Conference Agenda

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to transform interdependent ecological, social, and economic systems. Climate change, for instance, affects the world's poorest populations and exacerbates problems like severe floods and droughts, as well as biodiversity loss. Achieving the Agenda 2030 requires a holistic approach to governance that considers the impact on multiple SDGs. Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs), which bring together public, private, and civil society organizations to achieve shared goals, are often advocated as effective vehicles for addressing multiple SDGs. Consequently, this paper evaluates whether existing MSPs are connecting SDGs with the greatest leverage points, in other words, whether the supply of governance is meeting the demand for connections between the SDGs.

In more detail, the paper first identifies the demand for governing SDG interactions by reviewing literature that models the relationships between the SDGs. Then, it compares the demand to the supply of interaction governance provided by MSPs. The study utilizes a new dataset of nearly 200 MSPs targeting multiple SDGs and distilled from nearly 7,000 entries on the UNDESA Partnership Platform. The MSPs are analyzed through descriptive statistics and network analysis, which demonstrates the formation of clusters around SDGs related to climate, nature, land, health, and energy. However, weak connections to SDGs related to innovation, inequality, and peace and justice are exposed.

The results indicate a mismatch between the supply and demand of interaction governance, particularly between environmental and economic SDGs. The study suggests that MSPs should pay more attention to targeting production and consumption patterns to address this mismatch and enhance their effectiveness. In addition, achieving synergies between SDGs should receive more attention in both research and practice.

Climate change is perhaps the largest threat to sustainable development globally. In addition to the amplifying negative environmental effects such as air pollution and biodiversity loss, it may also exacerbate social inequalities. Consequently, tackling SDG13 on Climate Action more effectively could help to both keep the temperature rise below 1,5 degrees as stipulated in the Paris Agreement and accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. To this end, the nexus literature suggests tackling interlinkages between the environmental, social and economic domains of society by harnessing synergies, managing trade-offs and mitigating conflicts. Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs), recognized through SDG 17 on Partnerships for the Goals, offer a complement to existing international institutional arrangements to address climate change using a nexus approach. Due to their capacity to coordinate stakeholders, and combine resources, MSPs may have the potential to accelerate action. This paper explores the question: to what extent are MSPs effective in implementing SDG13 through a nexus approach? Under the assumption that MSPs’ own goals and targets are fundamental to how they govern interlinkages between issue areas, together acting as a starting point and benchmark for measuring their output, outcome and impact effectiveness, we map (1) which SDGs the MSPs connect, (2) whether interlinkages are addressed, and (3) whether potential governance effects are addressed. The paper studies goals and targets of 74 MSPs from the Transform2030 dataset who indicate that they facilitate SDG13 and at least one social and/or economic SDG. The mapping exercise is carried out through an automated text search in R and qualitative content analysis in Atlas.ti. In turn, the results contribute to initial conclusions about MSPs potential to effectively harness synergies, manage trade-offs, mitigate conflicts. The paper makes an empirical contribution by providing a first account of existing efforts against which the effectiveness of MSPs can be measured at the output, outcome and impact level. The theoretical contribution to the field of global sustainability governance is the enhanced understanding of MSPs effectiveness in the context of a nexus approach.

