Conference Agenda

The SDG Impact Assessment published in 2022 has shown that the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has so far largely been discursive, while the 17 goals also had some normative and institutional effects. Yet overall, there is only limited transformative force. The goals are incrementally moving political processes forward, with much variation among countries, sectors and across levels of governance. This suggests that scholars and policymakers alike need to adapt their expectations regarding the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs and more efforts have to be taken to further embed the SDGs into practice. The incremental change detected in the SDG Impact Assessment indicates that it takes time until globally agreed policy goals and norms lead to tangible effects on the ground. This paper explores the questions of where and how such incremental change is taking place, and under what conditions these developments generate and accelerate the ongoing sustainability transformation up to 2030 and beyond. The paper builds upon a web-based expert survey directed to the ESG Project community as well as discussions within the SDG Taskforce that took place from 2020 to 2022. We zoom into five areas where some effects of the SDGs are observable and point to both enabling and constraining factors of SDG implementation: (1) High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, (2) national policy integration, (3) sub-national initiatives for goal implementation, (4) partnerships for the SDGs, and (5) education and learning for sustainable development. In a nutshell, this scoping paper aims to refine our conceptual approaches to governance by global goal-setting and provides novel empirical insights on ongoing efforts to achieve the SDGs.

Academic and societal actors alike are seeking to optimize the ways in which scientific research may contribute to sustainable development, for which a diverse range of research uptake strategies have been developed. Yet, while the literature emphasizes that the appropriateness of research uptake strategies depends on the context in which they are applied, determining which strategy to apply given a specific context remains challenging due to the lack of explicit conceptualization of the role of context for research uptake. In this paper, we conceptualize appropriate research uptake strategies to be those that align with the research and societal sustainability contexts in which they are applied and account for dynamics between these two contexts, enabling us to identify five contextual dimensions which we propose shape the appropriateness of research uptake strategies. With the aim of supporting the design of more appropriate research uptake strategies in a wide range of contexts, we then build on this conceptualization to offer an application-oriented typology distinguishing between four broad research uptake approaches: the knowledge transfer approach; the commissioned research approach; the direct engagement approach; and the co-production approach. The typology matches each approach to the dynamic research and societal sustainability contexts in which it is most likely to be appropriate, while accommodating nuanced understandings of how researchers may approach uptake given different contexts and aiming at parsimony. In this way, we take a first step towards conceptualizing the role of context in research uptake decision-making, thereby empowering researchers to design more appropriate research uptake strategies.

Adjustments to legislative and regulatory frameworks that align national policies, plans, and programs with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can play a critical role in the achievement of the agenda. Legal instruments provide the foundation for creating, implementing, and enforcing laws and regulations that support the attainment of the SDGs. This paper argues that regulations can facilitate actions to contribute to SDGs by setting clear goals and targets to guide government action and monitoring and protecting the rights of individuals, communities, and the environment.

This paper examines recent legal instruments of three countries; Belgium's Act on the Coordination of Sustainable Development, Canada's Federal Sustainable Development Act, and South Korea's Basic Law on Sustainable Development, to critically evaluate their readiness in promoting and delivering global goals through legal means. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of these instruments, reviewing their roles and legal framework in light of the various policy, institutional, and legal mechanisms relevant to the SDGs used by these countries.

The preliminary findings suggest that innovative and comprehensive legislative measures that directly address governance issues of sustainable development can establish concrete duties for relevant stakeholders, including the government and private sectors, to integrate the SDGs in their actions and planning. Furthermore, these legislative instruments can facilitate, rather than restrict, positive activities and interventions in SDG implementation, and establish accountability mechanisms to ensure that governments, businesses, and other stakeholders are held responsible for their impact on sustainable development.

Overall, this study emphasizes the importance of using a range of legal mechanisms to drive the necessary changes for the successful implementation of the SDGs. By aligning national policies, plans, and programs with the SDGs through comprehensive legal instruments, governments can prioritize the SDGs and ensure that the necessary changes are implemented to achieve them.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the most ambitious attempt to integrate environmental, economic and social dimensions of global policy and promote greater institutional coherence across the international system. As such, governments, international organizations and stakeholders have identified coherence as crucial to address these challenges. However, they are not the first attempt to promote macro coherence internationally in global sustainable development governance. The meanings of, and arrangements to support, coherence have evolved significantly, as have the impacts and consequences of those efforts. This paper will examine the normative, political and institutional context and evolution of these efforts to understand how these meanings and arrangements have changed over time, and with what implications for which norms, values, and policy framings become dominant. Specifically, we examine three cases: 1) The largely failed 1994 WTO "Coherence Mandate" to promote macroeconomic coherence, and its evolution toward attempts to integrate developing countries into the multilateral trade regime; 2) the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, which brought together environment and development agendas; and 3) the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development centered on the SDGs. The main method is a normative/discourse analysis of the “content” of these initiatives as well as those of relevant international institutions where the meaning of coherence has been debated and contested (e.g., UNGA, ECOSOC, WTO, UNCTAD, UNDP, OECD, World Bank). We will analyze primary hard and soft law documents, calls for coherence, and policy statements, declarations, reports, and initiatives of relevant international institutions. This information may be supplemented by interview data of those involved in these processes. The analysis will establish the normative dimension or “social purposes” of coherence policies and initiatives since the early 1990s. The paper is part of a larger project that aims to explain these repeated attempts to build macro-level coherence in sustainable development over the last 30 years, their consequences for policies and institutional arrangements, and their positive and negative effects on rules, resources, governance practices, and policies among international institutions and transnational actors expected to pursue these mandates.

Analyses of efforts being placed on the localization of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been a rich and fast-growing research agenda. Within Earth System Governance, this has often taken the place of understanding how subnational actors have been implementing the SDGs under the influence of the global goals’ steering effects. Among the array of agendas, research has been conducted on evaluating the multi-level governance architecture, its fragmentation and effectiveness; the variables influencing subnational implementation, especially seeing how power and authority shift patterns of localization; which actors and themes are most likely mobilized and which goals are perceived as a priority; and which effects can be perceived, and to what degree, within the different dimensions in which the global goals are implemented (e.g., discursive, institutional, and normative). However, this body of literature still could be complemented by more study cases from the Global South, especially if we are to interrogate how the SDGs localization is affected by the presence of historical and structural inequalities, and how its indivisible and universal agenda is translated in a local scenario. This paper aims to contribute to this task by analyzing Brazilian subnational actors’ SDGs Voluntary Local Reviews. Brazil presents a relevant study case since its federal government shifted its instance around SDGs after the beginning of the SDG implementation, leaving local governments to act more independently within different contexts and governance architecture. Moreover, civil society and academia have remained actively engaging with the SDGs agenda at the local and national levels. Thus, examining how the SDGs implementation process took place in different local contexts in Brazil may show some light on SDGs steering effects in the Global South, as perceived and publicized by the subnational governments themselves. Via qualitative content analysis and codification, we suggest that subnational actors in Brazil have mobilized the SDGs as a powerful social narrative to implement actions regarding climate change and poverty alleviation, but that these are somewhat limited still since these novel discourse framing mainly aims to put already existing projects under a distinct discursive schema. While this leads to a moderate effect, we conclude that within Brazilian local politics, the discursive framing around SDGs opens a venue that still could be fostered, leading subnational actors towards the aspirational objective of the global goals initiative.