The conference is hosted by the University of Toronto, and the University of Waterloo together with the Earth System Governance Project. This year’s conference theme is:

Governing accelerated transitions: justice, creativity, and power in a transforming world.

Humans are dramatically accelerating global environmental change. Several planetary boundaries have been overstepped including climate change. Prof. Partzsch’s paper presentation deals with challenges and opportunities to hold power wielders accountable for five decades of insufficient environmental action since the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Based on a theoretical framework that differentiates between public, private and voluntary logics of accountability, the paper assesses accountability mechanism with respect to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This allows to discuss and conclude on the untapped potential for holding power wielders accountable. There is a need to establish norms demanding stringent respect of environmental protection in global development. Besides greater ‘peer review’ and exchange of good practices among governments, parliaments should play a larger role in formal mechanism of monitoring and surveillance. Finally, we should use SDG indicators not only for ranking nation-states, but make them mandatory for corporate reporting and establish rankings of global business players.