1Introduction
Global governance has become a popular concept across fields and disciplines, yet the sources of and contouring mechanisms for it often resemble a chimera more than a set of regimes. While this uncertainly or fuzziness might be useful in some contexts, it does not allow a robust understanding of global governance regimes, their abilities to evolve and grow over time, and the ways in which they can be used to shape the future of international law and its implementation.
Critical questions in this context remain unaddressed and, without an examination of their potential answers, the ability to advance international law regimes, especially soft law regimes, through global governance mechanisms is inevitably hindered. How can treaty regimes and international law facilitate the implementation of global governance mechanisms? How can treaty regimes and international law hinder the successful implementation of global governance mechanisms? The answers to these questions are unknown although the international community has devoted many resources – political, legal and economic – to global governance mechanisms.
This book studies methods through which international treaty law and its associated innovative global governance mechanisms – such as those found in treaty regimes and their domestic authorities/stakeholders – can strengthen, foster and scale up the impacts of treaty regimes and international law on the ability to implement global governance mechanisms. By way of a modern, concrete example, the book examines these questions through the lens of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs have been selected as an area of focus because they contain soft and hard law elements, relate to a number of international treaty regime topics and associated governance mechanisms, and offer a blank slate upon which to conduct analysis for current and future implementation. Additionally, the SDGs are time-limited in the sense that they are intended to achieve results by 2030, necessitating the rapid entrenchment of their terms as part of global government mechanisms as well as national governance mechanisms and policies.
At the same time, there exist inherent contradictions between international treaty regimes and principles of international law that function in tandem for global governance mechanisms to be properly implemented. For example, environmental treaties and human rights treaties often speak of furthering essential rights and freedoms, however they can be interpreted as giving primacy to different constituencies, resulting in conflicting implementation of the treaty regimes themselves and of global governance mechanisms. Without determining these areas of contest and highlighting the inherent interconnections rather than contradictions, the SDGs will not be able to maximize their legal and societal benefits. This, in turn, could be detrimental to other efforts at global governance in the future, at a time when all governance options must be available to a world crippled by the pandemic and seeking to determine a path to normality. Thus, this book addresses the gaps and negative areas involving treaty regimes and global governance mechanisms in order to offer readers a holistic understanding of the topic.
The research project of which this book is a result began in 2018, well before the world became familiar with the COVID-19 virus or the existence of a crippling modern-day pandemic. The pandemic and the local, national, regional and global impacts stemming from it are unprecedented and will certainly change the ways in which the SDGs are achieved and the ways in which global governance mechanisms function in the short-term and the long-term. Rather than calling the premise of this book into question, however, the pandemic and its lasting effects highlight the importance of understanding the ways in which international law helps and hinders global governance mechanisms and especially how these lessons can be translated to the SDG context, where there is grave concern over the ability to meet the 2030 targets from many circles.
1.1Background on the Sustainable Development Goals
1.1.1Origins
The SDGs were created in 2015 as the successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the groundbreaking statement regarding the issues following the world into the new millennium in 2000 and the ways in which the international community hoped to address them.1 As such, it is essential to understand the MDGs before examining the SDGs. From the outset, it should be highlighted that the MDGs, like the SDGs, were time-bound and expired in 2015. This was emphasized as a governance advantage by the United Nations in that it was intended to create a sense of urgency among States and other international actors in terms of implementing commitments made.2 Whether this was indeed effective as a strategy is still a matter that is up for debate, although it has been replicated as a model moving forward.
The MDGs articulated eight areas of focus to be undertaken by the international community and State actors during the first 15 years of the millennium. MDG 1 sought to “eradiate extreme poverty and hunger”3 using targets centering on raising the number of people living above the poverty line,4 “achiev[ing] full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people,”5 and reducing the number of those suffering from hunger at the global level by half the 1990 rates.6 MDG 2 focused on accomplishing access to primary education across the world,7 using the ability of both genders to access and finish primary education as the target for achievement.8 In MDG 3, the international community pledged support to the “promot[ion] of gender equality and empower[ing] women,”9 specifically adopting a target that centered on ensuring access for women and girls to primary and secondary edu...
