2 August 2018
Friend or Foe? Paper Assesses Accountability Regimes for SDGs
story highlights

The paper, titled, ‘The emerging accountability regimes for the Sustainable Development Goals and policy integration: Friend or foe?’ examines the extent to which follow-up and review mechanisms take into account the SDGs’ interlinkages.

The authors outline conceptions of accountability and describe six elements of accountability relationships, also distinguishing between vertical and horizontal accountability.

The paper highlights challenges and opportunities at the global and national levels, including the role of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

25 June 2018: A paper by several experts assesses whether an accountability regime for the SDG agenda is compatible with an integrated approach that spreads implementation responsibilities across actors and sectors. The authors from Wageningen University, International Environment Forum and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) explore the degree to which accountability is in synergy or in conflict with policy integration.

The paper titled, ‘The emerging accountability regimes for the Sustainable Development Goals and policy integration: Friend or foe?,’ notes that as an agenda that is “integrative by design,” SDG implementation demands coordination across policy domains. Such integration is called for in SDG target 17.14, on enhancing policy coherence for sustainable development, the paper notes. However, the authors highlight that although the SDGs feature many indicators and an emerging framework to track progress and ensure accountability, some accountability regimes can be ineffective or even counterproductive for such policies.

Through a review of the literature on environmental policy integration and mainstreaming, the paper derives an analytical framework to evaluate whether emerging accountability regimes for the SDGs can augment or enhance integrated decision-making and policy actions. In doing so, the authors describe six elements of accountability relationships:

  • Who is accountable;
  • To whom;
  • For what;
  • Through what processes behavior is reported and accountability assured;
  • By what standards behavior is assessed; and
  • With what effect is someone held answerable for behavior?

The authors note the importance of monitoring efforts, highlighting that one cause of low or slow sustainable development implementation is “a weak accountability regime.” They caution, however, that even a strong regime can fail to recognize the policy integration efforts needed to successfully implement the SDGs.

Policy integration often requires collaboration through networks.

The paper outlines various conceptions of accountability found in networks and at multiple levels of governance, including political, social, market, democratic, stakeholder, public and technical, noting that these relationships can be hierarchical (to a higher authority or with a principal-agent relationship) or horizontal (among peers, or to each other). Policy integration, they note, often requires collaboration through networks, implying a horizontal relationship that has the potential to be hindered by poorly-defined goals or procedures, whereas vertical relationships tend to have strong, centralized performance management.

Findings in the paper underscore the need for shared responsibility at all levels of governance, and across a range of actors. The authors emphasize that stakeholders must actively engage in integration efforts, and further note that information must be made available on “the types of behavioral efforts that support integration.” They stress that the global-yet-unspecified responsibility of actors to deliver the SDGs offers a weak basis for accountability, and that shared responsibility must therefore be reflected in the follow-up and review system.

The authors identify bodies within the UN system that have accountability embedded within their mandates, but acknowledge that these mandates do not delineate shared responsibilities. At the national level, governments will assign responsibilities both vertically and horizontally (to sub-national or local authorities and across ministries), but may face challenges in creating a sense of shared ownership.

These two levels, the paper notes, should be present in an accountability regime, as both aggregated global progress and individual country progress must be measured. The authors identify the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) as encompassing the former, and also including some elements of country progress in the form of Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), but notes that the Forum is not designed to provide transparent, externally-verified information about country performance, nor would it result in “material sanctions.” The authors also recognize Supreme Audit Institutions and civil society platforms as contributing to accountability regimes.

The authors conclude that due to there being few hierarchical relationships in the global accountability regime, it may be supportive of more integrative policies. The key challenges, they note, are in national contexts, where there will be a plethora of institutions and strategies for SDG implementation. Overcoming these challenges require national institutions to understand the linkages across the SDG framework, and to focus on learning, which “has become central to the global follow-up and review design.” [Publication: The Emerging Accountability Regimes for the Sustainable Development Goals and Policy Integration: Friend or foe?]

related posts