3 Goal Setting in the Anthropocene: The Ultimate Challenge of Planetary Stewardship Oran R. Young, Arild Underdal, Norichika Kanie, and Rakhyun E. Kim
The UN General Assembly’s Millennium Declaration, adopted in 2000, launched a global effort to eradicate poverty, improve basic human health, and enhance food security, educational opportunities, and gender equality. Although exogenous factors, such as economic growth and democratic reforms, have played important roles in the progress made since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, experience with the pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals has stimulated interest in goal setting, in contrast to rule making, as a strategy for solving global problems (Haas and Stevens, chapter 6, Andresen and Iguchi, chapter 7, and Yamada, chapter 8, all this volume). The call for Sustainable Development Goals in “The Future We Want,” the outcome document from the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, is a clear expression of this growing interest in governance through goals (UNGA 2012). As the effort to craft the terms of a broadly agreeable set of Sustainable Development Goals has made clear, interest in the concerns underlying the Millennium Development Goals remains strong. Throughout the process, issues relating to poverty, hunger, health, education, and gender equality headed the lists produced by both official and unofficial contributors. Yet framing and specifying a set of Sustainable Development Goals is not simply a matter of rededicating the global community to addressing these familiar concerns. Sustainable development is a broader objective that calls for a melding of economic, social, and environmental factors, both to enhance the well-being of individual humans and to produce resilient socio-ecological systems from the local to the global level. Today, scientists as well as a growing number of policy makers are increasingly aware that the earth itself has become, over a short span of time, a human-dominated system (Steffen et al. 2004). The resultant growth of a new discourse, often framed in terms of the proposition that the earth is entering a new era referred to as the Anthropocene, has profound
