Back to the future: learning from the evolution of global sustainability governance

Can goals change the world? In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) unanimously adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to "transform our world" by 2030. With these highly ambitious goals, world leaders pledged to "end hunger", "achieve gender equality", "protect life on land", and much more. Importantly, the SDGs emphasise the need for more collaboration, the breakdown of 'silos' in global governance, and to achieve the SDGs in a balanced and integrated manner. This call for both institutional and policy integration in global governance is long-standing, but remains highly challenging. The SDGs - as the most central and ambitious global agenda so far - have given a renewed impetus to this call. Yet, empirically, we know very little about the effects of global goals. Can non-binding, highly ambitious goals really steer global governance? In this thesis, I investigate the steering effects of the SDGs on international organisations. Specifically, I assess whether - since the advent of the SDGs - institutional integration among and policy integration within international organisations has increased. My methods are both quantitative and qualitative. I rely primarily on a large dataset of scraped websites of 276 international organisations, and assess the contents of and hyperlinks between websites. To complement this data, I also conduct a discourse analysis and analysis on Twitter data. My findings can be summarised in four key points. First, while many international organisations use the SDGs on their websites, the SDGs are not yet a fully global framework. Many international organisations use the SDGs on their websites, and this increases over time. However, the SDGs are mainly used by the larger organisations and by UN entities, while many of the smaller and more regional organisations do not or barely use the SDGs. Second, policy integration overall is increasing, but the integration of environmental topics with socio-economic topics is lagging behind. As mentioned, the call for more policy integration is long-standing, and indeed an increase in policy integration is observed in my study. However, mainly socio-economic topics (ending poverty, decent work, innovation and infrastructure) are integrated with one another, while the integration of environmental with socio-economic topics occurs much less frequent. Third, while policy integration is overall increasing, the SDGs appear not to be an influencing factor. The international organisations that use the SDGs more, do not subsequently show an increase in policy integration. It is rather the other way around: those international organisations that already showed higher levels of policy integration, also use the SDGs more. Thus, the SDGs are used to frame efforts towards policy integration, but do not spur it. Fourth, the SDGs facilitate institutional integration within policy domains. This also means, conversely, that institutional integration between policy domains has decreased. Thus, contrary to political expectations of the SDGS to "break down silos", silos around the 17 issue areas of the SDGs and around the economic, social and environmental dimension of sustainability have strengthened.

Global ocean governance is the concretization of global governance. Various interest groups interact with and coordinate ocean issues. Global ocean governance is inevitably linked to the new global governance landscape. In recent years, a series of new scenarios in global governance have emerged. These situations have further shaped the plurality of participants and the diversity of mechanisms in global ocean governance. Science and technology innovation and application are prerequisites and prime movers for the evolution of global ocean governance. Major worldwide crises, represented by global climate change and the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, have added great uncertainty to the future development of global ocean governance. The divergence of interests and positions between emerging countries and developed countries, as well as the reshaping of the global geopolitical landscape in recent years, has led to the stagnation or deadlock of a series of international negotiations and international cooperation platforms related to global ocean governance. With the deepening of global governance, non-state actors are not only objects of ocean governance but also bearers of legal obligations and enjoy varying degrees of legal rights, participating in agenda setting, rule construction, and monitoring implementation at different levels of ocean governance. From a critical jurisprudence perspective, in the practice of global ocean governance, the relationship between non-governmental organizations, states, and international organizations is more likely to be one of reconciliation than the “state–civil society” dichotomy of moral imagination. This new set of circumstances exposes the divisive and fragmented nature of global ocean governance. This study concludes that the new situation of global ocean governance constitutes a historic opportunity for countries to reexamine the role of the rule of law during the Anthropocene to bridge the fragmentation and gaps in mechanisms and achieve a truly integrated, holistic, and closely nested global ocean governance. The question of how to implement the rule of law requires the introduction of theoretical perspectives such as the Anthropocene, complex systems theory, and the community of a shared future for humanity to undertake a fundamental critical reflection and rethinking of global ocean governance.

