To look forward, it is necessary to look back and learn from the past. Hence this diverse collection of histories provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on what a future assessment might look like globally. Across the regions the themes for the future of assessment were similar. These centered around the need to adapt tests, to incorporate more local or emic assessments, as well as the need to use more indigenous knowledge. There was a clear narrative of a lack of training and resources in countries that would typically be described as developing or as low- to middle-income countries. This need was also evident in countries that are relatively developed but engaged with psychological assessment later in their histories in comparison to the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, for example. Typically, countries that were colonized, especially those colonized by Britain, showed more developments in the field of assessment as they had more contact with early developments in the field. This chapter reflects on the international histories of assessment and provides an overarching view on what we assess, why we assess, who assesses, and how we assess. In so doing the chapter presents a possible blueprint for the way forward for assessment in the global village that will be equally accessible and applicable to all.

The global dilemma of climate change can be seen in refrigeration: as warming increases, air conditioning becomes essential for people living in the tropics, but providing it will also contribute to carbon emissions. A successful policy must respect the need for development, yet overcome the collective action barriers to global cooperation. The first step is for each country to propose its own carbon budget, so that negotiations can proceed in light of their combined impact on the carbon cycle. The next step is to initiate a carbon club, in which willing countries agree to coordinate their policies. Advantages of joining include mitigating the free-riding and competitive costs of collective action, sharing research and development expenses, aligning border adjustments and, especially, arranging for global transfers of carbon revenues. A plausible transfer system could rectify shortfalls in development finance and fulfill the climate adaptation pledges made in the Paris Agreement. Global cooperation on climate change can and should also operate as development policy.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

This chapter concludes this book by exploring the success, limitations and future global outlook of the pan-European UNECE environmental regime including challenges for future non-UNECE accession, drawing upon an unparalleled seventy years of experience supporting international law on transboundary watercourses and freshwater ecosystems. From the key findings, this book draws a series of overarching and cross-cutting insights into the rising impact and contribution of the UNECE regime to the clarification and development of international law, which also raises outstanding areas for future research. It explores questions of legitimacy as the UNECE regime moves towards its new global role. This research bears in mind the importance of distinguishing policy arguments for signing up to the UNECE regime with legal arguments. The problem arising from a legal perspective is to ask whether it is good legally when international courts or international institutions endorse a regionally specific detailed regime as global law? This analysis demonstrates that the UNECE environmental instruments were never intended to be geographically exclusive and have also already been co-developed by non-UNECE countries for some time. This research supports the UNECE’s endeavour to embrace a global role but cautions that a strong mandate from non-UNECE countries must drive this process.

There is a pressing need to strengthen systemic integration and mutually supportive interpretation of norms and institutional coordination between the UNECE environmental agreements with a view to understanding their collective contribution to clarifying and further developing international water, environmental and general international law. This chapter identifies the contribution of the UNECE regime to established ‘central or cornerstone rules and principles’ of international water law, including the due diligence rule to avoid or mitigate transboundary harm, the duty to cooperate, the principle of equitable and reasonable use and transboundary environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Key findings demonstrate that these rules and principles are defined in greater detail in the UNECE treaties compared to global treaties, which fills gaps in international law. For example, the UNECE clarifies international law regarding transboundary EIAs by providing criteria to identify what level of risk triggers the obligation to conduct an EIA and compulsory minimum content of EIAs. The UNECE regime also clarifies the effect of applying general principles, like the precautionary and polluter pays principles to the ‘no harm’ rule which strengthens these obligations. The strengths and weaknesses of UNECE’s contribution to developing reporting mechanisms for the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 6 on water, are discussed.

The chapter turns to consider two key implications of the environmental minimum for international environmental law. For one, there is considerable difficulty in applying the human rights-based framework of the book to issues surrounding transboundary environmental harm, particularly the overarching global issue of man-made climate change. Due to enduring difficulties establishing causality, as well as temporal, geographic concerns, and the at most lacklustre commitment of most states to upholding them as practical safeguards, human rights are unlikely to contribute decisively to the current policy debate. The environmental minimum and its human rights framework presuppose a robust commitment to human rights, environmental protection and the rule of law that is questionable at best with respect to many of the most notorious global polluters. The environmental minimum is more suited to specifying the scope, context, and relationship of competing environmental obligations, notably among the sustainable development goals, as well as provide a viable framework to enforce otherwise non-binding or underenforced treaty obligations under international environmental law.

