Climate-poverty nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa: the transformative potential of governing SDG interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lie at the heart of global sustainability. While the achievement of the goals is considered an indivisible whole, evidence suggests they are neither integrated nor jointly implemented. Among them, SDG1 aims to end global poverty with 7 underlying targets and 13 indicators. At the same time, efforts to tackle climate change have significantly increased over the past years, but a global response accelerating transition, integrating climate action into the broader sustainability agenda is still missing. Consequently, attention has been paid to how the two agendas can be governed in an integrated way through institutional interlinkages in multi-level political settings. The coherent governance of synergies and trade-offs between the two agendas clearly has transformative potential. However, even despite their interconnectedness, SDGs are still implemented in siloes, meaning that policy-making almost exclusively focuses on one sector or policy subfield and there has been little inter-sectoral and inter-institutional cooperation to date. Institutional interlinkages and interactions between the social, environmental and economic objectives of the SDGs are especially pressing in Sub-Saharan African countries with populations vulnerable to both poverty and climate impacts. The lack of synergistic integration in sustainability governance potentially hinders broad societal transformation especially in the climate-poverty nexus. On the one hand, climate efforts not aligned to poverty eradication policies may be maladaptive, potentially worsening poverty and leading to less effective responses to climate change. On the other hand, pro-poor strategies that are based on carbon-intensive economic growth will amplify climate change. Synergistic governance of the climate-poverty nexus is therefore of key importance; however, we know surprisingly little about how trade-offs can be transformed to synergies in a global South context. This paper offers a systematic meta-analytical review, exploring existing literature on interlinkages, trade-offs and synergies in Sub-Saharan African countries, with a specific focus on the climate-poverty nexus. The paper asks the following questions: i) how can synergies and trade-offs be identified in a cross-sectoral multi-level setting, ii) what do we know about the interconnectedness of actors and institutions in the climate-poverty nexus; precisely what is the nature of these interlinkages across sectors and scales in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most importantly, iii) whether and how synergies contribute to broader societal transformations, specifically how climate commitments support or hinder poverty eradication under the 2030 Agenda. In more general terms, the paper makes a significant contribution to advance the field of SDG interlinkages by arguing that synergies and trade-offs between policy subfields are crucial in addressing pressing global challenges in the intersecting fields of climate action and sustainable development. Additionally, the paper investigates how the synergistic governance of interlinkages may have a catalytic societal transformative potential in a global South context - establishing the integrated, indivisible whole of the SDGs that the 2030 Agenda calls for.