Abstract

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.

Keywords

social change; social-ecological systems; Sustainable Development Goals; transformations

Published in

Ecology and Society
2014, Volume: 19, number: 3, article number: 8

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Sciences
Economics


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06602-190308

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/96162