Global financial governance refers to the way in which global financial affairs are managed. As there is no global government, global financial governance typically involves a range of actors including states, as well as regional and international organizations aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region, far from only providing the public good of financial stability through global economy integration and global financial legislation. In geopolitical context of the 21st century, emerging economies still have maintained a low profile in global financial governance, despite their growing economic power and the rhetoric of being a responsible great power, and there is little evidence that they will seek international leadership. Moreover, compared to the other emerging powers in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group, China has under-participated in global governance in terms of contributing personnel, finance and ideas to major multilateral institutions and programs. It is really an interesting question in international economics and politics area. Firstly, this paper examines comparative data on the emerging economies countries’ participation in global financial governance and explains the reason why China has relatively low involvement in global financial governance. Secondly, this paper analyzes norms and legitimacy in global financial governance, and thus outlines the emerging economies constraints on public policy of global financial market integration in the light of the foregoing analysis of legitimacy, accountability and democracy. Finally, some global financial governance development strategy and possible policy solutions are discussed as well.

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an “integrated and indivisible” set of policy objectives with the aim, among others, to unite the diverse and vast system of international organizations under one shared normative agenda. And yet, have these SDGs really become such an integrative force in global governance? Our conclusion here is negative, and our research suggests that the SDGs have not lived up to these high expectations. We find instead that the 17 global goals have not been taken up by a substantial group of international organizations, and some organizations rather cherry-pick those goals that best fit their own agenda and interests. To overcome these challenges and to fulfill the promise of integrated global sustainability governance enshrined in the SDGs, we propose three urgent actions: first, to further push the use of the SDGs across all international organizations, in particular regional organizations outside the United Nations system; second, to facilitate better collaboration across policy domains; and third, to focus attention on those SDGs that are so far “left behind.”

Recent decades of globalisation have created a more interconnected, interdependent and complex world than ever witnessed before. While global policy has focused on facilitating integration, the implications of growing interdependence have been largely ignored. The acceleration in global integration has brought many benefits, but it also has created fragility through the production of new kinds of systemic risks. This article provides a framework for understanding these new 21st‐century systemic risks and examines the challenges they pose to global governance. The 2008–2009 financial crisis will be used to illustrate the failure of even sophisticated global institutions to manage the underlying forces of systemic risk. We show this is symptomatic of institutional failure to keep pace with globalisation. The failure of the most developed and best‐equipped global governance system, finance, to recognise or manage the new vulnerabilities associated with globalisation in the 21st century highlights the scale and urgency of the global governance challenge.Policy Implications The rise of systemic risk requires a systemic response. Effective global governance and policy development have never been so necessary and urgent. The financial crisis illustrated that current global financial institutions are inadequate in their policy response to systemic risk and cannot keep pace with innovation and increasing system complexity in global finance. Deeper structural changes are required, including regulatory reforms. The institutional rigidity and profound shortcomings of global institutions apply not only to global finance, but to other looming systemic risks in the future. Neither the current global governance system, nor the planned reforms, meet the test of addressing new global systemic risks. Global governance requires radical structural changes in existing institutions and the development of new global institutions that reflect the realities of new global power balances and address the forces of systemic risk in the 21st century.

An examination of three major trends in global governance, exemplified by developments in transnational environmental rule-setting. The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainability governance: the emergence of nonstate actors; new mechanisms of transnational cooperation; and increasingly segmented and overlapping layers of authority. The book, which is the synthesis of a ten-year “Global Governance Project” carried out by thirteen leading European research institutions, first examines new nonstate actors, focusing on international bureaucracies, global corporations, and transnational networks of scientists; then investigates novel mechanisms of global governance, particularly transnational environmental regimes, public-private partnerships, and market-based arrangements; and, finally, looks at fragmentation of authority, both vertically among supranational, international, national, and subnational layers, and horizontally among different parallel rule-making systems. The implications, potential, and realities of global environmental governance are defining questions for our generation. This book distills key insights from the past and outlines the most important research challenges for the future.

