Systemic governance in national SDG implementation: assessing the compatibility with legitimacy and accountability

Sustainability scientists and policy makers alike are increasingly concerned with the need for transformative change to tackle multifaceted and interconnected contemporary sustainability challenges.

Meanwhile, there is a recognition that responses to address interlinked global agendas need to be coherent with one another, and need to be designed in the face of surprises and imperfect information.

Effectively realizing a transformative and integrated sustainability agenda under uncertainty represents a formidable governance challenge.Scholarship on complex systems holds promise of contributing insights towards this challenge, but it has to date been unclear how it applies in national level governance and how it relates to more traditional benchmarks of democratic public governance, such as legitimacy and accountability.The project will draw on case studies consisting of systemic governance mechanisms that are part of countries SDG implementation.

Using a combination of text analysis and informant interviews, we will illustrate various ways in which systemic governance principles can be operationalized in practice at national level.

In addition, we will critically assess the compatibility of principles of systemic governance vis-à-vis principles of legitimacy and accountability.

In doing so, we will identify tensions across the principles in theory and practice, and identify potential ways of bridging these tensions.