The scoping article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas: (1) global governance, (2) national policy integration, (3) subnational initiatives, (4) private governance, and (5) education and learning for sustainable development. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals, it remains unclear how such cases can be upscaled and develop a broader political impact to accelerate the global endeavour to achieve sustainable development. We hence raise concerns about the overall effectiveness of governance by goal setting and raise the question of how we can make this mode of governance more effective.

Hickmann, T., Biermann, F., Sénit, C.-A., Sun, Y., Bexell, M., Bolton, M., … Weiland, S. (2024). Scoping article: Research frontiers on the governance of the Sustainable Development Goals. Global Sustainability, 1–26. doi:10.1017/sus.2024.4