Governance Analyses for Transformation to Sustainability – Sustainable Development Pathways Achieving Human Well-being while Safeguarding the Climate and Planet Earth (SHAPE)

Project description

The UN 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a vision fort he wellbeing of all people in prosperity, peace and partnership while preserving the integrity of the planet. The goal of protecting Earth’s climate, SDG13, is underpinned by the Paris Agreement to hold global warming well below 2°C, through an international climate action architecture of coordinated nationally determined contributions. Numerous processes at local, national and international level are in motion to implement these global agreements, but the current initiatives are unlikely to fulfil the ambition of the Paris Agreement, pointing to the need for ratcheting-up towards faster and more profound transformation processes. Similarly, the world is not on tract for meeting any of the SDGs. Several scientific papers have emphasized that an integrated approach is needed to benefit from possible synergies between climate targets and other SDGs – while mitigating possible trade-offs.

SHAPE will develop and analyse Sustainable Development Pathways (SDPs) that achieve the SDGs in 2030 and maintain sustainable development to reach the Paris climate goals until 2100. To this end, the project sets out to analyze three key questions:
 

1. What are the crucial interactions, both trade-offs and synergies, between climate action and other SDGs related to land and water, consumption and production, and questions of economic development and inequalities?
2. Which system transformations can overcome trade-offs and enhance synergies to achieve a broad range of sustainable development objectives simultaneously?
3. What are effective means of governance facilitating the deep transformations required to climate action and other SDGs while mitigating trade-offs and exploiting synergies between them, on both the regional and global level?

DIE contribution to SHAPE pertains to the analysis of governance of transformation to sustainability and of interlinkages of policies to achieve multiple policy goals. Transformation to sustainability does not only cover technological, but also societal, cultural and political changes. These changes challenge existing rules and norms of human interactions leading to the need to revisit social mandates in order to effectively address emerging path depedencies and power asymmetries. DIE’s contribution aims to highlight and advance social science knowledge for sustainability transformations, and strengthen the social science component of Sustainable Development Pathways (SDPs).