Global health governance is in many ways proving more innovative and resilient than other sectors in global governance. In order to understand the mechanisms that have made these developments possible, this article draws on the concept of gridlock, as well as on the additional theoretical strands of metagovernance and adaptive governance, to conceptualize how global health governance has been able to adapt despite increasingly difficult conditions in the multilateral order. The remarkable degree of innovation that characterizes global health governance is the result of two interrelated conditions. First, developments that are normally associated with gridlock in multilateral cooperation, such as institutional fragmentation and growing multipolarity, have transformed, rather than gridlocked, global health governance. Second, global health actors have often been able to harness the opportunities offered by three important pathways of change, namely: (1) a significant degree of organizational learning and active feedback loops between epistemic and practice communities; (2) a highly polycentric system of governance; and (3) the increased role of political leadership as a catalyst for governance innovation. These trends are discussed in the context of three case studies of significant political, social and health relevance, namely HIV/AIDS, the 2014 Ebola outbreak and antimicrobial resistance.
This article explores the implications for international environmental law of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which occurred at the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit. Following a summary of the main outcomes of the Summit, the paper evaluates the process and vision of the SDGs against both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the past efforts of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in the field of sustainable development. The paper then examines how the environmental dimension of the SDGs is integrated into the general framework of the post-2015 development agenda and addresses two important questions which will most likely prove instrumental in the achievement of the Goals themselves. First, it the light of UN General Assembly Resolution 70/1, it discusses the normative value of the environmental obligations of States enshrined in the SDGs. Secondly, it deals with problems of implementation of the outcomes of the Summit, and accordingly attempts to identify the main legal challenges for the operationalization of the environmental component of the SDGs, in the wider context of the Agenda and taking the recent developments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) into account.
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Ensuring sustainability of earth systems is intrinsically dependent on the incorporation of equity and fairness in the regimes and institutions that govern the global economy. Accordingly, to design effective and just earth system governance (ESG), it is crucial to understand how the global economic system affects access to and allocation of environmental benefits and burdens among people and countries around the world and what are the relevant causal mechanisms. By focusing on trade and investment as two predominant elements of today’s global economic system, this paper reviews the literature developed within the ESG project in 2008–2017 to explore the relationships between the global economic system and access to and allocation of environmental benefits and burdens. Our review shows that ESG scholarship has begun to highlight the dynamics of unfair access and allocation deriving from the global economic system, ranging from the direct impacts of trade and investment on environmental inequality and socioeconomic opportunities to the indirect equity implications of certification schemes, environmental decision-making processes and environmentally motivated restrictions in international trade and investment regimes. However, it also notes that critical questions about the identity of vulnerable groups and the potential pathways for more equitable sharing of benefits and burdens remain understudied by ESG scholars. Hence, we call for more critical analysis of the role of the global economic system in perpetuating unsustainable patterns of access and allocation in ESG, as well as research about the local impacts of the global economic system on environmental access and allocation.
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