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• Published: 20 June 2022

Scientific evidence on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals

• Frank Biermann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0292-0703 1 ,
• Thomas Hickmann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5072-7855 2 ,
• Carole-Anne Sénit   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2723-6091 1 ,
• Marianne Beisheim   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0554-925X 3 ,
• Steven Bernstein   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0115-084X 4 ,
• Pamela Chasek 5 ,
• Leonie Grob 1 , 6 ,
• Rakhyun E. Kim   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1308-6849 1 ,
• Louis J. Kotzé 7 , 8 ,
• Måns Nilsson 9 , 10 ,
• Andrea Ordóñez Llanos 11 ,
• Chukwumerije Okereke 12 ,
• Prajal Pradhan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0491-5489 13 ,
• Rob Raven 1 , 14 ,
• Yixian Sun   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2415-2327 15 ,
• Marjanneke J. Vijge 1 ,
• Detlef van Vuuren   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0398-2831 1 , 16 &
• Birka Wicke   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0445-0984 17  

Nature Sustainability volume  5 ,  pages 795–800 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 27 June 2022

This article has been updated

In 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals as the central normative framework for sustainable development worldwide. The effectiveness of governing by such broad global goals, however, remains uncertain, and we lack comprehensive meta-studies that assess the political impact of the goals across countries and globally. We present here condensed evidence from an analysis of over 3,000 scientific studies on the Sustainable Development Goals published between 2016 and April 2021. Our findings suggests that the goals have had some political impact on institutions and policies, from local to global governance. This impact has been largely discursive, affecting the way actors understand and communicate about sustainable development. More profound normative and institutional impact, from legislative action to changing resource allocation, remains rare. We conclude that the scientific evidence suggests only limited transformative political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals thus far.

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In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to guide public policies and inspire societal actors to promote sustainable development worldwide. The core of this programme is 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 specific targets, most of them to be achieved by 2030. Although the SDGs are not the first effort to set global goals (and they have been criticized earlier on, for example, ref. 1 ), they are still by far the most comprehensive and detailed attempt by the United Nations to advance sustainable development 2 , 3 , 4 . After six years of implementation, the question arises whether these 17 SDGs have had any political impact within national and global governance to address pressing challenges such as poverty eradication, social justice and environmental protection.

In this Article, we offer the results of a meta-analysis of the available scientific evidence about the political impact of the SDGs since 2015. The assessment covers over 3,000 studies, analysed by a team of 61 scholars. Most studies assessed are peer-reviewed academic research papers, along with a few studies from the ‘grey literature’ that were consulted when the scientific literature was scarce, such as policy studies from think tanks, research institutes and non-governmental organizations. The majority of studies assessed in depth were empirical policy analyses by experts in political science and related fields of study, including analyses of the political impact of the SDGs over time; single or comparative case studies of individual SDGs or of specific countries; systematic assessments of expert opinions, for example, through broader surveys or series of systematic interviews; and a few quantitative datasets that assess the political impact of the SDGs.

Drawing on earlier research programmes on international institutions (for example, refs. 5 , 6 ), we searched for three types of effects: discursive, normative and institutional changes. Discursive effects we define as changes in global and national debates that make them more aligned with the SDGs, for example, through explicit references to goals, targets or the general provisions of the 2030 Agenda. We define normative effects as adjustments in legislative and regulatory frameworks and policies in line with, and because of, the SDGs. Institutional effects we define as evidence for the creation of new departments, committees, offices or programmes linked to the achievement of the SDGs or the realignment of existing institutions. The presence of all three types of effects throughout a political system we define as transformative impact, which is the eventual goal of the 2030 Agenda 7 .

The assessment has been organized around five dimensions, which we derived from the core ambitions expressed in the overarching United Nations document, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: the political impact of the SDGs on (1) global governance, (2) domestic political systems, (3) the integration and coherence of institutions and policies, (4) the inclusiveness of governance from local to global levels and (5) the protection of ecological integrity.

We find that the SDGs thus far have had mainly discursive effects but also have led to some isolated normative and institutional reforms. However, effects are often diffuse, and there is little evidence that goal-setting at the global level leads directly to political impacts in national or local politics 8 , 9 , 10 . Overall, our assessment indicates that although there are some limited effects of the SDGs, they are not yet a transformative force in and of themselves.

Here we present in more detail the insights of our assessment related to the political impact of the SDGs since their launch in 2015, organized around the five dimensions identified in the preceding. Note that the few literature references we provide are merely illustrative examples of larger trends in the hundreds of studies that we analysed in depth.

Impact on global governance

First, regarding the global governance system, we find that the political impact of the SDGs has been mostly discursive, for example, through their adoption as a reference point in international policy pronouncements and in a changed discourse within global institutions. While the governance principles that underpin the SDGs—such as universality, coherence, integration and ‘leaving no one behind’—have become part of mainstream discourses in multilateral institutions, actual reforms in the operations of these organizations since 2015 have been modest, and there is no strong evidence that the SDGs have had a transformative impact on the mandates, practices or resource allocation of international organizations and institutions within the United Nations system (for example, refs. 11 , 12 ). The literature thus suggests a mismatch between the formal aspirations of the United Nations to promote the SDGs as central guidelines in global governance and their limited transformative impact.

Moreover, observable changes often reflect longer trajectories in global governance that had started well before the launch of the SDGs. It is difficult to identify in the literature robust change in such long-term trends that can be causally related to the launch of the SDGs in 2015. There is rarely any clear and unidirectional causality that a major reform process has been initiated because of the SDGs.

Studies also suggest that the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development has not lived up to expectations of becoming an effective ‘orchestrator’ 13 in global sustainability governance. This forum, created after the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, is meant to serve as a regular meeting place for governments and non-state representatives to review the implementation of the SDGs and to assess global progress towards sustainable development. There is evidence that the High-Level Political Forum is serving as a platform for voluntary reporting and peer learning among governments. For example, the voluntary national reviews process has helped to disseminate best practices of SDG implementation across countries and actors 14 , and the forum has offered new opportunities for non-state and sub-national actors to become involved in global policy processes (for example, ref. 15 ). Yet there is no robust evidence that such peer learning, reporting and broad participation have steered governments and other actors towards structural and transformative change for sustainable development. The forum has not provided political leadership and effective guidance for achieving the SDGs (for example, ref. 16 ), and it has failed to promote system-wide coherence, largely because of its broad and unclear mandate combined with a lack of resources and divergent national interests (for example, refs. 15 , 17 , 18 ).

