Contribution of subnational authorities to multilateralism from the EU perspective—Implementation of the SDGs

Abstract

The report of UN Secretary General titled Our Common Agenda argues that growing tensions between states and accumulation of global problems is a wake‐up call for international society. The choice now is either to follow the beaten track of dealing with global issues and risk a perpetual crisis or to undertake the effort to achieve a more solidary international system. One of the main protagonists of the new UN blueprint for securing multilateralism are cities and local and regional governments. The aim of the article is to examine how the EU, as a complex system of multilevel governance, supports sub‐national actors in their efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and whether this support is sufficient. I will also concentrate on Voluntary Local Reviews, which are a new extra‐state tools of foreign activities of subnational actors and try to explain why the intra‐EU channel needs to adapt to this challenge. The results show that the EU institutions facilitated subnational actors in monitoring the SDGs by providing methodological assistance. However, local and regional governments face structural problems that may hinder the process of localizing SDGs. Therefore, they need specific capacity‐building competencies. This is a challenge for the EU in the future.