4 Global Goal Setting for Improving National Governance and Policy Frank Biermann, Casey Stevens, Steven Bernstein, Aarti Gupta, Norichika Kanie, Måns Nilsson, and Michelle Scobie
Can better governance, in itself, be a subject for global goal setting? This question stands at the center of this chapter, which focuses on the inclusion of “governance goals” in global goal-setting mechanisms, especially the Sustainable Development Goals agreed upon by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 as part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNGA 2015). While our discussion is inspired by the negotiations around governance goals and targets within the context of Sustainable Development Goals, we seek to build a broader analytic approach that goes beyond the integration of governance in this specific context. We define governance here as the purposeful and authoritative steering of societal processes by political actors. Governance thus includes traditional activities by governmental actors, such as laws, policies, and regulations; planning practices, rule systems, and procedures at subnational levels; and certain actions by nongovernmental actors, such as standards set by civil society networks or public-private partnerships, as long as these activities include a claim to authority, have some legitimacy, and are designed to steer behavior. While there are some debates in the literature regarding the exact boundaries of what counts as governance, there is general agreement that authority and steering are its two core components (Rosenau 1995; Bernstein 2010; Biermann 2014). In addition, the identification of issues, agenda setting, information gathering and processing, negotiation, setting policy goals, and their implementation and monitoring are all part of governance. Finally, globally defined goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, can themselves be powerful governance tools with a major impact on the behavior of governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental actors. This aspect is addressed in two related chapters in this book (see Young, this volume, chapter 2; Young et al., this volume, chapter 3).
