This chapter examines how the facilitation of foreign direct investment (FDI) through the World Trade Organization (WTO) can contribute to fulfilling the right to development and achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals. It assesses how the WTO facilitates investment related to sustainable development in developing countries through liberalization of trade in services, restrictions on trade-related investment measures, and promotion of intellectual property rights. The study finds that reform efforts to make these WTO disciplines more conducive to sustainable development have been slow and of limited significance. The chapter also looks at how investment is facilitated through investment treaties and domestic investment legislation, highlighting the importance of domestic investment legislation for promoting investment for sustainable development, particularly for least developed countries. Finally, the chapter discusses whether and how the draft WTO Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement can most effectively achieve its objective in relation to countries most in need of development-related investment, considering the relative roles of the home and host states of FDI.

This chapter explores why African countries, except those in the West African bloc, are reluctant to participate in the initiative to conclude an agreement on investment facilitation within the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the consequences of nonparticipation. The study discusses the core principles of the investment facilitation framework as contained in the leaked Easter Text and finds some of them concerning, including market access being within the scope of the agreement, potentially undermining states’ sovereignty through international cooperation and streamlining of administrative processes, and the lack of development aspects such as the incorporation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The author is concerned about Africa’s nonparticipation, as they will continue to be rule-takers instead of shaping the discussion in their favor. Nonparticipation in the agreement creates a bad signal to investors, threatening investor confidence.

This chapter introduces the reader to the problem of policy prioritisation and why quantitative/computational analytic frameworks are much needed. We explain the various academic- and policy-oriented motivations for developing the Policy Priority Inference research programme. We apply this computational framework in the study of the SDGs and the feasibility of the 2030 Agenda of sustainable development.

This chapter provides a comprehensive framework to understand and quantify structural bottlenecks in a setting of multidimensional sustainable development. First, we formalise the idea of an idiosyncratic bottleneck when thinking in a hypothetical situation where a government has all the necessary resources to guarantee the success of its existing programmes (i.e., the budgetary frontier). Second, we compare the development gaps between the baseline and counterfactual outputs to assess how sensitive are the different indicators when they operate at the budgetary frontier. Third, we combine this information with the historical performance of indicators to develop a methodology that identifies idiosyncratic bottlenecks. Finally, we elaborate on a flagging system to differentiate between idiosyncratic bottlenecks according to the ‘urgency’ to unblock them.

This chapter studies the feasibility of the SDGs to improve our understanding of the empirical link between government expenditure and development outcomes. First, we explain the strategy to produce prospective (counterfactual or otherwise) analyses with the computational model and two metrics to evaluate advances in development gaps. Second, we present simulation results showing the development gaps by 2030 when the historical budget, in real terms, is preserved during the remaining years of the current decade. Third, we conduct sensitivity analyses that involve changes in the overall budget size that modify the value observed at the historical period used for calibration. Fourth, we present some reflections on the results.

This chapter investigates how federal transfers can boost subnational development. We analyse the case of Mexico and its 32 federal states. For this, we assemble a balanced dataset with 103 social, economic, and environmental indicators for each state. First, we study how federal transfers impacted state-level development during the sample period. Second, we analyse how changes in the distribution of transfers across states affect the indicators’ average evolution when attempting to foster all SDGs or each of them. We find that ‘fiscal contributions’ – a particular form of government transfers aimed at equalising regional disparities – exert an average impact on SDGs of around 25%–45%. Likewise, our simulations indicate that it is possible to achieve substantial impact gains when using an ‘optimal fiscal transfer’ to allocate the total federal transfers across SCGs.

This chapter introduces the reader to the public datasets that we employ in most of the applications developed in the book. This information is our main input to provide a worldwide view of the state of sustainable development and how it responds to government expenditure. In light of this global database on development indicators, we also describe the most popular analytic tools and their limitations. Finally, we reflect on the main empirical challenges that researchers face when studying sustainable development with these data and motivate the methodological proposal of the book.

To engage with sustainable development and the SDGs, I present a heuristic framework to explore the underlying aspirations and actions from different perspectives: the worldview framework. In essence, it distinguishes the dimensions of I--local--particular from We--global--universal, and body--material from soul--immaterial. It is a methodology to experiment with, not a (scientific) theory. Its conceptualization is based on a historical analysis of Modernity (previous chapters), on insights from perennial philosophy and on empirical surveys. The four corners of this space are denoted Subjective Materialism (A2), Objective Materialism (A1), Objective Idealism (B1) and Subjective Idealism (B2). I apply it to interpret the roots of Modernity in European history and I offer a tentative social dynamics theory as a broad canvas for exploring sustainable pathways. The centre of this worldview space is the locus of the integral worldview, where dialogue, partnerships and coalitions are the means to overcome the -- often polarized -- differences in values and ideas of the competing worldviews.

We are at war with life. The Earth ecosystem, our common home, is being destroyed by industrial technologies which have led to massive pollution of all ecosystems, greenhouse effect, deforestation, impoverishment of the soil, overexploitation of fresh water, acidification of the ocean. We are now engaged in a sixth mass extinction. It is time to recognise the ongoing ecocide, the destruction of our common home, as a crime. It is also time to relearn to live in harmony with Nature, to recognise its intrinsic value and its right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, in all its life forms. The Rights of Nature allow us to protect the rights of future generations, human and non-human. This chapter presents various new initiatives and legal cases from around the world to that end.

Good health is essential to ensure well-being for individuals, society and nations. However, health is determined by a multitude of factors, and hence achieving the targets set for SDG3 would inevitably require equitable progress in other related SDGs. The health systems in many low-and middle-income countries (L&MICs) have been unable to cope with the needs of the population due to lack of health care workers, financial resources, supplies, monitoring and evaluation. Health systems research can help identify existing gaps and challenges and propose customised solutions based on country needs. A preferred approach to move forward would be an inclusive and multi-sectoral approach with the implementation modalities adapted to the local context. In order to assess the implementation and progress of health-related SDGs targets in L&MICs, a framework comprising of nine domains is proposed which represent political, technical and institutional conditions. A greater political commitment with a focus on reducing inequities and greater accountability would be of paramount importance for any real progress and materialization of SDG targets.

The conclusion summarizes and discusses the principal findings of the book, highlighting the role of temporal coordination dilemmas and Temporal Focal Points in patterns of continuity and change in international institutions. After relating these findings to other theoretical approaches, the chapter discusses the theoretical implications of the analysis contained in this book for the study of change in international institutions. The chapter provides an extended discussion of policy implications, including how international actors can employ the logic of temporal coordination in modernizing global institutions in the current international setting. It concludes with an analysis of the current context in global environmental and sustainable development politics, analyzing progress in combatting global challenges, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the international community has incentives to realize institutional change and that a Temporal Focal Point could soon emerge.

This chapter analyzes United Nations environmental politics from 1993 to 2021, focusing heavily on the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), or the “Johannesburg summit,” and the 2012 “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). The chapter examines the institutional ambiguities created by the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” and international efforts to address them. It analyzes in detail failed institutional bargaining surrounding WSSD and carries the empirical investigation forward to the Rio+20 summit. The second Rio Earth Summit constituted a Temporal Focal Point in the history of United Nations environment governance and precipitated large-scale institutional change. Among the significant institutional changes emerging from the conference were the transformation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the creation of a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and the approval of a process for articulating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda. The chapter also provides a brief discussion of more recent UN environmental cooperation, focusing on UNEP, the HLPF, and the SDGs, including progress in combatting climate change and the loss of biodiversity.