Likewise, parallel reforms in the United Nations system for development cooperation have not been transformational, mostly because of governments’ incoherent signals in the governing bodies and funding practices that impede integrated approaches (for example, refs. 19 , 20 , 21 ). As for environmental policy, the United Nations Environment Programme, mandated to catalyse international action and cooperation, has not been able to expand its leadership after the adoption of the SDGs. The fragmented nature of global environmental governance continues to limit institutional change and produces inconsistencies and inefficiencies (for example, refs. 22 , 23 , 24 ).

Impact on domestic politics

The SDGs must eventually be implemented in domestic political contexts through policies and programmes enacted by governments and public agencies with the support and engagement of non-state actors.

We find some evidence that state and non-state actors have started to implement the SDGs at the national and local levels. Many countries have begun to integrate SDGs into their administrative systems, and some governments have designated bodies or formed new units for goal implementation. Yet the performance of national governments varies, and most countries lag behind in implementing the SDGs. Observable institutional change often merely replicates existing priorities, trajectories and government agendas, and governments tend to selectively implement those SDGs that support policies they have already prioritized (for example, refs. 25 , 26 ). For instance, Paraguay’s current 2030 National Development Plan was adopted in 2014, a year before the adoption of the SDGs, and the two processes were never merged 27 .

There is scant evidence that governments have substantially reallocated funding to implement the SDGs, either for national implementation or for international cooperation. The SDGs do not seem to have changed public budgets and financial allocation mechanisms in any important way, except for some local governance contexts (for example, ref. 28 ). The lack of substantial funding could prevent stronger political impact of the SDGs and indicate that the discursive changes that we have identified will not lead to transformative change in terms of policy reform or resource allocation.

Some evidence suggests that sub-national authorities, and especially cities, are often more pioneering and progressive than their central governments in building coalitions for implementing the SDGs 29 . In several national political systems, civil society actors have begun to hold public actors accountable for their commitments to realize the vision of leaving no one behind. In particular, some studies in African countries 30 , 31 highlight the role that civil society organizations play in mobilizing participation and bringing the voices of those on the front lines of poverty, inequality and vulnerability into the implementation and progress review on specific SDGs, such as SDG 15. This growing role of actors beyond national governments suggests an emerging multi-faceted and multi-layered approach to implementing the 2030 Agenda (for example, refs. 28 , 32 , 33 ).

There is also evidence of increased interest and participation from corporate actors in sustainable development through public–private partnerships, even though the effectiveness of such arrangements is uncertain 34 . Some corporate actors, including banks and investors, increasingly engage with and invest in sustainability practices, promote green finance, facilitate large-scale sustainable infrastructure projects or expand their loan portfolios to include environmental and social loans (for example, refs. 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ). Such practices are often discursively linked to the SDGs. Some studies, however, warn of ‘SDG washing’ by corporate actors, selective implementation of SDGs and political risks linked to private investments in the context of continued shortage of public funding. For example, while one study found that 70% of CEOs see the SDGs as a powerful framing to accelerate sustainability-related efforts of their companies, the SDGs could also be used to camouflage business-as-usual by disguising it using SDG-related sustainability rhetoric 39 . Overall, fundamental changes in incentive structures to guide public and private funding towards more sustainable pathways seem to be lacking.

We conclude that the domestic political impact of the SDGs has remained mostly discursive. Governments increasingly refer to the SDGs in policy documents, and 176 countries have presented their voluntary national reviews at the High-level Political Forum (for example, ref. 40 ). Sub-national authorities refer to the SDGs in their communications as well, and many have offered voluntary local reviews of their initiatives. In addition, several corporate actors and civil society organizations use the language of the 2030 Agenda. All these references to the SDGs in the political debate could be seen as a first step towards more far-reaching transformational changes. Yet it is uncertain whether these discursive effects of the SDGs signal the beginning of a deep transformation towards sustainable development or whether their impact will remain mostly discursive until and beyond 2030.

Impact on domestic institutional integration and policy coherence

The 17 SDGs and their 169 targets form a complex mesh of normative aspirations that seek to address all areas of human activity. Some studies suggest that synergies among SDGs can be achieved by designing policies in a holistic way (for example, ref. 41 ). Others argue, however, that inherent trade-offs in the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs are too often neglected in academic research and require more attention (for example, ref. 42 ). Overall, the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs are expected to provide guidance and resolve normative conflicts, institutional fragmentation and policy complexity.

We find that substantial academic work has been devoted to the conceptualization of governance fragmentation, institutional interlinkages and integration. Yet limited empirical research has studied how these concepts play out in national implementation of the SDGs. Several case studies, for example, on Bangladesh, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and small island developing states indicate that synergies and trade-offs in the 2030 Agenda manifest differently across political systems and governmental levels (for example, ref. 43 ). Broader comparative assessments of the impacts of SDG interlinkages on national politics are lacking.

Several governments have taken first steps to align their institutions towards the SDGs. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, have established coordination bodies within central agencies (for example, ref. 44 ), and others, such as Germany, have promoted inter-ministerial exchanges to bring their public-administrative systems in line with the SDGs (for example, ref. 45 ). These attempts, however, differ from country to country, leading to large variations in institutional SDG-inspired integration. For example, the responsibility for the SDGs lies with one or two ministries in some countries and with the head of state or government in others. The impact of either strategy remains uncertain and warrants further investigation.

Overall, governments still fall short of enhancing policy coherence to implement the SDGs, despite modest advances in some countries. Where we see evidence of integrating SDGs into national strategies and action plans, this has not yet led to new or adjusted cross-sectoral policies and programmes that cohere with one another (for example, ref. 46 ). Experts are divided in their expectations as to whether stronger policy coherence for the SDGs will emerge before 2030.

Several studies point to remaining barriers to institutional integration and policy coherence in administrative systems (for example, ref. 47 ). These include cumbersome bureaucracies, lack of political interest, short-term political agendas and waning ownership of the SDGs. Studies agree that breaking down such barriers will take time and require political leadership, continuous efforts by policymakers and pressure by civil society organizations. So far, there are few indications that the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs has helped to greatly reduce such barriers.

Impact on inclusiveness

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs are meant to address inequalities within and among countries and to ensure that no one is left behind. Vulnerable groups and countries are extensively mentioned in the 2030 Agenda and in several SDGs and their targets. In addition, two SDGs are dedicated to the reduction of inequality within and between countries (Goal 10) and the promotion of equality for women and girls (Goal 5). However, evidence suggests a mismatch between rhetoric and action. On the one hand, vulnerable people and countries are often discursively prioritized in the implementation of the SDGs, as evidenced by the broad uptake of the principle of leaving no one behind in pronouncements by policymakers and civil society activists. On the other hand, the normative or institutional effects of such discursive prioritization remain limited.