Water is a key element of the earth system with all its geophysical, biological, and human-social interactions. Freshwater is a prerequisite of human well-being in terms of drinking water and sanitation, food security and health, industrial processes and energy supply, transportation and recreation, and further goods and services delivered by ecosystem integrity and freshwater biodiversity. The sustainable management of water resources in times of global change poses one of the most pressing challenges for public policy in the twenty-first century. Global demand for freshwater has skyrocketed with population expansion, income growth, and technological development. The resulting strains on supply create not only environmental pressures but social tensions as well, given that freshwater resources are unequally distributed among world regions, countries, and social groups. Water scarcity and conflicts over the allocation of water resources are already widespread around the world. One-third of humanity already lives under water stress today, and one-fifth of the world's people do not have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater ecosystems are the most degraded and endangered of the planet's habitats. Under contemporary global change, the inequality of water distribution is increasing, and threats from water extremes like droughts and floods are growing. The importance of securing world water resources is increasingly recognized not only by researchers across the academic disciplines, but also by policymakers and the general public. Yet although a global discourse about water issues has evolved over the last five decades, a clear global governance framework has still not emerged. This omission is the more remarkable when one considers that, unlike governance of many other environmental and resource issues, water management has a very long history. It can be traced back 5,000 years to the ancient civilizations of the Nile, the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Tigris. Nevertheless, global regimes for water have been much slower to emerge than global governance of, for example, climate change and ozone depletion. As ecological, social, and economic interdependence on a planetary scale grows, the need to govern water in global terms becomes all the more urgent. Yet how can global public policy on this issue be promoted when local and national arrangements have become entrenched over a very long period of time? How can new global elements of water management be intertwined with local, national, and regional aspects to create multilevel arrangements that provide effective and legitimate governance of this vital resource? In spite of the clearly evident scientific and political challenges, global water governance has not yet received the research attention it needs. To improve this situation, the Global Water System Project (GWSP) was created in 2005 to, among other things, build capacity and networks among global water governance scholars. The GWSP organized a workshop in June 2006 to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines working on global aspects of water policy. This special issue of Global Governance includes a collection of major articles presented at that workshop. The five articles published here highlight the need for adopting a global perspective on water governance. With regard to theory, the articles consider how to conceive of global water governance. In terms of empirical analysis, the articles provide in-depth analysis of specific global water issues, with particular emphasis on delineating the links between the river basin level and the global level. The case studies span different continents and cover a variety of institutional, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions. Taking the five articles in order, the opening piece by Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Joyeeta Gupta, and Daniel Petry analyzes global governance of water with emphasis on the role of network governance and on the use of governance typologies--in particular, the mobius-web concept developed by James Rosenau. …

The recent shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the much broader Sustainable Development Goals has given further impetus to the debate on the nexus between the multiple sectors of policy-making that the Goals are to cover. The key message in this debate is that different domains—for instance, water, energy and food—are interconnected and can thus not be effectively resolved unless they are addressed as being fully interrelated and interdependent. Yet while this overall narrative is forcefully supported in the new UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that are the main part of this agenda, many Goals still remain sectoral in their basic outlook. This now requires, we argue, a new focus in both policy and research on the nexus between different Sustainable Development Goals, especially with a view to reforms in the overall institutional setting that is required to sufficiently support such a nexus approach. This article thus examines the nexus approach in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals and identifies multiple avenues for its institutionalisation in global governance.

