The Environment in Global Sustainability Governance

Private philanthropic foundations—nongovernmental, nonprofit organizations with assets provided by donors for socially useful purposes—have become key political actors in global sustainability governance. Their collective efforts amount to over USD 112 billion for the implementation of the United Nations (UNs)’s ambitious plan to deliver on seventeen interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This corresponds to about a quarter of governmental contribution through official development assistance for the same purposes. Many of these foundations implicitly or explicitly aim to foster global justice, through, for example, empowering women, reducing inequalities, and promoting democracy. They thus act as justice agents shaping the substance and practice of justice in global sustainability governance. But what does this direction of private money into supporting global justice norms really mean? This question deserves scrutiny, especially against a context of diverse and contested meanings of justice and because philanthropy—beyond an act of giving—is often an exercise of power. Using critical discourse analysis of texts produced by selected foundations that are key funders of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda, this paper examines how private foundations frame global justice and with what implications for sustainability governance.

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.

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

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.

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.

Negotiators preparing for the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio 20) are missing an important opportunity. Reforming the institutional framework for sustainable development is a central part of the Rio 20 agenda. In the run-up to Rio 20, negotiators have extensively discussed institutional reforms, but have focused almost exclusively on inter-governmental organizations such as UNEP and the Commission for Sustainable Development. At the same time, however, private sustainability governance (PSG) is flourishing. Since 1992, numerous organizations created by business, civil society groups, multi-stakeholder coalitions and other private actors, as well as diverse public-private partnerships, have adopted important regulatory standards and implemented significant operational programs, including financing and project support. Rio 20 negotiators remain almost wholly disengaged from these innovations.This public-private engagement gap is both puzzling and troubling. PSG has arisen primarily in response to the inadequacies of inter-state governance; it has provided momentum on many environment and development issues while inter-state negotiations have stalled. Embracing PSG would bring this valuable engine of activity into the international system. Indeed, public engagement would be even more beneficial than this 'comparative statics' analysis suggests: supportive engagement would enhance the ability of PSG – and thus of the system as a whole – to address the daunting challenges of sustainability.This paper first contrasts the inter-state focus of Rio 20 preparations (Section 1) with the growth of PSG (Section 2). Section 3 examines the public-private engagement gap in practice and in scholarship. Section 4 considers why states and international organizations (IGOs) have been loath to engage more actively with PSG. Section 5 identifies six broad benefits of public engagement: helping IGOs to carry out their sustainability missions; improving the distribution of PSG schemes; maintaining the incentives that support PSG; managing fragmentation; promoting experimentation; and enhancing participation and democracy. Finally, section 6 outlines workable mechanisms to strengthen public engagement, under the headings of orchestration and regulatory cooperation. These techniques can move the international system towards truly global sustainability governance.

Abstract: There exists a knowledge gap in the literature on how international actors address artificial intelligence (AI) in international sustainability governance. By addressing this gap and bringing a critical perspective, this paper aims to enrich discussions on AI within international relations. First, this paper shows that the development and deployment of AI-based technologies are mainly seen as an opportunity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in international politics, while their drawbacks are only considered to a limited extent. Second, this paper refers to the tendency to rely on AI to address societal challenges that are considered too complex for humans to comprehend as potential "AI solutionism." It defines this approach as being based on an insufficient understanding of the operation and socio-environmental impacts of AI, arguing that these two aspects should be thoroughly analyzed by actors in global sustainability governance.

Transnational public–private governance initiatives (TGIs) have become key elements in global governance, especially in the governance of sustainability. Pertinent research has concentrated on why TGIs have emerged as well as on their impacts on political outcomes and questions related to their legitimacy. This instructive literature has predominantly focused on TGIs as entities in their own right. This explorative study contributes to the literature by advocating a complementary analytical perspective that pays attention to domestic‐level patterns of participation in TGIs and national factors that determine which types of organizations (public, business, or civil society) participate in TGIs. It is shown for six Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) that there exists cross‐country variation in the composition patterns in 29 TGIs on sustainability, suggesting that national conditions matter for how organizations participate in them. By improving the knowledge of the national conditions, a more complete analysis of participation and the effectiveness of TGIs can be provided in global sustainability governance. In this spirit, in a last step, an agenda is developed for guiding future research on this topic.

