Governing Sustainable Development Goals: interactions, infrastructures, and institutions

Sustainable development is hard to define and harder to achieve. The process of expansion from eight MDGs with 18 targets and 48 indicators, to proposals for 17 SDGs with over 100 indicators, demonstrates the evolving awareness by the international community of the complex nature of development and its implications for society, the economy, and the environment. Whilst the development of goals, targets, and indicators shows a stronger commitment to defining and monitoring constituent elements, sustainable development is more than the sum of its parts. It is an outcome of positive synergies between multiple elements, and may be undermined by negative trade-offs between them. The proposed SDGs have been informed, influenced, and developed by different sectoral constituencies. As with the MDGs (Waage et al. 2010), this process has not sufficiently addressed the interactions between goals, and between the mechanisms and processes that could be established to achieve them. These interactions could be positive or negative, and the nature of them may be physical, physiological, socio-political, or any combination thereof. The challenge for achieving sustainable development is how to manage and govern these interactions. The experience of the MDGs shows that strong institutional ownership of goals made them more likely to be delivered. However, while the MDGs were coherent on systems of measurement, they were weak in facilitating participation and voice in relation to reviewing implementation (Hulme 2013). Similar governance mechanisms for the newly proposed SDGs, such as those pertaining to the management of climate change and the environment, have so far proved difficult to establish. Governance in terms of responsibility, transparency, accountability, capacity, and legitimacy at sub-national, national, and international levels is essential for achieving sustainable development. A successful governance process for the SDGs, which engages with the full range of political interests, would link the delivery of goals that are capable of synergy, and negotiate trade-offs to optimise delivery of goals that are in conflict; governance within silos is no longer tenable. This chapter proposes a framework for classifying and clustering goals and their interactions, uses this to identify the different problem structures and challenges for governance, and proposes potential solutions. We use this novel conceptualisation to show why different goals interact positively or negatively, and where and why governing these interactions can lead to a ‘win-win’, as well as where governing these interactions is a much more politically difficult challenge.