The past few years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars and policy-makers in the interplay of international bureaucracies with civil society organizations, non-profit entities, and the private sector. Authors concerned with global environmental politics have made considerable progress in capturing this phenomenon. Nevertheless, we still lack in-depth empirical knowledge on the precise nature of such institutional interlinkages across governance levels and scales. Building upon the concept of orchestration, this article focuses on the relationship between specific types of international bureaucracies and actors other than the nation-state. In particular, we investigate how the secretariats of the three Rio Conventions reach out to non-state actors in order to exert influence on the outcome of international environmental negotiations. Our analysis demonstrates that the three intergovernmental treaty secretariats utilize various styles of orchestration in their relation to non-state actors and seek to push the global responses to the respective transboundary environmental problems forward. This article points to a recent trend towards a direct collaboration between these secretariats and non-state actors which gives rise to the idea that new alliances between these actors are emerging in global environmental governance.

South Africa’s energy sector finds itself in a gridlock situation. The sector is controlled by the state-owned utility Eskom holding the monopoly on the generation and transmission of electricity, which is almost exclusively produced from domestically extracted coal. At the same time, the constitutional mandate enables municipalities to distribute and sell electricity generated by Eskom to local consumers, which constitutes a large part of the cities’ municipal income. This is a strong disincentive for city governments to promote reductions in energy consumption and substantially limits the scope for urban action on energy efficiency and renewable energies. In the present case study, we portray the current development in South Africa’s energy policy and trace how deadlocked legal, financial, and institutional barriers block the transition from a coal-based energy system toward a greener and more sustainable energy economy. We furthermore point to the efforts of major South African cities to introduce low-carbon strategies in their jurisdictions and highlight key challenges for the future development of the country’s energy sector. By engaging with this case study, readers will become familiar with a prime example of the wider phenomenon of national political–economic obstacles to the progress in sustainable urban development.

Over the past decades, the growing proliferation of international institutions governing the global environment has impelled institutional interplay as a result of functional and normative overlap across multiple regimes. This article synthesizes primary contributions made in research on institutional interplay over the past twenty years, with particular focus on publications with International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. Broadening our understanding about the different types, dimensions, pathways, and effects of institutional interplay, scholars have produced key insights into the ways and means by which international institutions cooperate, manage discord, engage in problem solving, and capture synergies across levels and scales. As global environmental governance has become increasingly fragmented and complex, we recognize that recent studies have highlighted the growing interactions between transnationally operating institutions in the wake of polycentric governance and hybrid institutional complexes. However, our findings reveal that there is insufficient empirical and conceptual research to fully understand the relationship, causes, and consequences of interplay between intergovernmental and transnational institutions. Reflecting on the challenges of addressing regulatory gaps and mitigating the crisis of multilateralism, we expound the present research frontier for further advancing research on institutional interplay and provide recommendations to support policy-making.

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the focus of the United Nations climate regime has shifted from forging consensus among national governments toward animating implementation activity across multiple levels. Based on a case study of the Global Climate Action Portal—an online database designed to document nonstate actor climate commitments and implementation efforts—we trace, conceptualize, and assess how the roles of data, data infrastructures, and actor constellations have changed as a result of this shift. We argue that in the pre-COP21 negotiation phase, the United Nations Climate Secretariat strategically used the database to orchestrate and leverage nonstate actor commitments to exert pressure on intergovernmental negotiations. By contrast, in the post-COP21 implementation phase, the Secretariat, in collaboration with climate data specialists, is seeking to develop the portal to track and animate implementation activity. Given these developments, we discuss the potential and limitations of data-driven climate governance and set out avenues for future research.

Launched in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a "shared blueprint" for the world into a sustainable future covering 17 ambitious goals (United Nations, 2022a). These include poverty eradication, zero hunger, good health, quality education, gender equality, access to clean water and energy, decent work and economic growth, sustainable industrialization, reduced inequality, sustainable cities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water and on land, peaceful societies and strong institutions, and finally, cooperation and partnerships for the goals. Succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs represent a normative, legally non-binding framework, which was agreed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly for a period of 15 years (ending in 2030). In contrast to the MDGs, the SDGs center on sustainability, highlighting the linkages between the environment with social and economic aspects of development. The broad goals cover most human activities with a total of 169 individual targets. However, many of these targets are qualitative in nature and there is lively debate about goal-specific, universally accepted indicators (or the lack thereof) to measure and assess their progression. Importantly, the SDGs were designed to provide sustainability pathways in an integrated manner across the growing divides with regards to development priorities between the Global South and Global North.After seven years, how-if at all-have the SDGs worked toward guiding public policy-making and bringing about much needed societal transformations toward a sustainable future for all? Have these ambitious development goals really been as target-oriented and sustainable as their name suggests? In other words, what has been the political impact of the SDGs midterm? With their book "The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals-Transforming Governance Through Global Goals?", Frank Biermann, Thomas