Lessons from the Health-Related Millennium Development

Other examples can be widely drawn from international environmental law, where broad aspirations are laid out in initial conventions that are then followed by more specific and enforceable protocols. Even without consensus on specific commitments, multilateral treaties, as Young (this volume, chapter 2) points out, may introduce specific regulatory mechanisms to operationalize goals, such as procedures to identify species at risk or levels for sustainable yields. This type of goal can shed light on issues that would otherwise be neglected.

A third type consists of goals to which (often novel) institutions and agencies are immediately attached. Principled consensus is here often broad and deep enough that governments create the institutional mechanisms for their immediate pursuit. Examples include the Bretton Woods institutions, but also the UN Environment Programme, created after the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment; the Commission on Sustainable Development, created to follow up on Agenda 21 agreed to at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development; and the more recent Highlevel Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which will now follow up on the Sustainable Development Goals. However, in the latter case, the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development was created prior to deep consensus forming around the Sustainable Development Goals. Quite often, these types of goals do not lead to numerical targets but stay as broadly defined overarching goals, and institutional arrangements vary considerably in their means and capacities to follow up or institutionalize them.

The Sustainable Development Goals express some characteristics of each variety, but tend toward the first two, since the High-level Political Forum is not explicitly an implementing body and has so far little (or untested) authority and resources to directly support the goals, which will instead require buy-in, political action, and resource mobilization by a wide number of other actors and intermediary institutions at multiple levels (see part III of this volume). A proposal for a sustainability Grundnorm (“basic norm,” see Young et al., this volume, chapter 3) might provide an opportunity for creating normative consensus; and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNGA 2015) may be tactically utilized to create such an opportunity according to the third type of goal setting.

The Context of the Sustainable Development Goals

Even though the Sustainable Development Goals arose in an overtly political context to replace the earlier Millennium Development Goals,