GOVERNING THE INTERLINKAGES BETWEEN THE SDGS
In 2015, the UN member states adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sets out a 15-year plan to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 sub-targets by 2030. Essentially, the SDGs and their targets constitute a universal call to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and livelihoods of everyone, everywhere.1 The 2030 Agenda reflects a new understanding of global development problems that differs from preceding global development frameworks such as the World Bank’s and International Monetary Fund’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), in several ways. A first defining feature of the 2030 Agenda is its aspiration to universality. The MDGs were mainly conceived as an agenda focused on achieving a set of basic minimum living standards in lower income countries. By contrast, the 2030 Agenda is universal in scope and commits high-income and low-income nations alike to contribute to the efforts to achieve global sustainability. Another distinctive characteristic is the 2030 Agenda’s strong emphasis on inclusiveness. This becomes manifest in the overarching principle to “Leave No One Behind” (LNOB) and in the pledge to “reach the furthest behind f irst”, which are both enshrined in the Agenda’s preamble (§4). A novelty also consists in the strong emphasis on multi-level governance. References to the importance of implementing the SDGs at all levels– from global over national to sub-national levelcan be found throughout the text, for example in SDG 16.7, which strives to “ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels”. The adoption of SDG 16 on “Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions” is one of the most substantial differences between the SDGs and the MDGs. Importantly, issues of good governance, peace and human rights are not only presented as goals in and of themselves but also as enablers for the achievement of all other goals. Finally, and most importantly for this book, the 2030 Agenda represents a paradigm shift from previous development approaches in its recognition of the indivisibility of the social, economic, and ecological dimensions of sustainable development. As a result, the 17 SDGs and their 169 targets constitute a network of development objectives that are fundamentally interdependent. Evidently, the practical implementation of such an ambitious development vision poses new challenges to political institutions and processes. Achieving the SDGs simultaneously, will require an integrated2 implementation of the 2030 Agenda and increased policy coherence. Such policy coherence across different policy sectors, government levels, and societal actors can only be achieved through the dismantling of traditional silos. To this end, the adoption of innovative governance approaches that facilitate the harnessing of synergies and mitigation of trade-offs between and within the SDGs will be necessary (Biermann et al., 2014; Breuer, Leininger, and Tosun, 2019; International Science Council, 2017; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019; Tosun and Leininger, 2017).
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