Conceptualization: Goal Setting as a Strategy for Earth System

This single, goal-oriented agenda is not simply a continuation of unfinished elements of the Millennium Development Goals; it aspires to build from their central mission of poverty eradication and social inclusion a universal, integrated framework for action that also responds to growing economic, social, and planetary complexity in the twenty-first century. Some may wonder whether goal seeking is a deliberate effort to evade the sort of commitments that were developed after the fact for the Millennium Development Goals. Others have questioned whether the particular formulation of sustainable development in the Sustainable Development Goals provides a sufficient foundation for a comprehensive agenda that includes human rights, social and political inclusion, and good governance (Browne 2014). The combination of extraordinary ambition, uncertain political commitments, and questions about the ability of goals to mobilize political and economic actors, and the resources required to pursue them, motivates three sets of questions that animate this volume.

First, the book studies in detail the core characteristics of goal setting in global governance, asking when it is an appropriate strategy in global governance and what makes global governance through goals different from other approaches such as rule making or norm promotion. Second, the chapters analyze under what conditions a goal-oriented approach can ensure progress toward desired ends; what can be learned from other, earlier experiences of global goal setting, especially the Millennium Development Goals; and what governance arrangements are likely to facilitate progress in implementing the new Sustainable Development Goals. Third, the book studies the practical and operational challenges involved in global governance through goals in promoting sustainability and the prospects for achieving such a demanding new agenda.

While these questions inform all chapters in this volume to varying degrees, chapters 2 to 5 focus especially on the first question. Chapters 6–8 most directly address the second question. Chapters 9–12, on operational challenges of goal attainment and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals globally and nationally, primarily focus on the third question.

Apart from advancing sustainable development worldwide, the Sustainable Development Goals are also an important focus of study in their own right as a new type of global governance. The perceived success of the Millennium Development Goals (an evaluation that a number of chapters in this book critically assess) has set the stage for this elevation of goal setting as a governance strategy. The Sustainable Development Goals now raise the stakes for this strategy, in part owing to the very public and high-level political process that has produced them.