Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Agenda 2030 has been characterized as universal, transformative and integrative. The introductory chapter reviews the debate on environmental sustainability in the document. Tensions between environmental governance and socio-economic development are the central conceptual concern of the book. While ecologists have long demanded that planetary stability be integrated with United Nations targets to fight poverty and secure human well-being, the response to Agenda 2030 has been mixed in this regard. Against the backdrop of this debate, this chapter identifies the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crucial for a transition to environmentally salient sustainability. There is a broad consensus that the environmental core of Agenda 2030 consists of SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation), SDG 13 (Climate action), SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land). The chapter explains how these ‘green’ goals interact with the other SDGs. It introduces the chapters of this volume and shows how they are linked to each other.
Sustainable Development Goal 15 is strongly embedded in international forest governance and previous international conventions and agreements. These include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), as well other international governance initiatives, particularly those concentrating on Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) such as the Bonn Challenge and the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF). This chapter aims to identify the key logics of international forest governance tied to SDG 15. Based on a literature review and a chronological overview of interests, institutions and types of governance are provided and three key logics identified: production and market; environmental sustainability; and community and empowerment. All of these logics are partly reflected in SDG 15. However, the potential of SDG 15 to substantially contribute to the overarching SDG 17 of diminishing power asymmetries is not fully exploited. Indeed, the key actors involved in forest governance pursue an agenda that often neglects the interests of local people and communities. Driven by the dominant idea of international markets guiding the way forests and their products are thought about and handled, this agenda practically spurs biodiversity loss and climate change.
In the past three decades, the UN has led the governance of sustainable development via three different global agendas that have taken different perspectives towards sustainable development and brought about some structural changes. The 2030 Agenda is the most recent one, and two key characteristics distinguish it from its predecessors: (1) it is the first agenda explicitly recognizing the interconnected nature of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals; and (2) multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) play a more central role in the implementation of the goals than ever before. SDG 17 actually calls for partnerships as the main vehicle of delivering sustainable development globally. With these two characteristics, the 2030 Agenda implicitly assumes that MSPs are an effective vehicle for bridging the goals. Whether MSPs can indeed act as nexus facilitators, and how they can achieve it, have received little scholarly attention. Thousands of partnerships have been registered on UNDESA’s Partnership Platform, many of which cut across SDGs and promise to deliver synergies between different issue areas. Empirically focusing on entries in this platform that declare they are working on SDGs 13 (Climate action) and 15 (Life on land), this chapter explores whether MSPs live up to the expectation that they act as nexus facilitators.
SDG 14 captures the need to both protect the oceans and acknowledge the socio-economic dependence of humans on marine resources. Although many scholars consider SDG 14 to be a landmark or, at least, a great step forward in advancing partnerships and synergies between various strands of contemporary ocean governance, there is also a broad recognition of its shortcomings. This chapter aims to critically assess the role of SDG 14 in contemporary ocean governance by bringing to the fore the normative, economic and epistemic orders that have shaped the institutional responses to an endangered ocean. The chapter will unpack related tensions by conceptualizing multilateral negotiations as order-making sites and examining the case of a new legally binding agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). Finally, the chapter will discuss alternative innovative approaches that deserve more research attention for a transition towards ocean sustainability.
