This chapter takes stock of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals within countries. It explores the various initiatives taken by national governments, sub-national authorities, the corporate sector and civil society, and assesses their strategies and approaches to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in their spheres. The chapter finds that the steering effects of the global goals are so far mainly present in political discourse. While we also witness the emergence of new types of institutions, relationships and partnerships, they apparently reproduce existing structures and priorities of key players, indicating selective goal implementation. What we observe the least are steering effects on the (re-)allocation of resources. Thus, the chapter suggests that the Sustainable Development Goals are not (yet) leading to fundamental change and the voluntary nature of the 2030 Agenda makes it fairly easy for actors to implement the global goals in a way that benefits their self-interests.

This chapter provides an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of methods used to study the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. After a discussion of the political use of science and the complex relations between science and politics, the chapter showcases a selection of different methods that are employed to trace the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals. Selecting the most suitable method for a particular research question requires understanding their main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. The chapter highlights that all methods and tools need to be combined to comprehensively assess the political impact of the goals, the progress towards their achievement, and their overall transformative potential. As data gaps and unequal geographical coverage still hamper a broader understanding of the political impact of the globalgoals, we need to build bridges across language communities, disciplines and methodological camps, which still work very much in isolation.

In 2015, the international community adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets as part of a global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ambition expressed in these goals is unprecedented; the Agenda aims at nothing less than ‘Transforming Our World’. But can this prominent example of global goal-setting, as a new central approach in global governance, help resolve the pressing challenges of economic development, poverty eradication, social justice and global environmental protection? This chapter sets out the central questions our scientific assessment aims to address, as well as the conceptual framework for evaluating the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals. We start with providing an account of the novelty of the Sustainable Development Goals. We then conceptualize the steering effects of global goals as encompassing any behavioural changes of political, economic and societal actors, including normative, institutional and discursive changes. Finally, we detail the assessment process and scope of our meta-analysis, and outline the assessment areas that form the organizing principle for the following chapters of the book.

The final chapter brings the insights of the book together under the overarching question of whether the Sustainable Development Goals have had any political impact after their adoption in 2015. The chapter draws the conclusion that the Sustainable Development Goals have so far had only limited effects in global, national and local governance. We mainly see discursive effects of the goals with some normative and institutional effects as well. The global goals have however not (yet) become a transformative force in and of themselves. Their effects are neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 2030 Agenda and the 17 goals with their 169 targets constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national implementation, translation to the local level, and dissemination across societal sectors remain a political process.

This chapter focuses on the national level and studies interlinkages, institutional integration and policy coherence in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals. After defining key terms, the chapter reviews how perspectives on interlinkages have shaped a new discourse, followed by an analysis of the steering effects of the global goals on institutional integration and policy coherence. The chapter finds that some measures have been taken by national governments to advance institutional integration through coordination by central agencies and inter-ministerial exchanges. Growing policy coherence, however, is not clearly observable. Existing barriers in political-administrative systems preventing institutional integration and policy coherence have not vanished with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals. Although recent studies have considerably enhanced knowledge on the conceptual understanding of interlinkages, integration and coherence, empirical data about how these concepts play out in practice at national level is still very limited.

Given the regulatory gap in earth system governance, numerous new governance initiatives, such as multilateral clubs, private certification schemes and multi-stakeholder forums, have emerged to tackle transboundary environmental challenges. This plethora of different governance initiatives has led to a significant increase in the institutional complexity of global (environmental) policymaking and to more interlinkages between such institutions. Chapter 6 perceives dyadic institutional interlinkages as a key ‘microscopic’ structural feature of the overall global governance landscape and most basic building blocks or units of analysis in current scholarship on global governance architectures. After defining the term institutional interlinkages, we synthesize the literature on institutional interlinkages with a particular view on the expansion of interlinkages across different governance levels and scales. Against this backdrop, we examine to what extent the existing concepts and typologies of institutional interlinkages can capture the various new interlinkages between different kinds of institutions in earth system governance.