Within countries, the political impact of the SDGs in reducing inequalities varies considerably and seems to be determined by domestic politics. The literature indicates that the SDGs have not stimulated new forms of normative or institutional steering that promotes inclusiveness. The SDGs have been leveraged, if at all, as an overarching international normative framework to legitimize existing national policies and institutions for the promotion of inclusiveness (for example, refs. 48 , 49 , 50 ). In some cases, we see counterproductive effects when political elites use the SDG discourse to overlay the existing non-inclusive institutional settings or to add legitimacy to entrenched marginalization. For example, a study on Paraguay found that the government cooperates in the framework of SDG implementation mostly with agribusiness companies, while civil society organizations were not offered any avenues for meaningful participation 27 .

Internationally, there is no evidence that the adoption of the SDGs has advanced the position of the world’s most vulnerable countries in global governance and in the global economy. For one, there are hardly any indications that the SDGs have steered global governance structures towards more inclusiveness, especially regarding least developed countries (for example, refs. 51 , 52 ). Studies doubt whether the SDGs will ever be able to transform legal frameworks towards increased political participation of these countries in global governance. In addition, continued lack of compliance with long-standing norms that seek to support the least developed countries, such as special commitments on aid from the Global North, further indicates the limited steering effect of the SDGs on the ability of poorer countries to fully participate in and benefit from the global economy.

There is evidence, however, that emerging economies in the Global South increasingly frame their aid and investment commitments to poorer countries as promoting the SDGs. For example, China has in recent years increased its aid and investments under the Belt and Road Initiative, claiming that this would promote the SDGs 53 . Similarly, the literature suggests that civil society organizations use the SDGs as a reference framework to hold governments to account (for example, ref. 54 ), pointing to advantages of granting larger roles to civil society organizations in shaping and implementing policy initiatives such as the SDGs. This trend might be important to prevent policy backlash against inclusiveness, especially in countries that are less welcoming to civil society influence.

Impact on ecological integrity at the planetary scale

The SDGs pronounce their ambition to resolve the fundamental concerns of both people and the planet and to ensure life-sustaining conditions on Earth. However, there is widespread doubt that the SDGs can steer societies towards more ecological integrity at the planetary scale. There is also little evidence that any normative and institutional change in this direction has materialized because of the SDGs.

Studies on international governance indicate a limited role of the SDGs in facilitating the clustering of international agreements by serving as a set of collective ‘headlines’. While the SDGs seem to have influenced discussions around the climate and biodiversity regimes (for example, ref. 55 ) and have consolidated support for specific concerns and interlinkages, many such changes had been part of these negotiations well before 2015 (for example, refs. 56 , 57 ). At the regional level, the SDGs have fed into policies and programmes of regional governance bodies and steered the creation of new institutions, although even here the political impact of the SDGs towards better environmental protection remains limited (for example, refs. 58 , 59 , 60 ). Within countries, there is also little evidence that the SDGs have strengthened environmental policies (for example, refs. 61 , 62 ). For example, the South African Integrated Resource Plan, which defines the country’s energy mix and was adopted four years after the SDGs, projects that coal power will still account for 59% of South Africa’s electricity supply by 2030, potentially bringing about adverse impacts on other goals related to health, water, climate and life on land.

Many studies concur that the SDGs lack ambition and coherence to foster a transformative and focused push towards ecological integrity at the planetary scale (for example, refs. 63 , 64 , 65 ). There are indications that this lack of ambition and coherence results partially from the design of the SDGs (for example, ref. 66 ), for example, global economic growth as envisaged in SDG 8 (notwithstanding regional development needs) might be incompatible with some environmental protection targets under SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15 (for example, ref. 1 ). Certain studies also argue that the focus of the SDGs on neoliberal sustainable development is detrimental to planetary integrity and justice (for example, ref. 67 ). As a result, experiences from the implementation of the SDGs in domestic, regional and international contexts provide little evidence of political impact towards advancing ecological integrity, as countries in both the Global South and the Global North largely prioritize the more socioeconomic SDGs over the environmentally oriented ones, which is in alignment with their long-standing national development policies (for example, refs. 68 , 69 ). Overall, scholars argue that while the SDGs may help to highlight environmental protection as an important concern, parts of their targets are structurally incompatible with efforts to steer towards a more ambitious programme for ecological integrity at the planetary scale.

The adoption of the 2030 Agenda with its SDGs is often seen as a major accomplishment in global sustainability governance. While many SDGs build on earlier agreements, the full set of 17 SDGs and 169 targets is breathtaking in its ambition, scope and comprehensiveness. And yet, we conclude that the 2030 Agenda and the 17 SDGs have thus far had only a limited political impact on global, national and local governance since their adoption in 2015.

The effects of the SDGs, limited as they are, are also neither linear nor unidirectional. While the 17 SDGs constitute a strong set of normative guidelines, their national and local implementation and dissemination across societal sectors remain political. The SDGs are a non-legally binding and loose script, purposefully designed to provide much leeway for actors to interpret the goals differently and often according to their interests. Hence, many actors seem to use the SDGs for their own purposes by interpreting them in specific ways or by implementing them selectively. This finding challenges the aspiration shared by some scholars and policy experts that the SDGs could underpin the ‘orchestration’ of global sustainability policy, or even global social, environmental and economic policy more generally (for example, ref. 13 ). Rather, the SDGs can be seen as a set of musical scores played by different actors and subject to multiple interpretations. There is little evidence that the United Nations system has been able to serve as a central conductor to ensure that actors cohere around a harmonious melody and unite towards achieving sustainable development worldwide.

Our assessment suggests that more research in this field is urgently needed. Research on the political impact of the SDGs has employed two broad sets of methods so far: those that explore the detailed effects of the SDGs on political, societal and economic actors and their institutions and those that seek to measure whether societies are on track to achieve the SDGs. Both sets of methods are needed for a comprehensive understanding of the political impact of the SDGs, and it is important to build bridges across methodological communities that often work in isolation. In addition, we still lack data on the implementation and impact of the SDGs (see for example, refs. 70 , 71 ), particularly regarding local governance and the least developed countries (for example, ref. 72 ). Comparative in-depth studies of the political impact of the SDGs in local governance are laborious, time consuming and require adequate funding. Yet insights from such field research are of utmost importance to assessing the relevance of the SDGs.

Similarly, studies still tend to focus on a limited number of the 17 SDGs and only some of their interactions. Certain SDGs are under-researched as a result, such as SDGs 10 and 12, and comprehensive integrated studies that cover all 17 SDGs and their interactions are rare. Stronger efforts are needed in particular to understand the interlinkages between SDGs, the steering of the SDGs on national and global inclusiveness and the variation in the effects of the SDGs on different actors and institutions and how this influences overall progress towards sustainable development.

