I have recently been involved in a joint project between the London International Development Centre and UCL to explore the post-2015 development target-setting area with a particular focus on the sustainable development goal-setting agenda.  This project will hopefully result in a number of joint publications.  In the meantime, it has given me an opportunity to reflect on global governance in the SDG domain.  I have penned some initial thoughts in a paper posted on SSRN, an extract follows.

Effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may be dependent upon domestic configurations of institutions and political will, but the irreducible nature of the challenge demands a global governance component.  Myriad developmental issues are transboundary in character, from forest stewardship, to soil fertility, desertification and air pollution. Solutions to the range of goals first proposed in the agreement of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio in 2012 (Rio+20), such as poverty eradication, non-communicable disease control, health system reform and educational provision, are conventionally regarded as embedded principally in domestic (read: sovereign) political and institutional processes. But they also have a crucial global dimension – especially as policy space for transformative thinking on public goods delivery is increasingly circumscribed by prescriptive economic models and expansive transnational trade regulation.

This short paper can be accessed here.