The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals

Written by an international team of sixty-one experts and drawing on more than 3,000 scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South, on institutional integration and policy coherence, and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies more broadly. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.

Frank Biermann is a research professor of Global Sustainability Governance with the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University and a widely cited scholar of global institutions and organizations in the sustainability domain. He pioneered the ‘earth system governance’ paradigm in global change research in 2005, and was founder and first chair of the Earth System Governance Project, a global transdisciplinary research network of sustainability scholars. He has authored or co-edited 18 books and published more than 200 articles and book chapters, along with more than 100 policy contributions.

Thomas Hickmann is an associate senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Lund University. His research focuses on the question of how societies can best deal with transboundary issues and provide global common goods in the sustainability domain from local to global levels. He is co-convener of the taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals of the Earth System Governance Project and served from 2015 to 2021 on the steering committee of the Environmental Politics/Global Change working group of the German Political Science Association.

Carole-Anne Sénit is an assistant professor of Inclusive Sustainability Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University. Her research explores the integration of the Global South in global change science, global civil society and global institutions. She is a research fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, co-convener of the project’s taskforce on the Sustainable Development Goals and managing editor of the Earth System Governance journal.