Global sustainability governance is marked by a highly fragmented system of distinct clusters of international organizations, along with states and other actors. Enhancing inter-organizational coordination and cooperation is thus often recognized as an important reform challenge in global sustainability governance. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the United Nations in 2015, thus explicitly aim at advancing policy coherence and institutional integration among the myriad international institutions. Yet, have these goals been effective in this regard? We assess here the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the network structure of 276 international organizations in the period 2012–2019, that is, four years before and four years after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. The network structure was approximated by analyzing data from the websites of these 276 international organizations that were joined by more than 1.5 million hyperlinks, which we collected using a custom-made web crawler. Our findings are contrary to what is widely expected from the Sustainable Development Goals: we find that fragmentation has in fact increased after the Sustainable Development Goals came into effect. In addition, silos are increasing around the 17 SDGs as well as around the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

In this article, we explore the challenges of global governance and the particular challenge presented by global data governance. We discuss a range of challenges to developing meaningful global governance institutions for regulating how companies and governments around the world manage and utilize consumer data. These challenges are compounded by their global nature and the complexities of Internet-based technologies. We argue that the following gaps exist for effective global data governance: (a) there is no overarching global framework for protecting consumer data, and it is partial and incomplete; (b) there is a lack of data protection for international data transfers, as much of the regulation that is being developed is not global in scale; and (c) new areas of data collection and use compound concerns to effective data governance in a globalized digital world. Moreover, we highlight important needs in terms of both global governance and impending challenges related to current and new uses of data. Any global governance framework should recognize the need for an iterative process where communication is ongoing between the necessary stakeholders. Agreements should incorporate common goals to maximize the potential development of global data governance norms. However, goals must remain flexible to the different data environments across nation-states while maintaining a global scope to ensure data protection. In addition, any agreement should consider the emerging challenges in this area. These challenges include new methods of data collection and use, as well as protecting individuals from manipulation and undue influence based on how their data are being used, processed, and collected.

Scrutinizing environmental governance in a digital age: New ways of seeing, participating, and intervening

This paper explores the extent to which global health governance – in the context of the early implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals is grounded in the right to health. The essential components of the right to health in relation to global health are unpacked. Four essential functions of the global health system are assessed from a normative, rights‐based, analysis on how each of these governance functions should operate. These essential functions are: the production of global public goods, the management of externalities across countries, the mobilization of global solidarity, and stewardship. The paper maps the current reality of global health governance now that the post‐2015 Sustainable Development Goals are beginning to be implemented. In theory, the existing human rights legislation would enable the principles and basis for the global governance of health beyond the premise of the state. In practice, there is a governance gap between the human rights framework and practices in global health and development policies. This gap can be explained by the political determinants of health that shape the governance of these global policies. Current representations of the right to health in the Sustainable Development Goals are insufficient and superficial, because they do not explicitly link commitments or right to health discourse to binding treaty obligations for duty‐bearing nation states or entitlements by people. If global health policy is to meaningfully contribute to the realization of the right to health and to rights based global health governance then future iterations of global health policy must bridge this gap. This includes scholarship and policy debate on the structure, politics, and agency to overcome existing global health injustices.

This article assesses the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in terms of their contribution to improved global social governance. As a global policy-making process they are commended. As a set of global social policy aspirations the SDGs are the first global social policy. In terms of the contributions the SDG document makes to improving the architecture of global social governance it is found to fail. It fails in the field of global redistribution, global taxation, global regulation and in the field of the realisation of global social rights. The SDGs document embodies a reversal in policy-making away from a concern to construct improved global governance institutions back to an era of strengthening national sovereignty. The anti-structural adjustment sentiments of the 1980s cast their shadow over attempts to construct a socially responsible globalisation in the 2010s. The SDGs do make suggestions regarding the role of regionalism in meeting the goals and targets and indeed the article suggests reforms in regional social governance might be a more productive route to follow.

