9 The United Nations and the Governance of Sustainable Development Goals Steven Bernstein
The purpose of the Sustainable Development Goals is to mobilize action to address systemic challenges across economic, social, and ecological dimensions of sustainable development. However, even if the goals were perfectly designed according to criteria identified by other contributors to this volume—fully coherent, built around consensual knowledge, actionoriented, with multilayered differential targets, and adapted to national capacities and circumstances—they would still require appropriate governance arrangements to diffuse them and integrate them into institutions, policies, and practices. The United Nations has an important leadership role to play in such governance efforts, even as the nature of goals means that governance cannot rely solely on traditional tools of multilateralism. The challenge, then, is how to balance requisite political leadership, political authority, and steering at the global level with the reality that action and resources must be mobilized also at regional, national, and local levels, and by a wide range of public and private actors, partnerships, and networks. Put another way, the Sustainable Development Goals, ideally, can provide the direction of steering—the normative underpinning, compass, and guideposts—for the pursuit of sustainable development, but do not, simply by virtue of their articulation, provide the authority, tools, or means required. This chapter focuses especially on the United Nations’ leadership role in governance of the Sustainable Development Goals for two simple reasons: governments set the Sustainable Development Goals through the United Nations, and they have mandated the United Nations to follow up, monitor, and review all commitments related to sustainable development, as well as to mobilize means of implementation. The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development created the new High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (hereafter, “High-level Political Forum”) to lead this effort. Governments gave it an appropriately ambitious mandate for
