This book analyzes the politics of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The conventional wisdom is that efforts to achieve the SDGs, or Global Goals, will contribute to building a more inclusive, sustainable and peaceful world. Adam Sneyd’s analysis counters this orthodox and unduly utopian point of view, uncovering the hidden politics of the SDG project and showing why the SDGs are not an ambitious package of progressive reforms. Sneyd’s analysis of each of the seventeen goals reveals how the SDGs are infused with minimalist intentions and a political orientation that sharply contrasts with the world-changing aspirations typically associated with the goals. He argues that the SDGs do more to bolster the legitimacy of the liberal international economic order and advance capitalist interests than to address pressing global challenges. This book analyzes the politics of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The conventional wisdom is that efforts to achieve the SDGs, or Global Goals, will contribute to building a more inclusive, sustainable and peaceful world. Adam Sneyd’s analysis counters this orthodox and unduly utopian point of view, uncovering the hidden politics of the SDG project and showing why the SDGs are not an ambitious package of progressive reforms. Sneyd’s analysis of each of the seventeen goals reveals how the SDGs are infused with minimalist intentions and a political orientation that sharply contrasts with the world-changing aspirations typically associated with the goals. He argues that the SDGs do more to bolster the legitimacy of the liberal international economic order and advance capitalist interests than to address pressing global challenges.

This book analyzes the politics of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and counters mainstream feelgood accounts of this agenda.

Funding low-carbon transitions to address climate change is one of the major challenges of our time. Green bonds have emerged as a powerful tool to enlist institutional investors’ wealth for these transitions. But despite exponential growth in many parts of the world, the green bond market in South Africa has been stalling. This book project grapples with this puzzle. Firstly, it debunks some of the promises underpinning green bond markets and traces the manifold practices undergirding its promotion. Secondly, it identifies some barriers prohibiting the expansion of green bonds in emerging markets and zooms in on the depoliticizing tendencies a transition premised on financial innovation produces. Thirdly, this work discloses the idiosyncratic political economic challenges of a fossil-based economy in transition and shines a light on the competing elements of a ‘green’ and a ‘just’ transition. It argues that the limited uptake of green bonds can best be explained by the instrument’s inability to adequately incorporate the various demands levied on South Africa’s contested transition trajectory. In so doing, this book contributes important new qualitative insights into green bond markets-in-the-making and extends political economic scholarship on finance-led transition endeavors in emerging markets. Chapters 3 and 6 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book investigates how non-state actors have become key drivers of the diffusion of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Brazil. The UN ranks Brazil as the most biodiverse country in the world, but the country’s environment has never been under greater threat, with the rise of multiple crises bringing mounting challenges to socioeconomic development and environmental protection. As state support has fallen away, non-state actors have actively engaged and eventually mobilized other social actors towards the promotion of the SDGs and the implementation of the UN agenda. This book asks why it is that non-state actors have dedicated so much time, effort and resources to promote a non-binding agenda that was ratified by and is mainly assigned to state actors. Looking at the roles of academia, civil society, and the private sector, the book explores the different ways in which these social actors make sense of and translate the 2030 Agenda into practice within their respective local contexts. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book sheds light on a series of challenges, opportunities and contradictions within the global agenda and its implementation. Assessing what the Brazil case can teach us about the diffusion of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs more broadly, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Sustainable Development, Latin America Studies and Environmental Politics as well as sustainable development researchers and policy makers.

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.

Aid Power and Politics delves into the political roots of aid policy, demonstrating how and why governments across the world use aid for global influence, and exploring the role it plays in present-day global governance and international relations. In reconsidering aid as part of international relations, the book argues that the interplay between domestic and international development policy works in both directions, with individual countries having the capacity to shape global issues, whilst at the same time, global agreements and trends, in turn, shape the political behaviour of individual countries. Starting with the background of aid policy and international relations, the book goes on to explore the behaviour of both traditional and emerging donors (the US, the UK, the Nordic countries, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Brazil, and the European Union), and then finally looks at some big international agendas which have influenced donors, from the liberal consensus on democracy and good governance, to gender equality and global health. Aid Power and Politics will be an important read for international development students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers, and for anyone who has ever wondered why it is that countries spend so much money on the well-being of non-citizens outside their borders.

