Measuring Progress in Achieving the Sustainable Development

the Sustainable Development Goals must confront and review the historical and political trajectory of sustainable development governance, including the evolution from a primarily rule-based to a more goal-based system and the experience of the earlier Millennium Development Goals. Third, we review the negotiating history of the Sustainable Development Goals. Fourth, we elaborate on how the chapters are organized to address the three questions that guide the volume.

Goal Setting as a Global Governance Strategy

Governments and other political actors adopt goals at a global level to identify and publicize collective ambitions or aspirations in order to achieve some set of objectives, or at least to commit themselves publically to pursuing those objectives. By embracing international goals—through adopting such measures as declarations by conferences, summits, or the UN General Assembly—governments signal their interest in achieving such goals and possibly being held accountable for doing so. In return, goals are often expected to include measurable targets and time frames that are used in tracking progress. As a strategy of global governance, chapter 2 in this volume elaborates on these features, highlighting that goal setting aims to establish priorities that help combat the tendency for short-termism that would draw attention away from longer-term objectives.

Yet goal setting remains a contested governance strategy. Analysts are divided on its utility and effectiveness. Many international lawyers support the use of aspirational norms against which states can be held morally accountable. Others look at their value in terms of providing the foundations for formal institutional mechanisms to promote their diffusion and to sanction violators. Yet political “realists” tend to dismiss the setting of goals as a veneer for failures to achieve meaningful binding multilateral agreements. As Underdal and Kim (this volume, chapter 10) note, the adoption of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals as a package, along with the even wider 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, provides “scant guidance for prioritizing scarce resources,” and there are no hierarchical governance arrangements internationally to ensure compliance. Still, they, as well as a number of other authors in this volume (for example, Bernstein, chapter 9; Voituriez, chapter 11; Gupta and Nilsson, chapter 12), though with varying degrees of caution, highlight the specific institutional and resource-mobilization efforts—some already emerging—to concretize implementation at multiple levels.