The Political Impact Of The Sustainable Development Goals

The first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals that the United Nations launched in 2015. Written by a team of over sixty experts and drawing on over 3000 scientific studies, this volume is a key resource for policymakers, activists and scholars of sustainable development.

This book draws attention to political aspects of sustainable development goal-setting, exploring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the global-national nexus during their first five years. After broad global deliberation and political negotiations, the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs were adopted in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015, and by now many countries have political structures in place for working towards their realisation. This book explores three concepts to call attention to the political qualities of processes related to the SDGs: legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability. Legitimacy is required to obtain broad political ownership for policy goals in order for them to become effective in addressing cross-border sustainability challenges. Responsibility needs to be clearly distributed among political institutions if a long-term set of broad goals such as the SDGs are to be realised. Accountability to the public is the retrospective mirror of political responsibility. The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals contributes new knowledge on political processes at the nexus of global and national levels, focussing on three countries at different levels of socio-economic development and democratisation: namely Ghana, Tanzania, and Sweden. These countries illustrate a variety of challenges related to the realisation of the SDGs. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, international organisations, and global politics.

A global assessment of potential and anticipated impacts of efforts to achieve the SDGs on forests and related socio-economic systems. This title is available as Open Access via Cambridge Core.

This book draws on the expertise of faculty and colleagues at the Balsillie School of International Affairs to both locate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a contribution to the development of global government and to examine the political-institutional and financial challenges posed by the SDGs. The contributors are experts in global governance issues in a broad variety of fields ranging from health, food systems, social policy, migration and climate change. An introductory chapter sets out the broad context of the governance challenges involved, and how individual chapters contribute to the analysis. The book begins by focusing on individual SDGs, examining briefly the background to the particular goal and evaluating the opportunities and challenges (particularly governance challenges) in achieving the goal, as well as discussing how this goal relates to other SDGs. The book goes on to address the broader issues of achieving the set of goals overall, examining the novel financing mechanisms required for an enterprise of this nature, the trade-offs involved (particularly between the urgent climate agenda and the social/economic goals), the institutional arrangements designed to enable the achievement of the goals and offering a critical perspective on the enterprise as a whole. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals makes a distinctive contribution by covering a broad range of individual goals with contributions from experts on governance in the global climate, social and economic areas as well as providing assessments of the overall project – its financial feasibility, institutional requisites, and its failures to tackle certain problems at the core. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of international affairs, development studies and sustainable development, as well as those engaged in policymaking nationally, internationally and those working in NGOs.

Since the Rio ‘Earth’ Summit of 1992, sustainable development has become the major policy response to tackling global environmental degradation, from climate change to loss of biodiversity and deforestation. Market instruments such as emissions trading, payments for ecosystem services and timber certification have become the main mechanisms for financing the sustainable management of the earth’s natural resources. Yet how effective are they – and do they help the planet and developing countries, or merely uphold the economic status quo? This book investigates these important questions. Providing a comprehensive analysis and the latest research on sustainable development, the authors compare the divergent approaches to emissions trading. Included is a detailed investigation into illegal logging and the effectiveness of policy responses, with an evaluation of different forest certification schemes. Biodiversity offsets and environmental payments are also explored. Integral to the book are interviews and opinions of the key stakeholders in the political economy of sustainable development. This uniquely comprehensive analysis of the governance quality of different sustainable development mechanisms, unprecedented in its panorama of comparative case studies, is essential reading for all those in the policy, academic and non-governmental communities.