In summary, this assessment of over 3,000 scientific articles, mainly from the social sciences, provides sound evidence that the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs have had some impact from global governance to local politics. While this impact has so far been largely discursive, the SDGs have had some normative and institutional effects as well. The SDGs have fostered mutual learning among governments about sustainable development policies and strategies. In certain contexts, they have offered new instruments for local political and societal actors to organize around, to gain more support from governments or to mobilize international funding. The SDGs have also enabled non-governmental organizations to hold governments accountable and in some cases to counter the interests of powerful actors.

Overall, however, there is only limited evidence of transformative impact. There is little evidence that institutions are substantially realigned, that funding is (re-)allocated for sustainable development, that policies are becoming more stringent or that new and more demanding laws and programmes are being established because of the SDGs. Proposals to strengthen the role of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development—the entity in the United Nations system to regularly review the SDGs—are not supported by all governments (for example, ref. 73 ). Accordingly, the global reporting system on the SDGs remains a weak peer-learning mechanism of governments; it might even lead to uncontested and unwarranted endorsements of national performances if governments and civil society organizations fail to act as watchdogs in policy implementation.

The SDGs are incrementally moving political processes forward, with much variation among countries and sectors and across levels of governance. Yet we are far from the ambition expressed by the United Nations General Assembly of ‘free[ing] the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and heal[ing] and secur[ing] our planet’. More fundamental change is needed for the SDGs to become ‘the bold and transformative steps … to shift the world on to a sustainable and resilient path’ 74 that the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations has promised.

Search protocol

This assessment is based on a meta-analysis of the scientific literature on the political impact of the SDGs. The assessment covers over 3,000 studies, analysed by a team of 61 lead authors and contributing scholars. The studies that we included in this assessment were identified through a keyword search with the reference software Scopus, with search strings as provided in the Supplementary Information (see also the PRISMA diagram added as Supplementary Fig. 1 ).

The contributing authors were divided into five teams, each covering one of the following assessment dimensions: the political impacts of SDGs on global governance, domestic implementation, institutional integration and policy coherence, inclusiveness and ecological integrity at the planetary level. All author teams met virtually to define search terms associated with their assessment dimension. While most reviewed research addresses the implementation of the SDGs since January 2016, we included evidence from the 2012–2015 negotiations of the SDGs as well because the SDGs were already prominent in policy circles at that time. The quantity of literature per dimension varied greatly, which indicates research trends and under-researched issues. See Supplementary Table 1 for a full list of search terms and search strings used to collect data on each assessment dimension.

Screening process and data analysis

The five author teams first analysed the relevance of articles identified in the Scopus search by scanning their titles, keywords and abstracts (or if in doubt, introduction and conclusion) to decide whether to include them in the in-depth assessment. They excluded in this step studies that did not substantially engage with the political impact of the SDGs (for example, studies that addressed SDGs only marginally) as well as purely programmatic, descriptive, conceptual or theoretical studies, even though the teams kept non-empirical studies that convincingly argued for the effects of SDGs.

The remaining studies were analysed in depth by smaller teams. Supplementary Table 1 lists the number of studies reviewed for each assessment dimension. (Note that there are a few double counts, as some sources were relevant for more than one dimension of this assessment. These double counts—which essentially signify that a study has been used for two assessment dimensions—are unlikely to impact the results.) The relative number of articles assessed in depth across assessment dimensions differs because some dimensions (for example, implementation and global governance) have been more extensively researched from a political perspective than others (for example, inclusiveness and planetary integrity). Authors screened and coded the articles according to the possible political impact of the SDGs, drawing on the typology of discursive, normative and institutional effects. They then analysed and interpreted this material. This analysis was guided by specific questions agreed upon in teams responsible for investigating the political impact of the SDGs in the different areas and based on our analytical framework (Supplementary Table 2 ). When literature was very scarce on a specific dimension, the interpretation from the qualitative content research was complemented by findings from grey literature and the authors’ own more recent research and expertise.

Methodological limitations

While this assessment of the literature established common search protocols across author teams and their associated assessment dimension to reduce bias, there are limitations.

First, the approach of a meta-analysis of existing work, covering over 3,000 studies, necessarily required the assessment of studies that were all independently conducted by different authors and at different times, with varied approaches to assessing causality and with no overarching research design. This limits, for example, the assessment of causality for the impacts of SDGs, that is, whether an observed change in alignment with the SDGs is evidence for causation or correlation. We had to rely on the judgement made in each study around whether a causal link has been identified between the launch of the SDGs in 2015 and observed changes. Many studies followed a chronological approach, assuming that any discursive, normative and institutional alignments with the SDGs after 2015 are causally related to the SDGs, which appears to be a plausible assumption.

Second, the study relied on literature research using the Scopus database. We are reproducing, thus, the limitations of Scopus, which does not cover all scientific literature but focuses on journal publications. Scopus covers over 39,000 journals but only 1,628 book series, 514 conference proceedings and no books that are published outside an established series 75 . This biases our research in favour of science communities that rely more on journal publications as opposed to books, including chapters in edited volumes. We have corrected this bias to some extent by adding other sources when the overall literature in a certain field was very scarce.

As a third limitation, despite the growing number of researchers who study the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, we still lack data. This is particularly evident for data on the local level and data on the least developed countries.

Fourth, we have relied mainly on publications and data published in English, which under-reports findings from regions where English is not the common working language.

Fifth, the results may be limited due to the period of the assessment. Scientific studies published in 2020 or 2021 usually report on research conducted several months or even years before, and therefore we do not take the most recent empirical developments into account. For the same reason, the results do not account for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the implementation of the SDGs.

Data availability

The underlying data are scientific articles that are copyrighted and are available with the respective publishers.

Change history

27 june 2022.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00938-0

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Acknowledgements

This Article synthesizes the core findings of the ‘SDG Impact Assessment’, a larger study that involved 61 scholars from all over the world. The complete assessment with author and reference lists and about 100,000 words of analysis will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 ( The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance through Global Goals? , edited by F. Biermann, T. Hickmann and C.A. Sénit). F.B., L.G., T.H. and C.A.S. received funding from the European Research Council for the project GlobalGoals (grant no. 788001, advanced grant F.B.). P.P. received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the BIOCLIMAPATHS project (grant no. 01LS1906A) under Axis-ERANET. D.v.V. received funding from the European Research Council under grant no. 819566 (PICASSO).

