutions emerge from rethinking economic models, rights-based litigation, strengthened governance systems and a new social contract. The disruption caused by COVID-19 could be seized as an opportunity for positive change, directing economic stimulus towards sustainable investments.
Technical summary
A synthesis is made of ten fields within climate science where there have been significant advances since mid-2019, through an expert elicitation process with broad disciplinary scope. Findings include: (1) a better understanding of equilibrium climate sensitivity; (2) abrupt thaw as an accelerator of carbon release from permafrost; (3) changes to global and regional land carbon sinks; (4) impacts of climate change on water crises, including equity perspectives; (5) adverse effects on mental health from climate change; (6) immediate effects on climate of the COVID-19 pandemic and requirements for recovery packages to deliver on the Paris Agreement; (7) suggested long-term changes to governance and a social contract to address climate change, learning from the current pandemic, (8) updated positive cost–benefit ratio and new perspectives on the potential for green growth in the short- and long-term perspective; (9) urban electrification as a strategy to move towards low-carbon energy systems and (10) rights-based litigation as an increasingly important method to address climate change, with recent clarifications on the legal standing and representation of future generations.
Social media summary
Stronger permafrost thaw, COVID-19 effects and growing mental health impacts among highlights of latest climate science.
Given the regulatory gap in earth system governance, numerous new governance initiatives, such as multilateral clubs, private certification schemes and multi-stakeholder forums, have emerged to tackle transboundary environmental challenges. This plethora of different governance initiatives has led to a significant increase in the institutional complexity of global (environmental) policymaking and to more interlinkages between such institutions. Chapter 6 perceives dyadic institutional interlinkages as a key ‘microscopic’ structural feature of the overall global governance landscape and most basic building blocks or units of analysis in current scholarship on global governance architectures. After defining the term institutional interlinkages, we synthesize the literature on institutional interlinkages with a particular view on the expansion of interlinkages across different governance levels and scales. Against this backdrop, we examine to what extent the existing concepts and typologies of institutional interlinkages can capture the various new interlinkages between different kinds of institutions in earth system governance.