Implementing the “Sustainable Development Goals”: towards addressing three key governance challenges—collective action, trade-offs, and accountability
Introduction
Increasing losses from disasters [1], growing inequality [2] and the likelihood of breaching planetary boundaries [3] have catalysed international attention on the sustainability challenge in the Anthropocene [4, 5] and helped to create a policy window [6] to advance solutions. In the last two years political actors have been mobilised and international agreements have been ratified to reduce harm, and limit the underlying causes of global climate change and enhance human well-being [7].
Coupled with action in the political realm, global change research has begun to address not only the ecological integrity of life-supporting systems, but also the underlying social and economic conditions that perpetuate vulnerability [8, 9]. New conceptual and methodological frameworks for analysing resilience and linked human–environmental systems are being combined with ideas about inequality, power relations and social justice [10, 11, 12, 13]. Solutions-oriented sustainability science increasingly focuses on identifying pathways to secure resilient livelihoods [14•] in the face of multiple stressors [15].
At the same time, an unprecedented international policy window has opened up for addressing global sustainability and human development issues through the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and its central element, the “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), which were signed in 2015. The SDGs extend the preceding Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in several ways. Whereas the MDGs focused on poverty reduction in developing countries, the SDGs have been characterised as universal, transformative and integrative [16]. This means they concern all countries and aim to comprehensively link human development goals and environmental sustainability under a single global agenda. Each of the 17 goals has specific outcomes to be achieved, and 169 targets provide the basis for monitoring and reporting.
Attention is shifting towards implementing the SDGs, raising many challenges for science and governance, some of which have been identified elsewhere [17, 18, 19•]. For example, Joshi et al. [20] assert that a clear-eyed assessment of historical and theoretical context of transformative governance arrangements is required for successful implementation of ‘pro-poor’ policies within the SDGs. Greater levels of integration across sectors, societal actors, and nation states have also been called for [21•], together with close attention to the interconnections between individual goals [22••].
There has been much attention to scientific challenges posed by the SDGs, but less attention to governance challenges. Three particular governance challenges that are central to implementing the SDGs are: (i) cultivating collective action by creating inclusive decision spaces for stakeholder interaction across multiple sectors and scales; (ii) making difficult trade-offs, focusing on equity, justice and fairness; and (iii) ensuring mechanisms exist to hold societal actors to account regarding decision-making, investment, action, and outcomes. While there are many valid angles that could be taken to study governance of the SDGs, we argue that these three areas are particularly important because they reflect integrative governance capabilities needed to make progress beyond business-as-usual approaches. They were identified through review of literature and extensive discussion based on the experience of the authors at a recent Future Earth science-policy dialogue hosted by The International Council for Science, International Social Science Council, and the German Research Foundation.9
The paper explains each of these three governance challenges in turn, identifying possible avenues for making progress in addressing them. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of interlinkages between the three challenges. Lastly, it briefly reflects on the three governance challenges in light of broader emerging discussions about global scale sustainability transformations.
Section snippets
Collective action and decision spaces
The challenge of ensuring that multiple actors work together is at the heart of many ‘wicked’ sustainability problems [23, 24, 25]. Cooperation between actors across scales, in diverse contexts, and over time, is fundamental to implementing the SDGs [21•]. This need can be viewed as a collective action challenge involving multiple actors across multiple sectors and jurisdictional levels, with divergent and often conflicting interests [26, 27, 28]. Collective action can be conceptualised in
Trade-offs and co-benefits
The 17 SDGs aim to present a unified vision of economic development, environmental sustainability and social inclusion. However, there will inevitably be many tensions between them, raising the critical need to identify trade-offs and ways of addressing these. A trade-off involves sacrificing one aspect of a goal in return for gaining improvements in another when both cannot be fully achieved at the same time. Some SDGs may need to be advanced or prioritized at the expense of others in
Ensuring accountability
The third governance challenge is ensuring accountability for commitments made by nations, communities, organizations, and other parties to SDG-related agreements [57]. Implementation within the SDG framework needs mechanisms for accountability to ensure that actions are fulfilled and targets are met [58]. Accountability requires close consideration of four specific aspects: the normative behaviour standards for actors, the relationship between actors ‘held to account’ and those who ‘hold to
Conclusion
In this paper, we suggest greater recognition of three key governance challenges influencing implementation of the SDGs. These challenges – facilitating collective action; recognising trade-offs in SDG processes and outcomes and maximising equitable outcomes; and ensuring accountability of national governments and other actors in fulfilling agreed commitments – are not independent challenges, but are closely related and influence each other. For example, collective action with broad stakeholder
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Charles Ebikeme, Johannes Mengel, Teddy Ruge and the convenors of an ISCU, ISSC, DFG and Future Earth workshop on science, policy and the SDGs, in May 2015 where this paper was initiated. An earlier version of the arguments presented in this piece was published by The Conversation, July 2015 as ‘How can we prevent the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” from failing?’. NCH was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund.
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