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F.B., T.H. and C.A.S. conceptualized the research, led the assessment process and wrote the article. M.B., S.B., P.C., L.G., R.E.K., L.J.K., M.N., A.O.L., C.O., P.P., R.R., Y.S., M.J.V., D.v.V. and B.W. co-led parts of the assessment and contributed to the analysis of data and to the writing of the article.

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Biermann, F., Hickmann, T., Sénit, CA. et al. Scientific evidence on the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals. Nat Sustain 5 , 795–800 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00909-5

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The Articles in the Special Issue: The Politics of Governing Loss and Damage

Agenda for global environmental politics, understanding the politics and governance of climate change loss and damage.

Lisa Vanhala is a professor of political science at University College London. She teaches and researches on global climate governance, climate change litigation, and the intersections of climate change and human rights. Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies , Law & Society Review , Global Environmental Change , and Environmental Politics . She is the principal investigator on a European Research Council Starting Grant Project on the Politics and Governance of Climate Change Loss and Damage (CCLAD, project number 755753.O). She is currently working on a solo-authored monograph entitled Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage focusing on the history of the UN negotiations on loss and damage. She is also co-editing a book with Elisa Calliari entitled Governing Climate Change Loss and Damage: The National Turn .

Elisa Calliari is a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna. Her research focuses on the politics and governance of climate change loss and damage at different scales, from climate change negotiations to national policy-making processes. She is also interested in studying how planned relocation can be employed as an anticipatory and strategic form of climate change adaptation in Europe. Calliari is currently a member of the Italian delegation at the UNFCCC, providing technical support on loss and damage to the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security.

Adelle Thomas is a senior fellow at the Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Research Centre at University of The Bahamas, and Senior Scientist and Loss and Damage Lead at Climate Analytics. Her areas of research focus on adaptation, limits to adaptation and loss and damage in the developing world context, with a particular focus on small island developing states. A human-environment geographer, Adelle has over sixteen years of practice in intersections between climate action and development.

Corresponding author: [email protected]

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Lisa Vanhala , Elisa Calliari , Adelle Thomas; Understanding the Politics and Governance of Climate Change Loss and Damage. Global Environmental Politics 2023; 23 (3): 1–11. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_e_00735

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This introduction to the 2023 special issue of Global Environment Politics brings questions related to politics and political processes to the forefront in the study of climate change loss and damage. The aim of avoiding the detrimental impacts of climate change has been at the heart of the international response to global climate change for more than thirty years. Yet the development of global governance responses to climate change loss and damage—those impacts that we cannot, do not or choose not to prevent or adapt to—has only over the last decade become a central theme within the discussions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Loss and damage has also become a research topic of growing importance within an array of disciplines, from international law to the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences. However, the engagement of scholars working in the fields of political science and international relations has been more limited so far. This is surprising because questions about how to best respond to loss and damage are fundamentally political, as they derive from deliberative processes, invoke value judgments, imply contestation, demand the development of policies, and result in distributional outcomes. In this introduction we describe the context and contributions of the research articles in the special issue. By drawing on a wide range of perspectives from across the social sciences, the articles render visible the multifaceted politics of climate change loss and damage and help to account for the trajectory of governance processes.

For decades, the scientific community has warned of the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels, increasingly frequent and intense storms, and the degradation of land, water, and ecosystems. Yet, it is only very recently that governance arrangements have begun to be developed to explicitly respond to those climate impacts that we may not be able (or choose not) to adapt to. While policy efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts have been at the heart of climate governance efforts for decades, climate change loss and damage has only recently emerged as “a third pillar” of climate governance. Recent developments within the UNFCCC underscore the timeliness of this special issue. This collection of articles is published during a critical juncture in the development of governance arrangements within the climate change regime and broader governance landscape that will influence the way that loss and damage is understood and responded to in the near future. These discussions are likely to shape institutions and policies that will establish path dependencies, build new constituencies, and ultimately influence the trajectory of people’s lives as they cope with the wide variety of losses associated with climate change. We suggest that scientific understanding and evidence are much needed, and the articles published here stand to help inform policy approaches—both those that are being rapidly developed now and others that will emerge in the future. This introduction briefly surveys historic and recent developments, highlights the key contributions of this collection of articles, and articulates an agenda for future research.

The concept of loss and damage was introduced in the early 1990s by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the UNFCCC and has gradually become institutionalized at the international level (Roberts and Huq 2015 ; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016 ). While an official definition has never been agreed in the climate regime, current scholarly understandings emphasize the unavoidability and irreversibility of certain climate change impacts and the role played by constraints and limits to adaptation as drivers of adverse outcomes (Mechler et al. 2020 ). 1 The latter can include both monetizable impacts and “non-economic losses” (NELs), such as loss of biodiversity, territory, cultural heritage, and climate-induced human mobility (Serdeczny et al. 2018 ). In recent years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has increasingly included assessments of “losses and damages” in its reports—understood as harmful impacts or risks that can result from climate change-related slow onset hazards and extreme weather events (IPCC 2022b ).

Within the international climate change negotiations, discussions on loss and damage have progressed far more slowly than on mitigation and adaptation, with differing views among countries about what loss and damage encompasses, the best approaches to respond to it, and appropriate sources and levels of finance to address it (Calliari et al. 2020 ; Johansson et al. 2022 ). The contentious nature of the negotiations has led to loss and damage being repeatedly referred to as a highly political topic, even as impacts of climate change are already being documented around the world (IPCC 2022a ). However, recent milestones in the UNFCCC have highlighted the urgency of the need for technical and practical understandings of what constitutes loss and damage and related responses, as distinct from adaptation. The decision at COP27 to establish new funding arrangements, including a fund to respond to loss and damage, has brought the issue to the attention of a much broader set of actors, including multilateral banks, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, the private sector, and a wide range of UN bodies, and has highlighted existing gaps in policy approaches to address loss and damage (Naylor and Ford 2023 ). All of this suggests a pressing need for a deeper conceptual understanding of and empirical evidence about climate change loss and damage.