Reviewed by: Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World by Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin Matheus de Carvalho Hernandez (bio) and Inga T. Winkler (bio) Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin, Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780190672676, 614 Pages. Institutions matter. This is the key message of the volume on Human Rights in Global Health edited by Benjamin Meier and Lawrence Gostin. With a renewed and comprehensive vision of human rights after the end of the Cold War and wide-ranging calls for entering the era of implementation of human rights,1 the inextricable link between human rights and global health has become generally accepted. Global health issues demand complex solutions, solutions that depend on a range of actors. They depend on global health governance. The encounter between these two realms—human rights and global health—places international institutions in the center of dynamics, demonstrating their strategic role for the realization of the right to health. The volume's main goal is to evaluate the connections between public health, global governance, and human rights. It presents a vast array of international organizations based on a broad understanding of global health, ranging from the WHO, to organizations in the UN system, to organizations focused on economic governance, to the UN human rights system. While States remain the primary duty-bearers for the realization of human rights, international organizations have a significant influence and such a wide definition of global health governance is appropriate for the multilevel and multi-stakeholder nature of the issue. It acknowledges that a broad range of organizations (including those whose mandate is not originally linked to global health) indeed have an impact on global health.2 The result of this immense analytical effort is a volume with over 600 pages, five sections, and twenty-four chapters that bring together forty-six authors, including many key experts in the health and human rights field. The first section provides the theoretical, historical, and conceptual basis regarding the relevance of human rights for global health, especially the rights-based approach to health. Chapter Three defines global governance for health as "the structures and methods of governing public health through multi-level and multisectoral institutions, including the actors and norms that define global health in an increasingly globalized [End Page 1045] world,"3 and discusses the role of human rights in influencing these governance processes. The section concludes with a forward-looking chapter on the need to reform global health governance in order to realize human rights in the sustainable development era (and the SDGs also feature prominently in other chapters). The second section is devoted to the World Health Organization (WHO) as the main specialized agency for global health. The authors explore the political and internal constraints and resistance to rights-based approaches inside the WHO. The section also assesses the current Gender, Equity, and Human Rights mainstreaming processes and analyzes the strategic position of the WHO in the future of global health governance. The third section discusses the different approaches of the UN agencies, funds, and programs to mainstreaming human rights into global health. The chapters are dedicated to analyzing each organization (UNICEF, ILO, UNESCO, UNFPA, FAO, and UNAIDS) within their respective mandates and their efforts to promote a human rights-based approach to global health. The section demonstrates how these UN entities have been seeking (with different levels of success) to implement Kofi Annan's appeal to mainstream human rights in all their practices. The final forward-looking chapter of the section (Chapter Fourteen focuses on the role of organizational partnerships for health and human rights. As it is impossible to delink human rights mainstreaming from development cooperation, the welcome fourth section goes beyond institutions that consider global health as the core of their mandate and approaches global economic governance institutions and funding agencies. The chapters critically discuss the role of these institutions in integrating human rights into their recommendations on economic reform and poverty reduction. Following an introductory chapter on the integration of the human rights-based approach and the right to development into global governance to health, the...

It is widely assumed that the fragmentation of global governance can affect coordination efforts among international institutions and organisations. Yet, the precise relationship between the fragmentation of global governance and the extent to which international organisations coordinate their activities remains underexplored. In this article, we offer new empirical evidence derived from the so‐called custodianship arrangements in which numerous international organisations have been mandated to coordinate data collection and reporting for 231 indicators of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These complex custodianship arrangements provide a fertile testing ground for theories on the relationship between fragmentation and coordination because the institutional arrangements for each of the 17 SDGs have emerged bottom–up with varying degrees of fragmentation. Through a comparative approach covering 44 custodian agencies and focusing on the most and least fragmented custodianship arrangements, we make three key contributions. First, we offer a novel operationalisation of institutional fragmentation and coordination. Second, we present empirical evidence in support of the claim that fragmentation negatively affects coordination. Third, we provide nuances to this claim by identifying factors that affect the strength of this relationship. Based on our analysis, we suggest further steps that might facilitate coordination in global sustainability governance.