Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have increasingly been accompanied and partially also substituted by other, more flexible instruments to reach the goal of sustainable development. Multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development have even been promoted as an official (type 2) outcome at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), suggesting that traditional MEAs (type 1 outcomes) are necessary but insufficient means to achieve sustainable development. Although public-private partnerships in national contexts have been rather common since early 1980s, they are novel governance arrangements in transnational politics. On the other hand, effectiveness of partnerships for sustainable development (for the implementation of MEAs) has rarely been the topic of investigation and most research has been conducted as single case studies, hindering more general understandings of the phenomenon. This paper discusses these multi-stakeholder initiatives and public-private partnerships for sustainable development in the context of global environmental governance, inquiring to what extent they fill the governance deficits. Governance deficits that will be researched in this paper are threefold: The participation deficit, the implementation deficit, and the regulation deficit. On the one hand partnerships have been introduced with Agenda 21, as early as 1992, as a means to ensure the participation of vulnerable groups (such as women, workers, farmers, etc.) and major stakeholders (businesses, NGOs, etc.) to the decision making process of sustainable development. The extent to which these groups have actually been incorporated to decision-making mechanisms, the distribution of power among different partners, and the extent to which corporations are willing to take part in partnerships would frame the query on the participation deficit. On the other hand, in 2002, the Bali Guidelines and WSSD defined them as implementation mechanisms of intergovernmentally agreed outcomes. To what extent partnerships are able to effectively implement sustainability goals would be the frame of the query on the implementation deficit. Finally, current literature on WSSD partnerships overlooks their interaction with existing regulatory governance institutions (international environmental regimes), and possible repercussions these institutions might have on governance. The issue areas in which partnerships are more numerous, and more effective will be discussed in relation to self-regulation in the international/transnational contexts, to explore if the regulation deficit is addressed. The answers to these questions are explored using statistical analyses of the data from Global Sustainability Partnerships Database (GSPD v.1), as well as other databases on WSSD partnerships.
Constraining global climate change to 1.5°C is commonly understood to require urgent and deep societal transformations. Yet such transformations are not always viewed as politically feasible; finding ways to enhance the political feasibility of ambitious decarbonization trajectories is needed. This paper reviews the role of social justice as an organizing principle for politically feasible 1.5°C transformations. A social justice lens usefully focuses attention on first, protecting vulnerable people from climate change impacts, second, protecting people from disruptions of transformation, and finally, enhancing the process of envisioning and implementing an equitable post-carbon society. However, justice-focused arguments could also have unintended consequences, such as being deployed against climate action. Hence proactively engaging with social justice is critical in navigating 1.5°C societal transformations
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