6 Ideas, Beliefs, and Policy Linkages: Lessons from Food, Water, and Energy Policies Peter M. Haas and Casey Stevens
Efforts by the United Nations to draft the Sustainable Development Goals have been driven by a belief in the need for a more integrated global policy framework and to create more international communities of practice around complexes that combine diffuse issues (UNGA 2012; Jeremić and Sachs 2013). Ideas are one of the primary resources available to the United Nations (Thakur, Cooper, and English 2005; Jolly, Emmerij, and Weiss 2009). Without widespread material resources to induce behavioral change by member states, the United Nations has to fall back on the power to persuade and educate (Luck 2000; Thakur, Cooper, and English 2005). The Sustainable Development Goals, like other high-level UN declaratory initiatives, are political instruments that are intended to move the international community in a more sustainable direction by creating a powerful narrative about development to focus collective attention and action, articulating common aspirations, setting concrete goals, creating a process of learning, expanding the constituency for sustainability by building bridges between policy communities, and directing the development community’s financial flows (McArthur 2013; Osborn 2013). This chapter deductively analyzes the prospects for such sustainable issue linkage by applying Ernst B. Haas’ insights about issue linkage (Haas 1980). The broad argument is that comprehensive linking of issues for a true sustainability agenda requires technical consensus about means as well as normative consensus on goals and ends. In the absence of such agreement agendas are likely to be disjointed, based on tactical linkages between smaller islands of consensus. Well-established theories exist to account for the emergence of shared norms and understandings and appraise the extent to which expert consensus about the underlying goals of sustainability currently exist at the international level, as well as the extent of understanding about the technical means of achieving them (Haas 2013).
