Abstract
While most of today's global challenges are deeply interconnected, international organizations often operate in silos. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015, have been advanced as a new agenda to break up these silos and to better integrate environmental, social and economic policies. Yet little is known about whether the SDGs had any effects in advancing policy integration. To investigate this, we conducted a quantitative content analysis on the website texts of 159 international organizations. Our study addresses two questions: (1) whether international organizations increasingly engage with the SDGs in their work; and (2) whether this engagement increased their attention for policy integration. Our results show that the SDGs are indeed increasingly used by most international organizations. However, this has not affected policy integration. We conclude with some possible explanations for this lack of effect and propose several research avenues.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 134-145 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Environmental Science & Policy |
| Volume | 138 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the European Research Council through the Advanced Grant project GLOBALGOALS (grant number 788001 ). We would like to thank Oscar Yandy Romero Goyeneche and Jolynde Visch for sharing their data and code, and Lucas de Oliveira Paes for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
Research programs
- ESSB PA