Editor’s choice
This article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. The authors report 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.
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The SDG Impact Assessment was the first comprehensive study that focused on the political steering effects of the SDGs on the governance of sustainable development across actors, sectors, and levels. Despite the lack of substantial political impact of the SDGs, this study pointed to several governance areas where initial political changes occurred due to the SDGs. Building upon these insights, we conducted an online expert survey that we directed at the members of the Earth System Governance Project, which is the largest global research alliance on sustainability governance with more than 500 scholars across the globe mainly from the social sciences and humanities (Earth System Governance Project, 2023). The survey comprised 15 questions and entailed closed and open-response options. The main rationale of the survey was to solicit the opinions of field experts on the areas in which they see the strongest impact of the SDGs on actors and institutions at various governance levels, as well as on the themes they perceive as deserving more attention in future research on the SDGs. Following an initial personal invitation in April 2021 and a reminder via email, a total of 49 experts took part in the survey (the survey questions are available as supplementary material).
This online expert survey led to insights into five key governance areas in which the adoption of the SDGs generated some political steering effects:
While some of these areas are widely studied, current scholarship has not comprehensively focused on the conditions that trigger or hamper sustainability transformations across countries, sectors, and levels of governance. After the identification of these five areas, the authors established five working groups under the “Taskforce on the SDGs” of the Earth System Governance Project in which the different governance areas were further scrutinized. They present the main findings from the discussions in these working groups in a condensed version in this paper.
Project / SEI is piloting the SDG Synergies approach in Sri Lanka for coherent policy-making and implementation.
Project / This project will identify and characterise critical interactions between a selection of ‘environmental SDGs’ and all SDGs at target level and at EU level
Project / SEI and the Mining-Energy Planning Unit of Colombia are partnering to integrate SDGs and NDCs, and investigate best practices in Colombia's mining sector.
Journal article / This article focuses on the state practice of Caribbean SIDS regarding the consent regime for marine scientific research under UNCLOS.
Project / Is more collaboration always a good thing? When – and with whom – does it make sense to collaborate in sustainability work?
Journal article / This article addresses civil society’s understudied roles in the SDGs framework, focusing on discursive and practical dynamics in the Forum LAC.
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