Existing social science research highlights the myriad ways in which the problem of loss and damage—and appropriate governance arrangements—are articulated (McNamara and Jackson 2019 ). While a variety of disciplines have developed bodies of literature on topics related to loss and damage (e.g., disaster studies, impact modeling), studies specifically focused on climate change loss and damage emerged around 2010, with a significant increase in research after 2013 (McNamara and Jackson 2019 ). Early work tended to focus on different conceptualizations of loss and damage, finding varying interpretations and definitions, influenced in part by disciplinary backgrounds. Scholars in law (e.g., Adelman 2016 ; Broberg and Romera 2021 ; Burkett 2016 ; Toussaint 2021 ), geography (e.g., Barnett et al. 2016 ; Hepach and Hartz 2023 ; Tschakert et al. 2019 ; Warner and van der Geest 2013 ), anthropology (e.g., Oliver-Smith 2013 ; O’Reilly et al. 2020 ), economics (e.g., Fanning and Hickel 2023 ; Markandya and González-Eguino 2019 ) and in the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences (e.g., Boyd et al. 2017 ; Boyd et al. 2021 ; James et al. 2014 ; Mechler et al. 2019 ; Mechler et al. 2020 ) have begun to turn their attention to the phenomenon of loss and damage and related responses. By contrast, scholars working in the fields of political science and international relations have only recently (with a few exceptions such as Calliari 2016 ; Calliari et al. 2020 ; Page and Heyward 2017 ; Vanhala and Calliari 2022 ; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016 ; Wapner 2014 ) begun to engage with this novel area of climate research. Yet, the contribution those working with the theoretical approaches and methodological tools of the discipline can make is critical: questions about how best to address climate change loss and damage are fundamentally political, as they derive from processes of deliberation and imply distributional outcomes. Moreover, Javeline ( 2014 ) and Eriksen et al. ( 2015 ) had already noted that climate change adaptation—far from being a neutral, technical, and managerial process—is based on contestation of what counts as “adaptive” for different groups and implies differentiated outcomes in terms of vulnerability and the capacity to adapt. We suggest that these considerations are equally applicable in the loss and damage realm. Following Tschakert et al. ( 2019 ), we note that what counts as “loss” in different places and over time is highly contextual and will be grappled with (or not) through local, national, regional, and international political processes.

We have two objectives for this special issue. First, by recognizing the highly interdisciplinary essence of loss and damage research, we seek to promote dialogue, cross-fertilization, and the building of bridges across social science disciplines concerned with politics and governance. Second, we seek to inform a policy landscape that was slow-moving for many years but has begun to shift rapidly. Political actors and practitioners from the international to the local level are quickly having to get to grips with the conceptual debate, policy discussions, and empirical evidence on a topic that is both a threatening material reality and a product of sociopolitical processes.

In terms of scope, the special issue investigates how loss and damage as a “governance object” (Allan 2017 ) has been shaped by contentious negotiations within the UNFCCC (Calliari 2016 ; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016 ) and has been then enacted (or not) by a range of actors across different levels and governance sites. A growing number of actors are engaging with the implications of loss and damage governance, including a range of nonstate actors from international organization secretariats to civil society groups to scientists working within and beyond the IPCC. At the national level, a wide variety of institutions, from environment ministries to disaster risk management departments to courts, have been invoked in loss and damage governance efforts but represent significantly different paradigms for action. Against this background, much of the existing scholarship still situates loss and damage at the scale of UNFCCC negotiations and focuses predominantly on states.

We broaden this perspective by posing the following overarching questions: 1. What kinds of knowledge and ideas do stakeholders draw upon when constructing, reproducing, or contesting loss and damage as a governance object? With what consequences? 2. How do different stakeholders engage with loss and damage at different scales (international, national, local) and across sites of governance (e.g., in international negotiations, across epistemic communities, and within national institutions)? 3. How does this engagement affect the ways in which the idea of climate change loss and damage are conceptualized and institutionalized at the international and national levels?

The articles cover a breadth of social science approaches: international relations, comparative politics, science and technology studies, and political theory. The articles themselves are underpinned by a shared interest in questions of power and justice.

A first group of articles explores the relationship between loss and damage politics, on the one hand, and science, knowledge, and evidence on the other. Serdeczny relies on a process tracing approach to show how developing country negotiators used knowledge produced within the UNFCCC process (e.g., technical papers) and beyond (e.g., NGOs reports) in a political way to further their interests in loss and damage negotiations from 2003 to 2013. While the role of knowledge is usually conceptualized as helping to justify or rationalize previously taken positions, Serdeczny finds that it can make a difference in policy outcomes. She portrays knowledge as having both an institutional effect, whereby it was used to establish loss and damage as a theme under the UNFCCC, and an individual effect, providing actors with a sense of clarity and legitimacy that strengthened their resolve in defending political positions. The article by Hartz focuses instead on the way the IPCC has engaged with the politically charged concept of loss and damage over time. The IPCC plays a key role in the climate change governance landscape, as it provides “certified” scientific and policy-oriented knowledge” to stimulate and legitimize climate policies (van der Sluijs et al. 2010 ). Hartz traces the representation of loss and damage across IPCC assessment reports and accounts for the inclusion of the term “losses and damages” in the Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs) of the Working Group II and III of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. By focusing on the implications of orthographic choices (“Loss and Damage”, “loss and damage”, “losses and damages”) in the science–policy discourse, she shows how different ways of spelling out the concept are appraised differently by individuals, depending on their context and position in the loss and damage space. For those more closely involved with the political sphere, the wording of “losses and damages” is considered yet another way to impede the development of global governance in this area, but for those engaged with the topic at scientific-technical and practical levels the inclusion of loss and damage terminology in IPCC SPMs is perceived as an important next step in the institutionalization of the topic.

A second group of articles draws attention to the important role of ideas and meaning-making processes in the politics of loss and damage governance. While the ideas of liability and compensation are often associated with loss and damage, Wallimann-Helmer argues that, from an ethical perspective they can be de-coupled in the governance of loss and damage. He calls for a new way of thinking about these concepts by taking climate resilience as a point of departure. By shifting from a backward-looking to a forward-looking conceptualization, he proposes a reframing of responsibility within the sphere of loss and damage governance.

The article by Calliari and Ryder changes scale, focusing on the country level to understand how national policy actors make sense of and translate the (ill-defined) global agenda on loss and damage to the national level. They analyse how loss and damage is framed within countries' archived and updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and outline countries’ different understandings of what the problem of loss and damage entails and possible solutions. The authors find that countries are not simply adopting the framing of loss and damage elaborated by the UNFCCC but are instead actively shaping the concept by advancing certain understandings that are consistent with the challenges experienced in their national context. Calliari and Ryder outline an emergent two-level ideational game, whereby countries attempt to shape the global agenda by advancing certain framings of the loss and damage problem and solution space.

Finally, the article by Falzon et al. develops a typology of obstructionist tactics that countries have used to delay action on loss and damage over the last thirty years. Drawing on and contributing to international relations theories, they center their analysis on the practices of power and how it is used to shape legal and political understandings of loss and damage. The authors show how the use of these tactics has limited what the concept of loss and damage encapsulates (at least within the global governance regime) and the effect this has on potential policy solutions and legal outcomes.

