Linking the Sustainable Development Goals: Examining the Alignment of Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Supply and Interaction Governance Demand

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to transform interdependent ecological, social, and economic systems. Climate change, for instance, affects the world's poorest populations and exacerbates problems like severe floods and droughts, as well as biodiversity loss. Achieving the Agenda 2030 requires a holistic approach to governance that considers the impact on multiple SDGs. Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs), which bring together public, private, and civil society organizations to achieve shared goals, are often advocated as effective vehicles for addressing multiple SDGs. Consequently, this paper evaluates whether existing MSPs are connecting SDGs with the greatest leverage points, in other words, whether the supply of governance is meeting the demand for connections between the SDGs. In more detail, the paper first identifies the demand for governing SDG interactions by reviewing literature that models the relationships between the SDGs. Then, it compares the demand to the supply of interaction governance provided by MSPs. The study utilizes a new dataset of nearly 200 MSPs targeting multiple SDGs and distilled from nearly 7,000 entries on the UNDESA Partnership Platform. The MSPs are analyzed through descriptive statistics and network analysis, which demonstrates the formation of clusters around SDGs related to climate, nature, land, health, and energy. However, weak connections to SDGs related to innovation, inequality, and peace and justice are exposed. The results indicate a mismatch between the supply and demand of interaction governance, particularly between environmental and economic SDGs. The study suggests that MSPs should pay more attention to targeting production and consumption patterns to address this mismatch and enhance their effectiveness. In addition, achieving synergies between SDGs should receive more attention in both research and practice.