Paper short abstract:

The paper draws suggestions for using the SDGs from: reviews of past global-scale development movements, as in the UN Intellectual History Project; the SDGs' own emergence process; and the Global Migration Compact's elite-level global norm generation but dangerous divorce from domestic politics.

Paper long abstract:

The SDGs are an exercise in formulation, propagation and attempted use of norms, to capture attention, re-orient expectations, mobilize energies, creativity and coalitions, and establish frames for accountability, on a global scale but with appropriate national-level ownership, leadership and adaptation. Good leadership and good institutions are both essential, and we must look in a disaggregating way at the variety of tasks, stages and scenarios. The paper draws suggestions from past and current experiences that may be complementary to other studies in the panel, including the following. First, it looks at long-time-scale reviews of past global-scale development movements, as reflected upon in the UN Intellectual History Project (led by Weiss, Jolly and Emmerij), the intellectual history of UNDP (Murphy), and similar studies. Second, it looks at lessons from the novel features in the process of emergence of the SDGs themselves, analysed in several recent studies (e.g. Kamau et al., Dodds et al., Gasper), including a combination of leadership by various Southern actors, institutional reengineering (e.g. within the procedures in global consultations), and attempts to combine the attention-capturing-and-coordinating roles of a goals-targets-indicators framework with at the same time great flexibility and implied calls for 'local' leadership in many locales. Third, it looks at the salutary case of the Global Compact on Migration, which shows remarkable comparable elite-level processes of global norm generation, but a dangerous divorce of these processes from domestic political debates in many member countries, and implied needs now for huge efforts to compensate and adjust.