Governing Through Goals

Page 233

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


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Articles inside

Index

10min
pages 347-353

Goals

28min
pages 315-330

Annexes

10min
pages 331-338

Contributors

12min
pages 339-346

Goals

36min
pages 295-314

11 Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

26min
pages 279-294

Agreements

33min
pages 261-278

Goals

47min
pages 233-260

Governance

44min
pages 207-230

Goals

1hr
pages 119-154

Energy Policies

51min
pages 157-184

Goals

39min
pages 185-206

Policy

37min
pages 95-118

Planetary Stewardship

42min
pages 73-94

Governance

41min
pages 51-72

Conclusion: Key Challenges for Global Governance through

27min
pages 33-48

Toward a Multi-level Action Framework for Sustainable Development

1min
page 32

The Sustainable Development Goals and Multilateral

3min
pages 30-31

The United Nations and the Governance of Sustainable Development

1min
page 29

Corporate Water Stewardship: Lessons for Goal-based Hybrid

1min
page 28

Lessons from the Health-Related Millennium Development

1min
page 27

Measuring Progress in Achieving the Sustainable Development

1min
page 25

Ideas, Beliefs, and Policy Linkages: Lessons from Food, Water, and

2min
page 26

1 Introduction: Global Governance through Goal Setting

1min
page 21

Global Goal Setting for Improving National Governance and

1min
page 24

Conceptualization: Goal Setting as a Strategy for Earth System

2min
page 22

Goal Setting in the Anthropocene: The Ultimate Challenge of

2min
page 23
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