Theories of global governance blossomed in the 1990's when multilateralism appeared to empirically back idealist and constructivist perspectives on global policy and international organization. A plethora of global policy frameworks, intergovernmental treaties and institutions influenced by global governance thinking came into existence until the political fallout from 9/11 marked an abrupt end of that phase and neorealism and neomercantilism resurged in global affairs. Today, global policy is challenged by unprecedented disorder, uncertainty, and complexity. Phenomena like climate change, pandemics, failing states, the creeping collapse of democratic governance and the rule of law, or forced migration, cannot be resolved by nation-state centric politics, defying multilateralism, or conventional policy design. This chapter explores the utility of learning from the evolution of global sustainability governance (GSG), which is characterized by resilience, flexibility, and adaptability, resulting in the largest regime complex in global policy, whose flagship are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and apply those lessons to inform future policy research.

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.

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 civil society is often uncritically seen as a democratic force in global governance. Civil society organizations claim to hold states and intergovernmental institutions accountable and channel the voices of the world’s poorest people in policy making. Yet to what extent do they succeed in performing that role? This article assesses the representation of the poor in global civil society, with a focus on the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, a process widely hailed as one of the most democratic ever organized by the United Nations. We first analyse how the poor and their local representatives are procedurally included in global civil society (procedural representation). We then quantitatively assess the actual representation of civil society organizations from the world’s poorest countries in the civil society hearings of the SDG negotiations, where civil society was invited to speak on behalf of their constituencies (geographical representation). Finally, we evaluate the extent to which global civil society representatives who claim to speak on behalf of the poor legitimately represented the interests of these people (discursive representation). We found that global civil society fails to fully represent the poor on procedural, geographical and discursive terms, and eventually perpetuates postcolonial injustices in global sustainability governance.

This article examines the role of normative power in shaping the global sustainability order. It challenges the prevailing focus on hegemonic leadership and norm diffusion from dominant states, arguing that less powerful states have contributed significantly to the global order by creating regional initiatives tailored to their unique contexts. The article adopts an alternative theoretical framework of norm-governed change, comprising norm-building, institutionalisation, and transformation. Using an illustrative case study of Africa’s regional economic institutions, it employs process-tracing and archival analysis of key policy documents. The study demonstrates how African states have proactively embedded environmental norms within their regional initiatives, while contributing to the global sustainability agenda, exemplifying a form of normative power referred to as ‘Green Pan-Africanism’. This approach broadens the understanding of global sustainability governance, positioning less economically powerful actors as active participants in world-making. The findings highlight the critical role of normative power in advancing global sustainability governance, particularly in addressing complex global challenges such as climate change.

Cities and their governments are increasingly recognized as important actors in global sustainability governance. With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, their role in the global endeavor to foster sustainability has once again been put in the spotlight. Several scholars have highlighted pioneering local strategies and policies to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and render urban areas more sustainable. However, the question of how such urban sustainability actions are embedded in complex interactions between public and private actors operating at different levels has not been studied in enough detail. Building upon a multi-level governance approach, this article explores the entanglement and interconnectedness of cities and local governments with actors and institutions at various levels and scales to better capture the potential and limitations of urban policymaking contributing to global sustainability. The article finds that on the one hand cities and their governments are well positioned to engage other actors into a policy dialogue. On the other hand, local authorities face considerable budgetary and institutional capacity constraints, and they heavily rely on support from actors at other governmental levels and societal scales to carry out effective sustainability actions in urban areas.

Philanthropic foundations are key players in global sustainability governance. This paper explores the legitimation strategies these foundations use to justify their actions and positions in the sustainable development community. By combining Theo van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework with our novel analytical justice framework, we offer a new tool to analyse hard-to-research actors. Analysing data from 41 foundation websites, we find that foundations emphasize Global Egalitarian Cosmopolitanism in their values and objectives to align with global sustainability discourses. However, Libertarian ideas dominate when discussing programs and founders. This indicates there may be internal conflicts within foundations over the relationship between extreme wealth accumulation required for global philanthropy and sustainability objectives. In turn, this has implications for how foundations position themselves as agents of justice in sustainable development. While discourse analysis provides valuable insights into philanthropic legitimation strategies, further research is needed to fully understand how justice intersects with organizational decision-making.