The collection of articles in the special issue offer insights in three ways. First, they advance our empirical understanding by building on earlier research and highlighting the importance of varying, overlapping, and often competing discourses and conceptualizations of loss and damage (Calliari 2016 ; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016 ; Vanhala 2023 ). The articles in this issue of GEP unpack these discourses within different settings, from the UNFCCC negotiations (Falzon et al., Serdeczny, Walliman-Helmer) to the IPCC (Hartz) to national level articulations of the problem (Calliari and Ryder). Going beyond just an analysis or description of these novel conceptualizations and existing discourses, these articles together highlight their many impacts from the institutional to the individual level and from the legal to the cognitive and emotional realms. Second, the research presented here sheds new light on the role of knowledge (as well as a lack thereof, see Vanhala et al. 2021 ) in explaining outcomes in the study of the global governance of loss and damage. For example, Hartz’s work draws on insights from science and technology studies and international relations to offer a nuanced understanding of the use and relevance of language and spelling more specifically as a way of reaching consensus at the interface of climate science and policy. Serdeczny highlights the multiple pathways through which knowledge about losses and damages shapes personal engagement, political behavior, and legal outcomes within climate change negotiations. Third, these articles contribute to broader theoretical debates within the study of global environmental politics. For instance, Falzon et al.’s typology of methods of obstruction can help us understand the full range of negotiation tactics that are deployed in the climate change regime but also in global governance more generally. Calliari and Ryder draw on the idea of a two-level ideational game to analyze developments bridging the national and international level, and Hartz shows how seemingly mundane matters, such as spelling, can shape world views. Together these articles contribute to constructivist theorizing of the modes and methods for constituting objects of global governance.

This special issue marks an important step forward in our understanding of the politics and governance of climate change loss and damage. However, we argue that there remains a pressing need for further research and for all the tools of the social sciences to be brought to bear on questions related to climate change loss. We identify three promising avenues of research here.

First, the relationship between loss and damage and adaptation is an ongoing area of research with particular relevance for policy approaches and with potential financial implications over time. In the discussions to establish the new loss and damage fund there are challenges in trying to distinguish between approaches. Planned relocation or permanent migration as a response to climate change exemplifies the challenges of sharply differentiating adaptation from loss and damage, as these approaches have been posited as viable adaptation options or as examples of grievous loss and damage by different research communities (McNamara et al. 2018 ). Other conceptually distinct but practically and empirically murky dichotomies include the differentiation between loss and damage; the distinction between noneconomic and economic losses, and the categories of impacts resulting from extreme weather and slow-onset events.

Second, while much of the early research on loss and damage focused on the local level (Warner and van der Geest 2013 ), the overwhelming focus of the literature on the politics, governance, and law of loss and damage has been on discussions within the UNFCCC. More recently, Calliari and Vanhala ( 2022 ) have argued for a “national turn” in the study of loss and damage governance. Both the existing gaps in knowledge about how national policymakers are conceptualizing and managing the issues under the heading of “loss and damage”, as well as political developments (including the operationalization of the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage, which will offer technical support to countries) demand a broader and deeper evidence base regarding the types, effectiveness, and legitimacy of policies, activities, and interventions that are already in place. Governance and politics at other scales of governance, including within states and in supra-state regional bodies, also merit attention as critically important in managing losses and damages.

Finally, this special issue seeks to stimulate political scientists’ and international relations scholars’ engagement with loss and damage, and to highlight the vital insights that scholars from across subdisciplinary fields (e.g., political theory, comparative politics, political economy, international relations) can bring to the table. A range of theoretical approaches, methodologies, and underlying epistemological commitments from within and beyond political science can help shed light on the problem and policy solutions of climate change loss and damage.

We note that scholars use different spellings and capitalizations for the term loss and damage, with some preferring to use capital letters (“Loss and Damage”) to signify the political discussions within the UNFCCC and beyond. We do not follow that convention here and authors in the special issue vary in their practices. See the article by Hartz (this issue) for more on the significance of orthographic choices.

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1 Introducing Environmental Political Theory

Teena Gabrielson is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Wyoming.

Cheryl Hall is Associate Professor of Political Theory, University of South Florida.

John M. Meyer is Professor of Politics and Environmental Studies, Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics, University of Sydney.

• Published: 07 March 2016
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This introductory chapter offers an overview of the context, content, and history of environmental political theory (EPT) as a field of study within political science. It starts by differentiating EPT from both the subfield of political theory and other areas of sustainability and environmental studies, with its focus on the political nature of human/non-human relations. EPT’s development over the last twenty years is discussed, in terms of both substantive foci and maturation as a field. The chapter then turns to an overview of the structure and chapters of the Handbook, including chapters on EPT as a field of inquiry, the rethinking of nature and political subjects, the goals and ideals of EPT, various obstacles faced by environmental change, and the role of activism in environmental politics and thought.

What Is Environmental Political Theory?

What is “environmental political theory?” No doubt many readers begin this handbook reasonably confident that they have a sense of what the field addresses or entails. Yet for many others the contours of the field are likely quite opaque. In both cases, we are confident that the essays collected here will challenge and intrigue readers with their diverse subject matter, their fresh approaches to complex challenges related to the environment and sustainability, their insightful analyses, and their effective modeling of engaged and problem-centered political theorizing. Nonetheless, the question remains: what is environmental political theory (EPT)? We begin by sketching a preliminary answer, with the understanding that many of these points are developed more fully later in this introduction. Of course, the more adequate answer only unfolds throughout the handbook in its entirety.

As we and many contributors to this volume understand it, EPT is a broad field of inquiry in which some of the tools and techniques honed by political theorists—conceptual critique; normative analysis of structures of power; close reading of texts; nuanced and multifaceted understandings of political values including democracy, justice, and freedom; and eclectic methodologies drawing upon diverse disciplines—are utilized to develop insight into contemporary environmental challenges. EPT, then, is best understood as a broad field of inquiry rather than a rigid ideological position or a partisan allegiance to a particular political agenda. It is, however, characterized by the conviction that massive, often global concerns regarding climate change, species extinction, toxic pollution, and many others pose a broad and deep challenge to both political thinking and political communities, today and in the future.

At least since Aristotle, political theorists have paid normative and critical attention to the role that the non-human world plays in political community and political change (see the chapters in this handbook by Harlan Wilson and Peter Cannavò). Yet such attention has often remained at the periphery of their theories. Moreover, while some political theorists have attended to the human relationship with nature or the non-human, this relationship has by no means been consistently valued. EPT moves it to the center of its inquiry. Beyond this, it seems clear that although EPT theorists differ in their normative assessments, they are motivated not only to theorize about the human relationship to nature but also to theorize about ways to reverse, mitigate, and/or adapt to ecological threats and devastation.

