26 June 2014: The UN University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), the Earth System Governance Project and the Sustainability Transition beyond 2015 project have published a policy brief titled ‘Coherent Governance, the UN and the SDGs.’ The brief explores opportunities for developing a governance system linking international and domestic efforts for the post-2015 development agenda.
The authors – Steven Bernstein, Joyeeta Gupta, Steinar Andresen, Peter M. Haas, Norichika Kanie, Marcel Kok, Marc A. Levy and Casey Stevens – provide key messages related to, inter alia: the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF); monitoring and review processes; and governance of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The brief stresses that the SDGs will require appropriate institutional support for effective integration, coordination of activities and mobilization of resources for implementation. The HLPF should be a lead “orchestrator of orchestrators” in this regard, promoting coordination within a fragmented system, with high-level participation, innovative methods for North-South dialogue, and links with intermediaries within and outside the UN.
Furthermore, the brief emphasizes the importance of monitoring and review processes to ensure accountability, catalyze learning and incentivize implementation processes. It suggests that the HLPF could consider modifications to the SDGs as new knowledge becomes available.
The document also discusses: State-led reviews of national sustainable development progress, organized around common challenges, that would provide systemic evaluations; review of international institutions based on progress made in mainstreaming SDGs and targets into their work programmes; and a global sustainable development report, as part of the HLPF’s mandate to improve the science-policy interface, which addresses knowledge required to fill implementation gaps and identify transition pathways.
The brief describes an SDG governance system that mobilizes action and resources at multiple levels and through a wide range of stakeholders, with diversity in means of implementation balanced by State-led mechanisms to ensure accountability, responsibility, coherence and capacity to incentivize long-term investments for sustainable development. [Publication: Coherent Governance, the UN and the SDGs]