Introduction
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of respecting planetary boundaries, while also recognizing “the right of all people to improved well-being.” At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals reflect a political outcome. As mentioned before, and as noted by a number of other chapters, the sustainable development concept itself reflects creative ambiguity, even as the attempt to integrate environmental, economic, and social goals reflects over 20 years of global negotiations and compromises since the 1992 Rio Summit. The Sustainable Development Goals explicitly claim to “integrate” and “balance” economic, social, and environmental purposes and to secure “interlinkages” among them, which raises questions about whether a coherent agenda will result, since including both modifiers in practice avoids difficult political debates about ultimate foundations. For example, as Bernstein (this volume, chapter 9) notes, the Sustainable Development Goals call for both “sustained” and “sustainable” economic growth and employment in Goal 8, but avoid any mention of planetary boundaries. At the same time, attempts had been made to include the concept in negotiations over the “growth” goal (Earth Negotiations Bulletin 2014), and respective Sustainable Development Goals mention the importance of securing natural resources or integration in policy of different dimensions of sustainable development. For example, Goal 12.2 states, “By 2030, achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources,” and Goal 17.14, referring to means of implementation, states that such means should “enhance policy coherence for sustainable development.” Nearly all chapters highlight the challenge of operationalizing integrative action across the goals in a systemic way. These challenges range from integrating cross-cutting concerns such as better governance into implementing arrangements at multiple levels (Biermann et al., chapter 4), to creating integrated and system-oriented assessments and measures appropriate for monitoring and evaluating progress on goal attainment (Pintér, Kok, and Almassy, chapter 5), to the differentiated challenges and opportunities of integrated approaches to problems where there is low causal and normative consensus, such as education and urban sustainability, higher consensus such as food or water security, or mixed consensus such as public health (Haas and Stevens, chapter 6; on water see Yamada, chapter 8 and Gupta and Nilsson, chapter 12; on health see Andresen and Iguchi, chapter 7, all this volume). Andresen and Iguchi also argue that underachievement of the Millennium Development Goals stems from a lack of “fit” or mismatch between the structure of problems and institutional solutions, and the especially weak performance of the Millennium Development Goals on