This chapter takes up the challenge to see the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as integrated and indivisible, and does so through the lens of slavery survivors’ own accounts. It draws from a major new collection of contemporary survivor narratives to answer a key question: which SDG target achievements are more likely to prevent or end enslavement? Focusing on India and on forced marriage as a case study, it looks beyond the SDG targets on forced labor (8.7) and forced marriage (5.3) themselves to identify three main SDG target issues as drivers of enslavement: 1.2 (poverty), 4.5 (gender disparities in education), and 5.1 (discrimination against women). Survivors also highlight the multi-directional relationships between these target issues that led to their exploitation. As an approach, this multi-SDG coding of narratives suggests that survivors’ own voices could be more central to the global antislavery and development agendas. In the detail of individuals’ unique lived experiences, we can identify the interrelated causal factors for vulnerability, and better enable the global antislavery community to tackle the socio-economic, cultural, and political drivers for slavery that are embodied in a range of SDG target combinations.

This chapter provides a brief overview of health and how it is influenced by different contextual factors. It describes the guiding frameworks of health promotion and how these are applied to address health challenges. It concludes with a preliminary exploration of how communication can support the acheivement of desired health promotion goals.

The exercise of formative agency in global justice cannot be entrusted to any single category of agents exclusively, be it states, advocacy groups, or citizens. However, interactions across categories can compensate for the deficiencies of all of them. A systemic account of deliberative governance shows how formative agency can be distributed and cultivated across multiple sites, actors, and institutions. It is the deliberative capacity of the entire system that matters most. The process that yielded the Sustainable Development Goals implicitly recognized this by establishing multiple venues, decision-making groups, and negotiation tracks, infused with participatory norms. Yet there was no logic to their interaction – and links were often simply absent. This chapter supplies the logic and the links. Specific shortcomings can then be identified and corrected. For example, the absence of citizens in the interstate negotiations of the Open Working Group could be corrected by links with deliberative citizens’ assemblies. It is important to cultivate the agency of citizens and the global poor, in nodes, sites, and interactions in the system. Deliberative systems in global justice governance should develop reflexive capacity in order to reflect on and improve their own performance.

This chapter sets out the logic of the practical pursuit of global justice through global democratization. The theory rests on the concept of formative agents of justice, who shape what justice should mean in specific contexts, and how it should be sought. The chapter analyses formative agents’ role in bridging the gap between democracy and justice, thereby situating this book’s contribution within existing debates on international ethics, global justice, global governance, and deliberative democracy, before outlining the ways deliberative democracy can promote global justice. This approach meets challenges arising from the irreducible disagreement over the content of justice in both theory and practice, and from the need to identify who exactly should be responsible for the advancement of justice. The theoretical arguments of the book will be informed by and applied to the process that yielded the Sustainable Development Goals, and to climate governance inasmuch as it takes on climate justice. These two cases are introduced, along with a discussion of the kinds of justice they promote, ignore, and obstruct. Chapter 1 concludes with a brief overview of the remaining chapters.

The Introduction situates contemporary public banks as socially contested and institutionally dynamic financial institutions. It presents the book's core argument that public banks are resurgent not by virtue of being publicly owned but because of the institutional functions they have acquired over time and can perform within class-divided society. These functions are not neutral within global financialised capitalism but are pulled between private and public interests. This leaves open the possibility for pro-public, green & just orientations. The chapter provides the book's methodology, rationale, and overview of the book’s structure.

How can we include the affected interests of future generations and non-humans in deliberations about global justice given that they cannot exercise formative agency themselves? Starting from the role moral imagination plays in moral reasoning, and hence in formative agency concerning the meaning of justice as well, this chapter looks at ways in which deliberations can be enhanced so as to promote inclusion of these neglected interests. Visual and experiential prompts should complement talk-centric deliberative processes. This would expand the deliberators’ moral imagination, enabling them to internalize the interests of future generations, animals, ecosystems, and the Earth system, and reach decisions reflecting all affected interests, even those bound to be silent – though that seeming silence itself may reveal an incapacity to listen. These kinds of considerations can be reflected in institutional design. Currently these frontiers of justice are only weakly present in the Sustainable Development Goals, which look ahead only to 2030, turned down the chance to incorporate planetary boundaries, and say little or nothing about non-humans.

States and international organizations are central to global governance, and are significant formative agents of justice (and injustice), in advancing, sifting, or undermining principles. Despite their formal authority, states and international organizations cannot be relied upon to promote global justice. States in practice often veil their material self-interest in the language of justice. International organizations too can promote their own interest, as well as adhering rigidly to dominant discourses such as neoliberalism that restrict the kind of justice they can advance. Thus states and international organizations should primarily act as effectors of global justice whose task is to ensure the outcomes determined in more extensive deliberation are implemented. Some of their problematic formative agency aspects can be ameliorated by deliberative democratic means. The Open Working Group that finalized the content of the Sustainable Development Goals is indicative of the possibilities here, as it embodied novel deliberative features that curbed polarization, overcame impasse, and facilitated common-interest justifications. Engagements with civil society of the kind now glimpsed in global climate governance can open international organizations to deliberating competing conceptions of justice. This chapter concludes by showing how states and international organizations might expand their deliberative engagements.