There has been increasing interest in local-level implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the emergence of various initiatives undertaken by local governments, studies on the process of mainstreaming the 2030 Agenda within local contexts remain limited. This study is aimed at identifying possible approaches for supporting local governments in successfully mainstreaming the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. We developed an analytical framework covering key components for local-level mainstreaming of the SDGs based on our review of recent policy guidelines for implementing the SDGs and the policy integration and coherence literature. Subsequently, we applied this framework within case studies of two designated municipalities under the Japanese government’s “SDGs Future Cities” initiative aimed at localizing the SDGs. The analysis demonstrated how local governments could develop and apply key components of the SDGs mainstreaming process. Our findings suggest that the following approaches can facilitate local governments’ efforts to mainstream the SDGs: first, municipalities can foster local ownership to address the challenges they face. Second, existing policy resources can be linked with formal procedures. Third, multi-stakeholder partnerships can be developed. Fourth, vertical communication channels can be established with international and national-level organizations. Overall, the article contributes to a growing literature on SDGs implementation at the local level by identifying key components required for their mainstreaming, introducing perspectives derived from Japanese case studies.

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Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to global peace and security. This paper intends to provide a better understanding of the nature of interactions between climate change and events that undermine peace through a systematic review of recent literature. It highlights major methodological approaches adopted in the literature, elaborates on the geographic focus of the research at the nexus of climate change and peace, and provides further information on how various climatic stressors, such as extreme temperature, floods, sea-level rise, storms, and water stress may be linked to different events that undermine peace (e.g. civil conflict, crime, intercommunal violence, interstate conflict, political conflict, and social conflict) through direct and indirect pathways. Results confirm previous findings that statistical techniques and qualitative case studies are dominant methods in climate-conflict research but show that there has been an increase in the geographic information system based risk analyses and qualitative comparative analyses in the recent years. In line with previous reviews, results show that the literature is mainly focused on certain regions of the world and several major regions that have experienced numerous conflicts over the past few years and/or are vulnerable to adverse climatic events are understudied. However, a new finding is that, in the past few years, there has been an increasing focus on Asia, which contrasts with previous reviews that show an African focus in the literature. Also, there is an unbalanced attention to different climatic stressors and peace-related events. Interactions between water stress/extreme temperature and civil and interstate conflicts have received more attention. A major finding is that, only under certain conditions climatic stressors may act as driving forces or aggravating factors. In fact, there is a strong consensus that climate change is less likely to undermine peace in isolation from a wide range of contextual socio-economic and institutional factors such as political instability, poor governance, poverty, homogeneous livelihood structures, and ethnic fractionalization. However, such contextual factors can contribute to undermining peace via either direct or indirect pathways. The former may occur through direct psychological/physiological effects of climatic impacts or via competition over scarce resources. In contrast, in indirect pathways climate change may lead to conflict through diminishing livelihood capacities and/or inducing migration. In addition to synthesizing literature on contextual factors and direct/indirect pathways, the review identifies gaps that need further research.

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