No abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were an important precursor to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, identifying the conditions that made the MDGs successful enhances our understanding of global goal-setting and informs the global endeavour to achieve the SDGs. Drawing on a comprehensive review of 316 articles published between 2009 and 2018, we identify six factors that have enabled or hindered MDG implementation. Our analysis stresses the importance of path dependencies and shows that the MDGs catalysed changes only for those countries with sufficient resource availability, administrative capacity and economic development, as well as adequate support from external donors. National ownership and NGO pressure bolstered efforts to implement the MDGs. These findings suggest that globally agreed goals do not easily trickle down from the global to the national level. Thus, this article adopts a forward-looking perspective and draws key lessons for the current implementation of the SDGs in developing countries.

No abstract

Implementation at Multiple Levels lead authors andrea ordo ´n ˜ez llanos and rob raven contributing authors magdalena bexell, brianna botchwey, basil bornemann, jecel censoro, marius christen, liliana dı ´az, thomas hickmann, kristina jo ¨nsson, imme scholz, michelle scobie, yixian sun, john thompson, john thwaites and abbie yunita

Aligning private finance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promises to close the multi-trillion-dollar SDG ‘financing gap’ while unlocking trillions more in market opportunities. This article explores the processes mobilised for this alignment in Indonesia, an emerging country exemplified as a site where such opportunities are profuse. We do so through assessing modalities of planning, prototyping and building project pipelines designed to facilitate market development for green and SDG bonds. As these types of bonds are supposedly used only to finance socially and environmentally beneficial projects, they are placed at the forefront of innovations to align financial returns with sustainable development outcomes. To make sense of what these forms of innovative finance do, we weave scholarship on the financialisation of development and on (shifting) governance practices surrounding the development project, together with empirical material gathered from SDG finance events, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. We argue that the processes shaping market development for green and SDG bonds functionally iterate upon and extend an open-ended project of making development legible to capital: to see and act on the SDGs as an investable proposition. This legibility rests upon and engenders standard(ising) techniques to define what counts as ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ in ways that (in)visibilise impacts, promising – albeit speculatively – the realisation of social, environmental and financial goals. Here, the SDGs provide the institutional locus to enliven this promise, erasing the unevenness of finance-oriented development and legitimising capitalist modes of ‘seeing’ and ‘doing’ development around this promissory imaginary.