The UN Sustainable Development Agenda and Rule of Law: Global Governance Failures Require Democratic and Judicial Restraints

Abstract

The 2030 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Agenda defines its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG S) in terms of human rights and multilevel governance of related public goods. The global health pandemics, environmental crises, and geopolitical trade wars reveal governance failures and related ‘constitutional failures’ to protect human and constitutional rights effectively by democratic legislation, administrative and judicial remedies of citizens, and transnational rule of law. The SDG S require stronger, multilevel legal restraints on ‘market failures’ (like environmental pollution), ‘governance failures’ (like insufficient remedies against abuses of executive powers) and ‘constitutional failures’ (like neglect for transnational rule of law and the ‘Anthropocene’). Democratic legislation and citizen-driven, administrative, and judicial remedies must strengthen accountability of governments for decarbonizing economies and protecting human rights (e.g., environmental and public health protection). Worldwide protection of the SDG S requires reforming multilevel governance beyond Europe’s multilevel constitutionalism in order to prevent policy conflicts through transnational rule of law and ‘constitutional embedding’ of UN/World Trade Organization (WTO) governance.