The Role Assigned to Artificial Intelligence 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.

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.

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.

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

The New Dynamics of Multilateralism: Diplomacy, International Organizations, and Global Governance. Edited by JoAnn Fagot Muldoon Jr., James P. Aviel, Richard Reitano, Earl Sullivan. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011. 384 pp., $37.00 paperback (ISBN 9780813344812). Transnational Actors in Global Governance: Patterns, Explanations, and Implications. Edited by Christer Jonsson, Jonas Tallberg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2010. 272 pp., $85.00 hardback (ISBN 978-0-230-23905-0). Who Governs the Globe? Edited by Deborah D. Avant, Martha Finnemore, Susan K. Sell Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 456 pp., $34.99 paperback (ISBN 9780521122016). It is perhaps banal to observe that the study of global politics is evolving. Theoretical debates are no longer dominated by “realism versus liberalism versus constructivism.” The lines between international and domestic politics have long been blurring. Many have shed traditional labels, like “international relations.” Much less banal is an effort to determine our destination. Toward what are we evolving? What are the key debates and questions that will orient our efforts in the future? The answers to these questions are unclear. Nonetheless, the three edited volumes under consideration here give us some excellent food for thought. Although each makes an important contribution to three distinct literatures, I focus here on what reading them together can tell us about the state of the field. The Jonsson and Tallberg volume, Transnational Actors in Global Governance: Patterns, Explanations, and Implications , is part of the ongoing Transdemos research project, headquartered at Lund and Stockholm Universities. The larger project explores the contribution of transnational actors to the democratization of global governance. While only one volume in the series of Transdemos research products is under review in this essay, it is important to note that two others were published simultaneously. One, edited by Bexell and Morth (2010), “concerns the mushrooming in recent decades of so-called public-private partnerships as alternatives or complements to traditional international organizations in tackling global problem areas. Why have these hybrid organizational entities emerged at this time? What different forms can ‘partnerships’ assume? Are they really the win-win solutions they are often depicted as?” (Jonsson and Tallberg, p. ix). A second volume, edited by Erman and Uhlin (2010), “concerns the character of transnational actors themselves. How is their expanding role in global governance legitimized? As transnational actors frequently claim to contribute to the democratization of global governance, it is …

Over the two decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a powerful class of large private foundations emerged as influential actors in global governance. Their presence is more prominent in global health than any other issue area: foundations now account for 20 percent of all development assistance for health, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) became the World Health Organization's second largest donor behind the United States government. This dissertation examines the core question: Under what conditions do private foundations influence policies and institutions governing health crises at the global and state levels? I argue private foundations influence global policy outcomes primarily through strategic engagement in public-private partnerships (PPPs)-through which they gain voting power typically reserved for states in global governance-alongside institutional embeddedness achieved through repeated interactions with other global health actors. This runs counter to prior findings suggesting donation amount and policy windows created by crises may facilitate foundation policy influence. Findings furthermore suggest private foundations may circumvent regulations against lobbying domestic or foreign governments via PPP engagement, to influence domestic policy outcomes in low-and-middle-income countries. While a body of global health research examines similar issues, foundations as non-state actors in global governance are largely under-theorized in international relations (IR). This project seeks to bridge global health scholarship with IR theory, integrating both philanthropy as an actor and global health as an issue area with broader IR theoretical approaches. The first article presents a novel data set to analyze trends and mechanisms by which foundations engage in global outbreak response between 2002 and 2019. The second draws on these data, utilizing a mixed-method approach to argue foundation policy influence occurs primarily through PPP engagement and repeated interactions with other governance actors. Building on these findings and engaging with a case study from the COVID-19 response, the third article presents a theory of large private foundation engagement in global health governance, to be tested in future research both in the context of other issue areas, using new data from the COVID-19 pandemic.--Author's abstract

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.

The emerging global governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is shaped by numerous political actors. Inviting non-state actors into such processes is typically assumed to address a perceived democratic deficit, by promoting increased representation, transparency, and openness. In the AI sphere, however, non-state actors include the same multinational companies that develop the technology to be regulated. Surprisingly, the task of normatively theorizing the democratic role of non-state actors in global AI governance has nevertheless been largely ignored. This paper addresses this by specifying, first, under what conditions non-state actors contribute to the actual democratization of global AI governance, as ‘democratic agents’, and second, under what conditions they instead contribute to the strengthening of the prerequisites for future democratization, as ‘agents of democracy’. We conclude that, although few non-state actors are authorized to act as ‘democratic agents’, their exercise of ‘moral’, ‘epistemic’, and ‘market authority’ could make them legitimate ‘agents of democracy’.

This concluding chapter recapitulates the diverse ways in which deleterious forms of pandemic politics contributed to Mexico’s painful experience with COVID-19. It underscores that Mexicans endured unnecessary human suffering because both global governance and governmental authorities on many accounts got the politics of the pandemic response wrong. It stresses that it was not necessarily global and domestic policies in themselves that were at fault, but how they were politicised, and that counterfactually, many Mexican lives could have been saved if the Mexican government and global governance actors had gotten the politics right. The analysis then reflects on what is entailed in order to get the politics of pandemic responses right, identifying three core challenges. The first question is how to shield or insulate key global governance and government actors and institutions from populist politics. A second challenge relates to global political economy: how to promote more equitable global pandemic governance. Lastly, there is the question of how to promote greater governmental accountability and transparency for Mexican public authorities, both during pandemic emergencies and in their aftermath.

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.

Global Energy Governance and International Institutions

Private actors and their interplay with public actors in global governance have become a prominent focus of global governance institutions and research alike. The last decade has witnessed a remarkable growth in the number of private actors in global governance and an increase in public-private partnerships, multi-stakeholder initiatives, informal coalitions between states, NGOs and business partners, and the emergence of private self-regulatory mechanisms. With their problem-solving capacities stretched thin in the wake of globalization and denationalization, states and international organizations began to reach out to the private sector and its resources. Private actors have been brought in to set and locally implement international regulations and have contributed to the provision of collective goods. Lately the private business sector has become a prominent partner of governments, international organizations and NGOs in areas such as environmental problems, labour and social standards, and human rights more broadly. The sheer growth in the number of private actors in global governance is astonishing; equally dramatic is their changed role within the governance initiatives. While their role was initially confined to functions such as agenda setting in the input phase or norm implementation and evaluation on the output side of global governance, it has since expanded to include core decision-making, taking part in all phases of the policy-making process.

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.

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.