The document discusses governance challenges for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It addresses lack of effective governance, insights into how governance actors interact across scales and concepts, and efforts to reduce barriers and increase drivers of governance. It outlines experimentalist and multi-level governance involving traditional actors like governments and new actors like citizens, corporations, and knowledge institutions. It argues for moving beyond "cockpit-ism" where top-down steering alone cannot solve problems, and that the SDGs must target multiple agents of change. The document proposes theoretical frameworks for analyzing power, knowledge, norms, and their linkages to improve sustainability governance.
2. Today
1. Governance for the SDGs
2. Transition management
3. Metagovernance
4. Experimentalist governance
5. Stakeholders
6. Beyond cockpit-ism
3.
4.
5. Challenges in
governance
for the SDGs
Lack of:
•Effective governance
•Insights into interplay
between governance
actors, scales, and
concepts
•Efforts to weaken barriers
and strengthen drivers
15. Non-traditional, multi-level:
• Media: internet, entertainment and advertisements
• Knowledge institutions: boundary organisations
• Private corporations
• NGOs
• Empowered citizens: growing middle class
• Judiciary
• Prominent individuals
16. Beyond
Cockpit-ism
“cockpit-ism”: the illusion
that top-down steering by
governments and
intergovernmental
organizations alone can
address global problems.
Summits like Rio+20 are
highlights in global
processes—gatherings of
national leaders that
symbolically function as a
“cockpit” from which
international policy
directions are formulated
in a top-down logic of
steering.
the SDGs need to target
not only governments, but
other agents of change
such as businesses, cities,
citizens and civil society
Planetary boundaries, safe
and just operating space,
energetic society, and
green competition