Goal Setting in the Anthropocene: The Ultimate Challenge of

Although the Millennium Development Goals reflected outcomes from many earlier UN and other international processes, as well as consultations with governments and UN agencies before and after the 2000 Millennium Summit, their specific formulation came from the UN Secretariat (McArthur 2014). The eight concise, yet broad, Millennium Development Goals and attendant targets were not negotiated outcomes (see this volume, Annex 1). In contrast, the Sustainable Development Goals required over two years of intense intergovernmental stocktaking and negotiation sessions, and perhaps the largest public and multi-stakeholder consultations in UN history. They are not simply standalone goals, but form the centerpiece of the broader new UN agenda approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015: “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (UNGA 2015; see table 1.1 for a list of the goals).

This encompassing declaration also reflects its own extensive negotiating and consultation process and incorporates the outcomes of numerous related international processes, including the third International Conference on Financing for Development (UN 2015; Voituriez et al., this volume, chapter 11) and the third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, both held earlier in 2015. It even includes a space for the then forthcoming outcome from the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is now called the Paris Agreement. The UN Secretary-General’s synthesis report on a variety of inputs provided for the post-2015 development agenda was published just before the start of the final intergovernmental deliberation in 2015, which aimed to create a vision around which these various streams could cohere (UN 2014b).

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development also pays attention to the means of delivering on its ambition, recognizing that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require not only a broader effort through the UN system, but also the mobilization of political support and resources well beyond it, including at regional and national levels and among multiple civil society, financial, and business actors. In sum, as the agreed title of the wider 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development reflects, the Sustainable Development Goals aim at “transforming our world.”

In the remainder of this chapter, we lay out a research agenda to assess conditions, challenges, and prospects for the Sustainable Development Goals to pursue this aim. First, we discuss goal setting as a global governance strategy. Second, to contextualize the Sustainable Development Goals, we discuss the unique nature of the contemporary challenges that