Martin Sjöstedt

Three necessary conditions for establishing effective Sustainable Development Goals in the Anthropocene

The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.

Resilience revisited: taking institutional theory seriously

Resilience thinking has in recent decades emerged as a key perspective within research and policy focusing on sustainable development and the global environmental challenges of today. Originating from ecology, the concept has gained a reputation far beyond its original disciplinary borders and now plays a key role in the study and practice of environmental governance in general. Although I fully support the interdisciplinary ambitions of resilience thinking, I argue that if the resulting scholarly insights and policy advice are to be of any true added value, resilience thinking should take existing social scientific advances more seriously. In particular, I argue that resilience thinking does not give sufficient recognition to the already existing accounts of, for example, institutional change trajectories, the dynamics of path dependence, the distributional character of institutions, or the fundamental political determinants and drivers of institutional design and diversity. A resilience theory truly recognizing social scientific advances in these areas, however, has substantial chances of truly furthering our understanding of and practical abilities in facing the fundamental environmental challenges of today.

Responsive and Responsible Leaders: A Matter of Political Will?

Policy makers and policy-oriented scholars concerned with development and reform commonly appeal to “political will” as a cornerstone of development. We question the circular and voluntaristic view of leadership behavior inherent in such an approach, and argue that—to be more useful for the analysis of development outcomes, as well as for policy design—the discourse on political will should be firmly integrated into a more systematic framework of analysis. In particular, we suggest that it should engage in more active dialogue with the combined insights offered by principal-agent theory and what we refer to as state theory. More specifically, in the framework we develop, the principal-agent framework offers the analytical tools for analyzing leadership behavior at the micro level, while state theory provides crucial insights regarding the macro-level factors shaping leadership behavior. In the end, these two perspectives in tandem have the potential to significantly increase our understanding of empirically observed leadership behavior as well as our theoretical understanding of how the context—and especially the character of underlying social contracts—shapes and constrains “political will.”

Overfishing in Southern Africa: A Comparative Account of Regime Effectiveness and National Capacities

Abstract The international community has in recent decades supported the installment of formal regulations and institutions for monitoring, control, and surveillance to decrease illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in African nations. Yet, few studies have investigated the effectiveness of these reforms. By conducting a systematic comparison of the enforcement of fisheries regulations in five Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, we illustrate how the effectiveness of international agreements and regional commitments is fundamentally conditioned by national capacities. The empirical investigation also provides some tentative insights into the general dynamic process and mechanisms through which this can be understood.

Vulnerability of Small Island Developing States to Natural Disasters: How Much Difference Can Effective Governments Make?

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories about how political institutions affect adaptive capacities, this article sets out to investigate whether government effectiveness has an impact on the vulnerability of SIDS. While claims over the importance of institutions are common in the literature, there is a lack of empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study’s time-series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government data set. The results show that government effectiveness has strong and significant effects on the number of people killed and affected by natural disasters.

The Political and Historical Origins of Good Government: How Social Contracts Shape Elite Behavior

An influential scholarship holds that the behavior of political elites – that is, elected and non-elected public officials – is of key importance for achieving quality of government (Klitgaard, 1988; Goldsmith, 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006, 2012; North, Wallis, and Weingast, 2009; Fukuyama, 2011). The influence of political elites is assumed to travel through direct as well as indirect channels. The powerful position of elites gives them a direct influence on political, social, and economic development. At the same time, the behavior of political elites is likely to indirectly influence the behavior of ordinary citizens through what Werner (1983, p. 149) calls a “leader-follower spillover effect.” That is, the morals and actions of political elites are likely to be copied, complemented, and reinforced by actors further down the hierarchy. In line with this logic, it is often argued that “the fish rots from the head down,” whereas responsive and responsible leadership plays an important role in setting in motion a virtuous development spiral (Rothstein, 2011).

Donor co‐ordination or donor confusion? How disputed facts and problem framing affect the prospects for aid harmonization

An outspoken commitment in international development assistance is to promote donor coordination. Yet, how this ambition plays out in practice, or how feasible and realistic it is, has rarely been evaluated. Using the fisheries sector as a critical case, this article explores whether two major international actors, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, meet the demands on policy harmonization as spelled out in the Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. Through a systematic qualitative analysis, the article investigates if the policies of these actors are complementary or contradictory. It also discusses how the potential challenges to harmonization can be understood and what the broader implications for aid and development policies in general might be. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.