Accountability at the Global-National Nexus: Parliaments and the Sustainable Development Goals

The role of parliaments in holding governments accountable for globally adopted policy goals has received scant scholarly attention. Yet governance by global goal-setting is increasingly central in many policy domains, particularly in sustainable development policy. International instruments to hold governments accountable for their commitments under global goal-setting agreements are weak. This makes national public accountability ecosystems central, with parliaments at their heart. An important current example of a global goal-setting agreement that has seen parliamentary engagement in many countries is the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in the United Nations in 2015. This paper examines how national parliaments seek to hold governments accountable for how the SDGs are implemented nationally, aiming to fill a gap in research on the role of parliaments at the global-national nexus. We use the concept of public accountability ecosystems to capture the interplay between institutions, actors, and accountability norms situated at the global-national nexus with national parliaments as the institutional core. Employing a qualitative comparative research design, we investigate parliamentary engagement with the SDGs in three countries with different levels of democracy: Sweden (liberal democracy), Argentina (electoral democracy), and India (electoral autocracy). Our theory suggests that parliaments are embedded in vertical, horizontal, and diagonal forms of accountability. Vertical forms concern how citizens are able to hold their government accountable through elections and party competition while horizontal forms concern checks and balances between institutions. Diagonal forms involve the reporting and advocacy that media, civil society, and other actors provide to control governments. Through these concepts, we empirically trace and compare how parliaments in the three countries have engaged with the SDGs since 2015 and what the main drivers and obstacles have been for such engagement. We also observe different forms of parliamentary engagement across the three case study countries. The paper identifies factors that enable or hinder the development of national public accountability ecosystems for the SDGs. The global-national nexus is a dynamic interface where global goal-setting agreements intersect with national circumstances. This nexus is shaped by friction, politics, and the degree to which there is freedom for civil society and media to act. Moreover, parliamentary engagement has been impacted by the initial political momentum following the adoption of the SDGs and subsequent political backlash against sustainable development across the world.