Governance for Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): How Important are Participation, Adaptive Governance, Reflexivity, Coherence and Democratic Institutions?

In September 2015, member states of the United Nations (UN) agreed on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in response to emerging global problems. With its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, the Agenda demonstrates the strong international commitment to achieve worldwide sustainable development in its social, economic and environmental dimension. To achieve the SDGs, all states are called upon to integrate the goals into their national sustainability and development plans. However, the implementation of the Agenda poses challenges for different actors at different levels: The complexity and interrelation of the SDGs requires holistic, integrated and coherent policy-making, where decision-making, implementation and monitoring involves diverse actors from the public and private sector as well as civil society. Many agree that to cope with these challenges, achieving the SDGs requires what has been referred to as the "fourth pillar of sustainable development" (Kanie et al., 2014, p.6): Governance. Despite years of academic debate, governance - and sustainability governance in particular - remains a contested concept that is applied differently across different disciplines. In the context of sustainable development, the complexity at hand calls for a conceptualization of governance that covers systems, structures, actors and processes. Although individual aspects of governance such as participation, reflexivity or coherence are key components of the sustainability governance discourse, empirical studies mostly analyze them in isolation. Furthermore, these studies mainly follow a case study approach, while a systematic cross-country analysis still represents a research gap. Against this backdrop, we will conduct a cross-country analysis among 35 OECD countries and additional 6 European Union member states (Non-OECD countries). Specifically, the article examines the correlation between different aspects of governance (such as participation, adaptive governance, reflexivity, coordination and coherence, and democratic institutions) and the achievement of each SDG on a national level. By doing so, we aim at deriving insights about which aspects of governance are particularly important for achieving sustainable development in its different dimensions. To measure the level of achievement for each individual SDG, we draw on official empirical data from the UN Global SDG Indicators Database, the OECD and other UN organizations. We will utilize the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) published by the Bertelsmann Stiftung to ensure the comparability of governance indicators on a national level. The selected SGI rely on qualitative assessments by country experts that undergo a multistage peer review. The article contributes to examining criteria for successful sustainability governance and help investigate the importance of distinct governance features in different country contexts. Examining which governance mechanisms are vital for achieving the SDGs in different political, geographical and cultural context is of great scientific and sociopolitical interest. Finally, we aim at contributing to the debate about the conceptualization of sustainability governance, particularly in the context of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs.