The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals

Legitimacy, Responsibility, and Accountability

Magdalena Bexell, Kristina Jönsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book draws attention to political aspects of sustainable development goal-setting, exploring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the global-national nexus during their first five years.

After broad global deliberation and political negotiations, the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs were adopted in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015, and by now many countries have political structures in place for working towards their realisation. This book explores three concepts to call attention to the political qualities of processes related to the SDGs: legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability. Legitimacy is required to obtain broad political ownership for policy goals in order for them to become effective in addressing cross-border sustainability challenges. Responsibility needs to be clearly distributed among political institutions if a long-term set of broad goals such as the SDGs are to be realised. Accountability to the public is the retrospective mirror of political responsibility. The Politics of the Sustainable Development Goals contributes new knowledge on political processes at the nexus of global and national levels, focussing on three countries at different levels of socio-economic development and democratisation: namely Ghana, Tanzania, and Sweden. These countries illustrate a variety of challenges related to the realisation of the SDGs.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable development, international organisations, and global politics.

1 Introduction

The 2030 Agenda and the study of sustainable development politics

1.1 Rationale and aims of the book

For many decades, environment and development were two separate tracks of intergovernmental negotiations, agreements, and implementation attempts. This changed with the adoption of Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the 2030 Agenda) in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015 (UN 2015a). The 2030 Agenda contains grand visions on a world with universal respect for human dignity in which humanity lives in harmony with nature. In its Preamble and Declaration, governments pledge that no one will be left behind. Among its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “No poverty”, “Reduced inequalities”, “Responsible Consumption and Production”, and “Climate Action” (see Table 1.1). The adoption of the 2030 Agenda was preceded by broad global deliberation and accompanied by political momentum for change during the “super-year of development” that also resulted in the Paris Agreement to combat climate change and the Sendai Framework on disaster risk reduction. The 2030 Agenda contains several paragraphs on follow-up and review, emphasising governments’ accountability to their citizens. Questions of whether and how these goals can be realised until 2030, the prescribed end date, has gained even more urgency by the Covid-19 pandemic, which seriously challenges hitherto positive developments. To start answering questions on the role of the 2030 Agenda, we need to know how the politics of goal realisation has developed to date. This study contributes new knowledge on political processes at the nexus of global and national levels during the initial years of the 2030 Agenda, focussing on three countries at different levels of socio-economic development and democratisation.

Table 1.1 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda

	Sustainable Development Goals
Goal 1	End poverty in all its forms everywhere
Goal 2	End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 3	Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
Goal 4	Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
Goal 5	Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6	Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Goal 7	Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Goal 8	Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Goal 9	Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
Goal 10	Reduce inequality within and among countries
Goal 11	Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
Goal 12	Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 13	Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts^a
Goal 14	Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
Goal 15	Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Goal 16	Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Goal 17	Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

^a Acknowledging that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.

In light of the above visions, our theoretical interest in this book concerns three central political qualities of sustainable development goal-setting: legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability. We understand the SDGs as political in the sense that they are the result of political negotiations and that the main responsibility for their realisation resides with political institutions. They are also political in the sense that their realisation is far from a technical matter. Rather, goal fulfilment requires political prioritisations and will involve goal conflicts, opening for further political contestation. Moreover, the 2030 Agenda does not enter a void at the national level, but encounters a pre-existing political setting. The concepts of legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability concern normative qualities of the relationship between political decision-makers and their constituencies, and therefore allow us to situate the analysis of the SDGs in a broader political-theoretical context. While these concepts are at times used as buzzwords in policy rhetoric, they are also long-standing concepts of scholarly enquiry in normative political theory. We are thereby able to substantiate our arguments with reference to the theoretical underpinnings of these concepts, independent of the concrete empirical context at hand. The concepts are closely interlinked and serve in complementary ways to highlight central political qualities of sustainable development goal-setting. Legitimacy is required to obtain broad political ownership for policy goals in order for them to become effective in addressing cross-border sustainability challenges. Responsibility needs to be clearly distributed among political institutions if a long-term set of broad goals such as the SDGs are to be realised. For its part, accountability to the public is the retrospective mirror of political responsibility. Through accountability, political actors need to answer for how they exercise power and make political choices related to the goals.

