The United Nations and the Governance of Sustainable Development

and viewed market norms and mechanisms as the best way to simultaneously achieve environmental protection and development concerns (Bernstein 2001). Concretely, governments signed two major multilateral treaties at Rio—on climate change and biodiversity—as well as agreeing to the Rio Declaration, a statement of principles to guide action on environment and development, and Agenda 21, a detailed plan of action on a wide range of sustainable development issues. The Commission on Sustainable Development was established to follow up on the commitments made at Rio de Janeiro, specifically in Agenda 21.

Ten years later, the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg assessed the state of implementation of Agenda 21 and called for further actions in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, but negotiated no new treaties. Instead, it promoted multisectoral publicprivate partnerships—so-called “type II outcomes”—as the primary means of implementation. Evaluations suggest that such partnerships have had, at best, mixed success. Many suffered from a lack of clear quantifiable goals and institutionalized monitoring, review, or evaluation mechanisms; significant underrepresentation of marginalized groups such as women, indigenous peoples, youth and children, and farmers; and relatively few partnerships actually geared toward implementing intergovernmental commitments (Biermann et al. 2007; Bäckstrand et al. 2012, 133–141; Pattberg et al. 2012; Bäckstrand and Kylsäter 2014). Around the time of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the concept of sustainable development promoted within the United Nations also gradually moved to more self-consciously include three “pillars”: environmental, economic, and social.

The 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development similarly did not include any negotiations on rules, but widened its focus from partnerships to include a variety of innovative governance and implementation mechanisms that involved mixes of government, stakeholder, foundation-based, and corporate participation and commitments. It also brought into greater focus than earlier summits the social dimension of sustainable development and emphasized the importance of integrating the three dimensions. Doing so acknowledged the reality of an increasingly fragmented and complex system of governance around the wide-ranging sustainable development agenda in which the United Nations was only one among many focal points. Thus the main means of implementation that the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development recognized were some 730 voluntary commitments during the summit, and more than 700 more made by