SDGs and transition to Sustainability – Are there missing pieces?
On the 7th August, we hosted our 4th Community of Practice session where we deal with issues we face in the world, then aim to develop and facilitate the implementation of practical solutions.
A common thread in our discussions at previous sessions, was the fact that there are very obvious “no-brainer” transition solutions and the question we explored was whether or not there are missing pieces (or gaps) in our efforts to enable the transition to sustainability and the full implementation of the SDG’s. The specific focus of our interesting discussion was to explore the socio-economic transition landscape at both international and national levels.
It was evident that there are major gaps in the international supporting governance architecture that countries need to work around. These included:
The extremely numerous and fragmented character of multilateral environmental treaties (a total of 519 treaties);
Poorly defined and supportive relationships between international governance regimes e.g. between sustainable development governance and the governance of trade, migration, intellectual property or security regimes;
Missing pieces in the international governance architecture e.g. water and forests; and
Inadequate or ineffective multilateral support systems, particularly finance.
At national level, five major implementation gaps are evident, including
ineffective long term visions and plans
gaps in and conflicts between domestic regulatory systems
lack of capacity
inadequate availability of or access to supporting and informing data
poor performance tracking and accountability
The reality for South Africa is that despite our very progressive National Development Plan, which takes a multi-disciplinary integrated approach, our governance and regulatory systems still take a sector (silo) approach. This ends up with decision making that does not consider nexus and results in unintended consequences and legitimizes poor decision making.
It was suggested that we require major mindset shifts towards a nexus approach, which demands shifts to collective planning; mainstreaming sustainability; integrated, simplified, facilitative and incentive based policy and regulatory systems. Instead of creating new legislation we should focus on the consumer and making use of evidence based support systems e.g. climate action tracker.
Going forward, it was noted that social pressure creates political will and that a simple 2 prong approach could be used, on the one hand to advocate, communicate and market a shift to an integrated nexus approach and the other to shift the mode of decision making and delivery. This would facilitate the addressing of the policy, data and innovation gaps.
To get to this requires innovative approaches and it was suggested that we look at innovation gaps that need to be addressed to accelerate our transition to sustainability at a future meeting.
by: Jessica Wills