THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
TRANSFORMING GOVERNANCE THROUGH GLOBAL GOALS?
The first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals
The assessment provides the most comprehensive data compilation, network mapping, and comparative institutional analysis of the evolution, effectiveness and future prospects of ‘global governance through goals’ as a central novel steering mechanism in world politics.
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.
A 2022 PUBLICATION FROM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to guide public policies and to inspire societal actors to promote sustainable development worldwide. The ambition expressed in these Sustainable Development Goals is unprecedented. The goals and the overarching UN “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” aim at nothing less than “Transforming Our World”.
Yet, five years after the launch of the goals, the question urgently arises: Will these 17 Sustainable Development Goals really help resolve the pressing challenges of economic development, poverty eradication, social justice and global environmental protection?
To address this question, a network of leading research institutions and individual scholars has come together to compile the first comprehensive assessment of all the scholarly knowledge on the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The central question of the SDG Impact Assessment is whether the Sustainable Development Goals have become a transformative force in governance, from local to global levels. More specifically, the Assessment asks whether, to what extent and how the Sustainable Development Goals have led to political and institutional changes in six key areas.
- Global governance
- Implementation
- Interlinkages, integration & coherence
- Inclusiveness
- Planetary integrity
- Indicators & methods
Side-Event: 2022 UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
The GLOBALGOALS project team is a vibrant international group of researchers based at Utrecht University, investigating the Sustainable Development Goals as novel governance interventions from varied perspectives. The group works with a global network of affiliated researchers and partner institutions.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 788001).
