The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are presented as highly connected: an 'interrelated' and 'indivisible' agenda with need of policy coherence for implementation. We analyse the relationships among SDGs using formal systems analysis and find that the connections between Goals are uneven, with a failure to integrate gender equality, and peace and governance concerns. This incoherence may undermine policy initiatives aimed to develop approaches to implement the SDGs.The SDGs were adopted by United Nations member states in September 2015 1 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They describe a "plan of action for people, planet and prosperity" to "stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet". The SDGs are presented as "integrated and indivisible", whilst acknowledging differing priorities and capacities between countries, where responsibility for delivery lies 1 .

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A new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) are currently being negotiated at the United Nations, and there is a widespread consensus that these goals must be “universal.” This article analyses what universality might mean in this context, and its normative significance as a guiding principle for the goals. After briefly introducing the Sustainable Development Goals as found in the current stage of the negotiations, thearticle proceeds in three sections that consider three different senses of universality. In the first, I outline the most intuitive or straightforward sense of universality as a claim about the scope of the goals, with limited import for the content. In the second section, I expand on this idea by noting a widespread understanding of the content of the goals which might also be thought universal and which reflects a moral cosmopolitan constraint on the ambition of each goal. Universality is paired with, and contrasted against, the need fordifferentiation. In the final section, I examine this idea of differentiation, asking how and how far, the goals should allow for country context. From this discussion arises a third account of universality which incorporates a demand for fair burden-sharing. I consider, and ultimately caution against, this account of universality, even though the demand forfairness is crucial in its own right.

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How do the goals, targets and indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as governance instruments in efforts to achieve the SDGs by 2030? This perspective addresses this question in three sections. First, it develops an account of how we should understand governance for the SDGs that highlights the role of targets and indicators, but also institutions and norms, in this model of ‘soft’ governance. Second, it then offers a brief assessment of how the SDGs have worked as governance innovation since 2015, highlighting changes in the infrastructure of the SDGs and some national contexts, but also limitations. This section also considers the place of national ownership as a principle, integral to the SDGs, which constrains the transformative potential of the goals and targets. A final section considers how elements and mechanisms of SDG governance might be developed further. It points toward the importance of scaling up pockets of innovation and goal achievement across jurisdictions and levels of governance, while raising questions about expectations for SDG achievement beyond 2030.