The UN 2030 Agenda and the Quest for Policy Integration: A Literature Review

Basil Bornemann,Sabine Weiland

doi:10.17645/pag.v9i1.3654

Basil Bornemann, Sabine Weiland

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v9i1.3654

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Abstract

The adoption of the UN 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represents a milestone in international sustainability politics. The broad and ambitious agenda calls for a reconsideration of established principles and practices of sustainability governance. This article examines how the 2030 Agenda changes the notion of policy integration, which represents a fundamental principle of sustainability governance. In general, policy integration denotes forms of cross-cutting policymaking to address the complexity of real-world problems. In the context of the sustainability discourse, the concept has long been interpreted as environmental policy integration, referring to the integration of environmental concerns into other sectoral policies. Based on a review of the current SDG literature, we examine whether and how this interpretation has changed. In so doing, the reasons (why?), objects (what?) and modes (how?) of policy integration in the context of the 2030 Agenda are specified. The analysis reveals that the 2030 Agenda promotes a comprehensive, reciprocal, and complex form of goal integration which differs markedly from environmental policy integration. This novel understanding of policy integration for sustainable development calls for future research on its impact and relevance in political practice.

Highlights

The adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents a milestone in international sustainability governance
The search string was composed of three requirements that the resulting records needed to fulfil: 1) publications including the search terms ‘2030 Agenda,’ ‘sustainable development goals’ and ‘SDG*’, connected through OR, meaning that any of the search terms can be present in the result; 2) publications focussing on the topic of integration, for which a combination of the terms ‘integration,’ ‘coherence,’ ‘trade-off,’ ‘synergies’ and ‘interaction’ apply, again connected through OR; 3) publications with a policy or governance focus, including variations, excluding analyses that were merely dealing with socio-ecological systems or static analyses
We analysed the notion of policy integration in the context of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs against the background of the historical sustainability discourse

Summary

Introduction

The adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents a milestone in international sustainability governance. While still in the tradition of the global sustainability discourse in normative and conceptual terms, the 2030 Agenda represents— we argue—a transformational moment for established sustainability thinking and practice It questions, problematises, and reinterprets existing assumptions, interpretations, and normativities of sustainability as well as approaches and practices of sustainability governance (Langford, 2016; Meadowcroft et al, 2019). For example, would fall short if it only relied on climate action and did not include measures in adjacent policy areas, such as agriculture, economy, transport, or energy (Adelle & Russel, 2013) These efforts to organise the ‘policy mess’ and deal with complex problems cutting across established policy fields more comprehensively come to bear in comprehensive and integrative political strategies, such as climate adaptation or sustainability strategies (Casado-Asensio & Steurer, 2014; Meadowcroft, 2007; Nordbeck & Steurer, 2015; Steurer, 2008)

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