This book represents an unusual intervention in debates about the nature of contemporary international development, where the majority of scholarship tends to concern itself with measuring or collating goal performance. Through a series of analyses of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this book explores development as a political construct, and is concerned with the kinds of epistemological, hegemonic, or politico-economic assumptions built into contemporary development policy, and the ensuing effectiveness the SDGs will have in terms of addressing or perpetuating the historical impoverishment of large groups of people living in poverty. The contributors to the book take issue with many of the assumptions upon which SDGs rest, while also broadening the conversation to pay attention to knowledge production, modernity, colonialism, exclusion, citizenship, and other conceptual insights. In this context, the book raises questions about the discourses and practices of the SDGs, especially in relation to how they can: define the limits of what can be said and what can be done; shape development logics through notions of division and forms of exclusion; construct political problems as technical problems; create certain spaces of imagination as a field of activity; and endorse particular ideas and forms of knowledge in models for sustainable development. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. The academic community, policymakers, industry leaders, and civil society must work together and share experiences on the implementation of SDGs. Open discussion on lessons learned from the inclusive education policies, the difficulties and obstacles developing economies face in implementing the SDGs, and the affordability of the clean energy policies initiated by the SDGs will guide and inform better decision making for future implementations across the world. Public Policy’s Role in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals is authored by various esteemed researchers, policymakers, and academics from a multidisciplinary perspective and emphasizes quality research-based studies that contribute to theory, lessons learned, best practices, critical understanding, and policy implications or formulation on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in any country. It supports the acceleration required to implement the SDGs by mobilizing the academic community, policymakers, industry, and civil society to discuss experiences focusing on the SDGs and their implementation in the context of public policy, administration, and governance deemed most important for world regions. Thus, the book will have a global discussion while addressing the SDGs in a way that considers each region’s specificities. It is designed for researchers from the social sciences, arts and humanities, sociology, politics, and the broader interdisciplinary fields of business and economics and also for policymakers, corporations, NGOs, government bodies, research centers, think tanks, and university libraries worldwide.

The aim of this report is to present an overview of the 17 Goals using data currently available to highlight the most significant gaps and challenges.

Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject Politics - Topic: International Organisations, grade: -, Stellenbosch Universitiy, language: English, abstract: Facing global challenges like armed conflicts, climate change and scarcity of resources, the UN as a platform for the international cooperation and global peace still is of majour significance. During the last decades, the focus of its work has shifted to legally non-binding agendas, most recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which stand in the focus of their time and address sustainability. The greatest weakness of the work of the United Nations is its poor enforcement due to legally non-binding documents. This is also a weak point of the Sustainable Development Goals. As the agenda is contained within a legally non-binding UN Resolution, it is at the specific state’s discretion whether and to what extent the SDG are implemented. In these terms, the Goals show a deficit compared to binding human rights treaties within the UN human rights system. This system is based upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which is together known as the Bill of Rights and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2016. The question arises, whether and how existent legally binding UN sources could support the implementation of the non-binding Sustainable Development Goals. As the Goals also address issues of individual’s economic, social and cultural life, the ICESCR could be a suitable guideline for implementation, assuming that the SDG focus on the same content as the Covenant, which are economic, social and cultural rights. In turn, the question arises whether the Sustainable Development Goals as a contemporary and modern work of the United Nations, could impact the long-established covenant. In order to examine these questions, this thesis will analyse the interelationships between the ICESCR and the new Sustainable Development Goals.

A positive agenda for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 All 193 member nations of the United Nations agreed in September 2015 to adopt a set of seventeen "Sustainable Development Goals," to be achieved by 2030. Each of the goals—in such areas as education and health care —is laudable in and of itself, and governments and organizations are working hard on them. But so far there is no overall, positive agenda of what new things need to be done to ensure the goals are achieved across all nations. In a search of fresh approaches to the longstanding problems targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings mounted a collaborative research effort to advance implementation of Agenda 2030. This edited volume is the product of that effort. The book approaches the UN's goals through three broad lenses. The first considers new approaches to capturing value. Examples include Nigeria's first green bonds, practical methods to expand women's economic opportunities, benchmarking to reflect business contributions to achieving the goals, new incentives for investment in infrastructure, and educational systems that promote cross-sector problem solving. The second lens entails new approaches to targeting places, including oceans, rural areas, fast-growing developing cities, and the interlocking challenge of data systems, including geospatial information generated by satellites. The third lens focuses on updating governance, broadly defined. Issues include how civil society can align with the SDG challenge; how an advanced economy like Canada can approach the goals at home and abroad; what needs to be done to foster new approaches for managing the global commons; and how can multilateral institutions for health and development finance evolve.