New Private Law Theory is pluralist, comparative, application-oriented, transnational and reflects critical approaches.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the law surrounding PPPs in the Middle East and North African region. The significance of liberalised and integrated Public Private Partnership Contracts as an essential component of the world legal and policy order is well documented. The regulation of PPPs is justified economically to allow for competition in the relevant public service and to achieve price transparency, thus resulting in significant savings for the public sector. In parallel to the economic justifications, legal imperatives have also called for the regulation of PPPs in order to allow free movement of goods and services and to prohibit discrimination on grounds of nationality. The need for competitiveness and transparency in delivering public services through PPPs is considered a safeguard to achieve international standards in delivering public utility services. First, it assesses the compatibility of the current PPPs legislation and regulation in the MENA region with the international standards of legislation and regulation prevalent in many other countries, including the UK, France and Brazil. Secondly, it compares the practices in the MENA region with those of international bodies such as the OECD and World Bank. Comparisons are then made between the MENA countries and those in Europe and Asia with regard to the influence of culture, policy and legal globalization. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of international contract law, public law and state contracts, finance law and private law.

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) and other private governance instruments (e.g., Fair Trade, Forest Stewardship Council, Fair Wear Foundation, GLOBALGAP) are increasingly regulating global production processes and economic activities. VSS verify the compliance of products or production processes with sustainability standards. The importance of voluntary sustainability standards is now widely recognized. After being operational for more than two decades, they have established themselves as private governance instruments. This recognition is also exemplified by their integration in public regulatory approaches. Governments and international organizations are partnering with voluntary sustainability standards to pursue sustainable development policies. We witness the integration of VSS in the regulatory approaches of local and national governments in countries around the world, the integration of VSS in trade policies, the emergence of public–private initiatives to govern global supply chains, and the inclusion of private initiatives in experimentalist governance regimes. This Special Issue seeks to bring together research on the interface between private and public governance. We welcome contributions which analyze specific case studies on the emergence and development of these private–public interactions, the design of public–private governance, the effectiveness of these governance arrangements, and critical perspectives on the possibilities and limitations of such public–private forms of governance. We welcome multi-disciplinary perspectives including contributions from economics, political science, law, sociology, geography, and anthropology. Papers selected for this Special Issue are subject to a peer review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

UNDP’s Private Sector and Foundations Strategy for the Sustainable Development Goals 2016–2020 defines how UNDP plans to engage with – and work on – sustainable development issues with the private sector and philanthropic foundations. The goal is to enable these actors to become transformative partners in implementing all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to achieve UNDP’s vision of poverty eradication and a reduction in inequalities. The strategy aims to position UNDP as a partner of choice for the private sector and foundations in SDG implementation, while maximizing the impact of the private sector and philanthropy on sustainable development. The target audience for this strategy includes our partners in the private sector and philanthropy as well as UNDP Headquarters units, regional bureaux, regional hubs and country offices that work with the private sector and foundations on development issues. It explains UNDP’s programmatic approach in working directly with the private sector and foundations as well as with other partners involved in development. By engaging the private sector and foundations through this strategy, UNDP can support governments to establish an enabling environment for aligning these stakeholders’ core operations with the SDGs. This strategy is complementary to UNDP’s Green Commodities and Trade Guidance Note, UNDP Guidance Note on Jobs and Livelihoods, UNDP’s Strategy for Supporting Sustainable and Equitable Management of the Extractive Sector for Human Development, International Financial Institutions Partnership Strategy 2016-2020, the Recovery Strategy, UNDP support to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Policy and Programme brief and the Mainstreaming, Acceleration, Policy Support Approach (MAPS) enabling responsive, coherent and inclusive support to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.