Our initial studies found that the UN documents on the 2030 Agenda establish a state-centric notion of responsibility with great room for state sovereignty, self-regulation, and national circumstances. In light of this finding, we explored the role of reporting practices for accountability related to progress towards the SDGs. We also assumed at an early stage that legitimacy challenges would be central for the SDGs at the global as well as the national level. By identifying drivers and obstacles of localisation of the 2030 Agenda, we have argued for the importance of involving parliaments in national level policymaking related to the 2030 Agenda (Bexell and Jönsson 2017, 2019, 2020). In this book, we are able to study more in depth how the 2030 Agenda has been taken up at the country level. We have the opportunity to explore implications for legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability across political institutions and processes in three different empirical contexts. Scholarly studies of the SDGs and national level political institutions and processes are thus far scarce. The present book aims to fill parts of this gap by placing the study of how the SDGs are taken on at the national political level at centre stage. More precisely, the book’s empirical focus is on the nexus between global and national levels and our key question is: How has the global agreement of the 2030 Agenda been translated into national political settings? The case of the SDGs lends itself particularly well to a study of the interaction between political levels with a joint agenda that requires long-term political decisions, yet faces pre-existing institutional structures and overlapping policy systems at national levels. The present book is driven by the need to study how the SDGs are in fact taken up by political institutions at the national level and we therefore develop a new conceptual framework suitable for this purpose. The framework is elaborated on normative grounds and provides a bridge between conceptual exposition and empirical studies by identifying elements of each concept that can be studied empirically. This leads to sub-questions such as: What legitimacy challenges arise in the transition from global agreement to national policymaking? In what regards do tensions related to responsibility appear and how do they impact goal fulfilment? Which accountability relations are privileged at the global-national SDG nexus?

Guided by the framework, the book contributes new empirical knowledge on how SDG politics plays out across three different countries: Ghana, Tanzania, and Sweden. The three countries are chosen because they display great variation with regard to political system, degree of socio-economic development, and the country’s role in international development cooperation. Clearly, country-specific factors shape how challenges of legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability play out in domestic SDG governance. The three countries face vastly different challenges in terms of realising the SDGs. At the same time, they share a joint global agenda with 17 SDGs that put high demands on political action in all three countries, and they are subject to similar international review processes. The book brings new knowledge on SDG processes in the three countries through our rich empirical material with a large set of interviews. Moreover, there are no in-depth qualitative studies, that include both high-income and lower-income countries with regard to the SDGs. The book thereby fills several theoretical and empirical gaps in the nascent research field of social science scholarship devoted to the study of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 SDGs. It also contributes to broader scholarly debates on legitimacy, political responsibility, and public accountability in goal-setting governance at the global-national nexus.

1.2 Prior research

1.2.1 Prior social science research on the 2030 Agenda

Research on the 2030 Agenda has expanded in many academic disciplines since 2015. Our main contribution is to the evolving body of social science research that concerns governance related to the 2030 Agenda. In prior research, one prominent ambition has been to study the participatory qualities of goal-setting processes during consultations and negotiations before the formal adoption of the 2030 Agenda in 2015. This research has provided rich accounts of global consultations conducted on a post-MDG agenda as well as on interstate negotiations on the final version of the 2030 Agenda (Dodds et al. 2017; Kamau et al. 2018). In this vein, researchers have examined patterns of participation in consultations (Chasek et al. 2016; Desai and Schomerus 2017). In particular, studies on the role of civil society in global consultations on the 2030 Agenda have pointed to strengths and limits of civil society participation for addressing an assumed democratic deficit of intergovernmental organisations (Sénit et al. 2017; Sénit 2020). Others have explored issues of contention between low-income and high-income countries during intergovernmental negotiations (Fukuda-Parr and Muchala 2020). Critical scholars have highlighted power struggles and argued that the 2030 Agenda does not challenge the ways in which inequalities in wealth and power are produced nationally and globally. Last-minute changes in the negotiation texts on the 2030 Agenda weakened the responsibilities of rich countries (Esquivel 2016). One study posits that consultations and negotiations on Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development privileged knowledge discourses of rich country governments, ignoring local knowledge and pluralist-participatory knowledge discourses (Cummings et al. 2018). Moreover, a special issue of Global Policy (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill 2019) usefully unr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the 2030 Agenda and the study of sustainable development politics
• 2 Conceptual framework: the politics of legitimacy, responsibility, and accountability at the global-national nexus
• 3 Legitimacy: a process perspective
• 4 Responsibility: from promise to action
• 5 Accountability: vertical and horizontal relations
• 6 Conclusions: interlinkages, continuity, and change in sustainable development politics
• Index