Next to intergovernmental negotiations and commitments, multi-stakeholder partnerships have been established as crucial governance mechanisms in global earth system governance. In particular multi-stakeholder partnerships are an interesting meeting point of practitioners from different disciplines and sectors, bringing together various forms of expertise – for example from civil society, governments, the private sector or academia. They also operate across different territories, and governance levels, from the global, to the national, and the local level, creating transnational governance spheres. This makes them highly complex, and zooming in on the role of specific types of practitioners worthwhile. Working with a database of transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships for the 2030 Agenda, this paper reaffirms that international institutions are the most common directly involved partner. In addition to this, international institutions also act as conveners for transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships, organizing conferences and summits to leverage them in addition to inter-governmental commitments. International institutions and their bureaucratic staff thus play a crucial role in actively and passively shaping multi-stakeholder partnerships. This role warrants further scrutiny, as this paper finds that no overarching standards on multi-stakeholder partnerships exist amongst international institutions or on a global scale. Instead a governance realm characterized heavily by best practices and loose, individually funded exchange formats has emerged. This includes fora such as the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which has a central role in global follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda, and whose reviews are supposed to offer a platform for partnerships. Based on these empirical observations, this paper investigates the best practices and loose exchange formats put forward by international institutions more closely, focusing on their practices and discourses in an inductive manner. How do these governance approaches differ from other governance modes? Whose expertise is heard and what role do power disparities play? And in how far is mimicry and norm diffusion possible in such a loosely tied transnational governance sphere? It finds that in substantive discourses best practices formats surpass other governance modes. At the same time, existing exchange formats favor expertise coming from international institutions, and tend to replicate power disparities. They constitute carefully choreographed instances of different legitimation claims, making mimicry and norm diffusion unlikely. This architecture around multi-stakeholder partnerships for the 2030 Agenda has implications for their accountability and scalability.

Multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for the SDGs are promoted as a critical avenue for achieving an inclusive sustainability transformation. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, inclusive sustainability transformation through MSPs is lagging behind due to limited local stakeholder participation. A lack of sustainability awareness has been identified as a key factor for limited stakeholder participation. While MSPs have been extensively researched as an agency for achieving inclusion in general, few studies have examined awareness of sustainability commitments and policies as an enabler for stakeholder participation. This paper bridges this gap by surveying MSP stakeholders about their awareness of Nigeria’s climate change commitments and policies. We designed and electronically distributed a questionnaire to a diverse sample of stakeholders from various sectors. The survey results show that stakeholders are highly aware of climate change, which is encouraging and will potentially increase stakeholder participation in local climate actions. However, the findings indicate that awareness of climate change commitments and policies among stakeholders is fragmented and may be inadequate to empower and facilitate effective participation in MSPs. This highlights the importance of policymakers developing a deliberate institutional arrangement to leverage the roles of local stakeholders through targeted sustainability advocacy and awareness strategies. In the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, it also points to a need for future research to interrogate the theoretical assumption that stakeholder ’participation’ in partnership arrangements automatically promotes and stimulates inclusion in sustainability transformation.

Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs) have gained relevance among the architectures of earth system governance, with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development endorsing them as ideal governance arrangements in its SDG 17: “Partnerships for the Goals.” Given their popularity as a governance tool with capacity to bridge agency from different sectors, the effectiveness of MSPs has been studied as a function of their structural characteristics, such as their degree of institutionalization, the involved actors, the different functions they perform, their inclusiveness, the geographies where they operate, to name a few.

The 2030 Agenda explicitly recognizes the interconnected nature of the 17 SDGs, and calls for an integral implementation that breaks down the silos responsible for creating the illusion that global issues can be solved in isolation. In this context, one crucial, but until now unexplored aspect beyond MSP effectiveness has been their potential to connect multiple SDGs simultaneously, and thus facilitate the emergence of synergies for sustainability transformations. This paper builds upon the existing literature on MSP effectiveness by exploring how different structural characteristics of the MSPs are related to the SDGs they connect in their work, or SDG connectivity. Different dimensions of SDG connections are explored, such as absolute degree of connectivity (total number of SDGs), sectoral connectivity (connections across different areas of sustainable development), and nexus connectivity (connections of popular nexuses in the literature, e.g. the water-energy-food nexus).

The study utilizes a new dataset of nearly 200 MSPs targeting multiple SDGs (based on nearly 7,000 entries on the UNDESA Partnership Platform). Exploratory factor analysis is used to check for correlations and identify patterns between the MSPs’ structural characteristics and SDG connectivity. The results of this paper will contribute to a better understanding of the MSPs structural design, and the facilitation for SDG synergies by MSPs. Furthermore, the results fill an existing gap in large-n studies of MSP effectiveness and will serve as a stepping stone to further analyze the pathways to create SDG synergies and avoid trade-offs.