Responsibility and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

This article asks what key concerns emerge from the way responsibility is framed in United Nations summit documents on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015. Our conceptual framework serves to make the study of SDG responsibility more systematic by distinguishing three main senses of responsibility: cause, obligation, and accountability. The framework structures our analysis of two SDG summit documents, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. The article shows, first, that the causal sense of responsibility is hidden between the lines in paragraphs on poverty, debt and environmental issues. As a consequence, root causes of problems might not be appropriately addressed. Second, SDG summit documents deal predominantly with responsibility in the sense of obligation. We raise concerns with repeated consideration for national circumstances and with vague obligations for non-governmental actors. Third, with regard to accountability, we stress that quantitative indicators have unintended steering effects both before and beyond the review phase. The focus on indicators risks shadowing broader obligations, such as international human rights. In all its three senses, responsibility in key SDG documents remains state-centric with great room for state sovereignty, self-regulation and respect for national circumstances. Our framework is useful also in showing that the three senses of responsibility build on each other and that engagement with responsibility provides fruitful ground for further research.

Keywords:

• responsibility
• accountability
• sustainable development goals
• United Nations

Notes on contributors

Magdalena Bexell is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. Her research concerns responsibility in international relations and legitimacy in public-private cooperation in global governance. She is the editor of Global Governance, Legitimacy and Legitimation (Routledge), co-editor of Democracy and Public-Private Partnerships in Global Governance (Palgrave) and has published in journals such as Globalizations, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Global Governance.

Kristina Jönsson is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. Her current research concerns legitimacy and responsibility in global governance with a special focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and global health. Her previous work concerned politics and policy-making in South-East Asia. She has published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Globalizations, Health Policy and Planning, Health Policy, and Asian Survey.

ORCID

Magdalena Bexell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9987-1177

Kristina Jönsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6908-4666

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas [grant number 942-2015-447: Realising the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals: Whose Responsibility?]