By Yasmine Mahssoun, PhD candidate at Hassan 1st University, Morocco

SDG 16 commits countries to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, ensure access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels. It is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development because progress on many other Goals depends on a minimum level of institutional stability.

At the normative level, the goal does not limit governance to the state. In practice, however, implementation focuses mainly on formal justice systems, state security provision, and centrally administered data. Analyses of the indicator framework show that, while some targets point to more plural forms of governance, most indicators still assume a model of authority centered on the sovereign state. In much of the central Sahel, this leads to what could be called a recognition gap: governance that exists on the ground remains largely invisible in SDG 16 reporting.

The central Sahel is often described in terms of state retreat, institutional fragility, and humanitarian emergency. The situation is difficult: the region accounted for an estimated 51% of global terrorism-related deaths in 2024, for the second year in a row, while consolidated humanitarian appeals remain significantly underfunded.

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These severe conditions do not, however, mean that governance is absent. In many localities, order is organized through layered arrangements involving customary authorities, religious leaders, community mediators, women’s associations, and pastoralist networks. Several of these actors have administered justice and mediated disputes since the pre-colonial period and continue to enjoy substantial social legitimacy. Research on African statehood shows that authority is produced through ongoing negotiation among local, national, and transnational actors, rather than following a single institutional model, and has criticized state failure narratives on this basis. Governance in the Sahel is therefore more accurately described as plural and negotiated rather than as simply lacking.

In these settings, another limitation of SDG 16 relates to measurement. When monitoring relies mainly on what national systems can formally report and count, areas with limited state presence may appear institutionally empty, even though they are governed through dense and socially effective local arrangements. Indicator 16.3.3, on access to dispute resolution mechanisms, illustrates both an opening in the framework and its continuing constraints. Developed by its three co-custodians as a people-centered measure, the indicator records the share of people who experienced a dispute and sought help from either a formal or informal resolution mechanism. It aims to capture unmet legal needs – the “justice gap” – through household surveys rather than administrative records. This is one of the framework’s strongest features because it brings non-state justice pathways into formal measurement and acknowledges that many people rely on informal mechanisms to resolve disputes.

Nevertheless, the indicator depends on dedicated survey design, contextual adaptation, and uptake by national statistical systems to produce usable data. Designing and implementing these surveys in fragile and conflict-affected settings requires resources, technical support, and sustained collaboration between national and international actors. Where these conditions are not in place, informal mechanisms remain poorly captured, and national reporting continues to reflect primarily state-based institutions. The fact that non-state justice pathways require this level of methodological adjustment to be visible suggests that the basic architecture of SDG 16 reporting still leans towards formal state institutions.

This bias has clear policy implications. When governance is measured mainly through formal institutions, external actors tend to prioritize state restoration, bureaucratic capacity, and central security provision, while customary and community-based institutions are treated as secondary or temporary. In a region where legitimacy is often negotiated rather than monopolized by the state, this misalignment can undermine the durability of peacebuilding and development initiatives. Programs that do not sufficiently engage with community-level authorities risk overlooking how decisions are made, how disputes are settled, and whose authority is accepted or contested in everyday life.

A stronger application of SDG 16 in the Sahel does not require abandoning the Goal’s universal ambition. Instead, it calls for interpreting “institutions at all levels” in ways that take seriously contexts of limited statehood. Three sets of policy implications follow.

Methodologically, international partners and national statistical offices should combine national reporting with people-centered tools that capture how justice and dispute resolution function through both formal and informal pathways. This is the logic of the citizen data approaches now gaining ground in SDG 16 monitoring, which treats people’s own experiences of justice as a legitimate complement to administrative records. Building on indicator 16.3.3, this means investing in survey instruments that are sensitive to local dispute resolution practices, including customary and religious mechanisms, and ensuring that such data are systematically integrated into SDG 16 reporting.

Politically, UN agencies, regional organizations, and donors should support co-design of these tools with researchers and socially legitimate authorities from the region, rather than relying only on external templates. Co-production can help ensure that categories used in questionnaires match the ways people in the Sahel understand authority, conflict, and redress. It can also strengthen local ownership of the resulting data and make it more likely that findings inform national and local decision making.

Strategically, peacebuilding and development programs should recognize legitimate community-level governance as a core dimension of institution building, not only as a stopgap when the state is weak. This implies engaging customary and community-based actors as partners in designing access to justice initiatives, security interventions, and institutional reforms, while also monitoring how these actors exercise power. Recognition should remain critical and nuanced: local legitimacy can coexist with exclusion or coercion, and customary authorities themselves face growing pressure from armed groups and other violent actors. Expanded recognition must therefore go hand in hand with careful normative scrutiny and safeguards for rights, including gender equality and protection of minorities.

The Sahel is more than a regional case. It raises a wider question for global development governance: can universal frameworks fully reflect institutional realities that do not follow state-centered template? As 2030 approaches, the central issue is no longer whether SDG 16 is important, but whether it will be applied in ways that acknowledge how governance works in conflict-affected contexts. Closing the recognition gap is essential if SDG 16 is to support peace and justice not only where states are strong, but also where authority is plural, negotiated, and contested.