Alongside its normative and critical attention to the non-human, environmental political theory also attends to structures of power within the human world. In this sense, EPT doesn’t simply ask what we should do to address human impacts on the non-human world. Such a question can posit an abstract “view from nowhere,” and, in neglecting to address explicitly how normative prescriptions can be adopted and implemented in society, can be read as presupposing that such prescriptions will be imposed by some sort of philosopher-king . . . or perhaps scientist-king. Work in EPT is often self-conscious in challenging this sort of presupposition. It explores how normative prescriptions become refracted through systems of power and privilege in political decision-making and in society (see, for example, Tim Luke’s chapter). Along these lines, EPT also often poses questions about the implications of the arguments and rhetoric advanced by activists and policymakers involved on all sides of contemporary political discourse about environmental concerns.

EPT follows the work of many other political theorists in attending to the nature and meaning of long-central—and contested—political concepts, including justice, democracy, and freedom (see, for example, the chapters by Steve Vanderheiden, Elisabeth Ellis, and Jason Lambacher, respectively). These concepts permeate political discourse surrounding environmental concerns, yet their meaning is often left curiously unexamined. Examining them now is especially crucial given that many of these political concepts were developed in very different environmental contexts. How, for example, might a conception of democracy be altered by the realization of the value of the non-human realm, or the qualities of individual non-human entities? Moreover, new terms and concepts, including the Anthropocene, biodiversity, and—perhaps most visibly and influentially—sustainability, have come to play an important role in relation to environmental concerns. These concepts, too, have become subject matter for inquiry in EPT (and are addressed, for example, in the chapters by Giovanna Di Chiro, David Schlosberg, and Ingolfur Blühdorn).

EPT can be described directly, but another way to appreciate its contours is to notice that which it seems positioned against. In all their diversity, environmental political theorists nonetheless share a critique of those who—explicitly or implicitly—view environmental challenges as something that can be contained in the box of a particular “issue area” for government policy and civil society action. And against the longstanding practice of political theorizing narrowly focused upon a rational, liberal, individual human, the field is also premised on the recognition that political action exists within an ecological context, and often articulates the need to recognize non-human as well as human agency (as, for instance, can be seen in the chapters by Rafi Youatt, Justin Williams, and Lisa Disch).

Finally, while it seems wholly compatible with the pursuit of EPT to make use of scientific work to identify, document, model, and predict the character of major challenges such as climate change, species extinction, and other manifestations of ecological devastation, EPT is positioned against the temptation to move beyond science to scientism. That is, it rejects the notion that scientists should not only provide empirical understanding but normative authority as well. In response to this move, EPT raises a red flag, drawing attention to the processes of interpretation, contestation, and value-based judgment that necessarily mediate between scientific insight and political authority. In other words, EPT sees science and scientists as necessary but not sufficient in the effort to address environmental challenges. As Mark B. Brown’s chapter in this handbook demonstrates, the precise character of the contribution by scientists (and science) makes all the difference.

The Emergence of Environmental Political Theory

As the discussion up to this point illustrates, to understand what EPT is, it is most important to understand its substantive interests and orientations. Yet one can also gain insight into both the contours and limitations of this field of inquiry by noticing its institutional and disciplinary locations. While work that might be labeled “environmental political theory” has been authored by scholars in philosophy, history, environmental studies, and other disciplines—as well as by authors from outside the academy—the field as such emerged in the 1980s and 1990s largely from the work of political theorists who were located within the discipline of political science. For those outside of this disciplinary location, a bit of explanation may be in order. For better or (and?) for worse, since at least the 1960s, political theory has been located in the discipline of political science, but has not been positioned as exactly part of this discipline. In part, this is a reflection of the tension between political theory’s normative approach and the largely empirical approach of the rest of the discipline. More particularly, it reflects political theory’s resistance to influential strands of the discipline that are committed to a positivist methodology. In an earlier generation this narrow methodological focus was manifest in a commitment to behaviorism; more recently this commitment has been superseded by the influence of rational choice theorizing (for further analysis of political theory’s relationship to political science, see the chapter by Kimberly Smith).

Regardless of the explanation, one consequence of the rather loose connection between political theory and political science has been a notable degree of freedom for political theorists. Michael Walzer has referred to this freedom as a political theory “license” that has allowed practitioners to transgress usual disciplinary boundaries and schools of thought ( Walzer 2013 ). In the field of political theory in general, transgression has often meant drawing upon work and influences from other fields, including philosophy, intellectual history, and cultural studies. Yet EPT presses the interdisciplinary borrowings far more widely, drawing from ecological science, science and technology studies, geographic thought, environmental history, and many other fields that can inform our understanding of the relationship of humans to non-human and more-than-human phenomena.

EPT shares other conventions with contemporary political theory besides transgression. Holding relatively loose obligations to the discipline of political science, political theorists have often treated the history of Western political thought as a resource for critical engagement; theorists have been regarded as sources that might illuminate contemporary political dilemmas, offer critical distance on contemporary political conceptions, and provide context for understanding some of the silences and blind-spots in contemporary social and political discourse. Of course critical engagement with this tradition is quite distinct from normative embrace of it. Many environmental political theorists share the sense that contemporary dilemmas might be better understood by working through the ideas of long-dead Western thinkers, a sense that often distinguishes them from environmental writers emerging from other locations in or out of the academy. But EPT has also become much more than a reinterpretation of past thinkers.

The foundations for EPT as a self-aware field were laid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the publication of works including John Dryzek’s Rational Ecology , Robyn Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory , Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature , and Andrew Dobson’s Green Political Thought ( Dryzek 1987 ; Dobson 1990 ; Eckersley 1992 ; Plumwood 1993 ). Of course, these works did not appear out of the blue. They emerged from an interest in making political theory relevant to a key and growing set of political concerns made evident by decades of fervent and diverse forms of environmental activism. This activism included the obvious efforts to protect wild places, endangered species, and habitats. But it also included movements against nuclear energy and for demilitarization, for more appropriate development paths in non-industrialized societies, for ecological restoration, for public health, and (by the 1990s) for environmental justice, among others.

EPT also emerged in the shadow of the institutionalization of new environmental policies in many industrialized societies during the 1970s. Both the promise and the performance of these institutions could thus be evaluated in the years that followed, and many people concluded that earlier hopes had proven hollow or gone unrealized. A variety of critics—both inside and outside the academy—began to develop bodies of explicitly normative environmental thought, including environmental ethics, eco-feminism, and so-called deep ecology. Strikingly, relatively few of the early works in these literatures focused on the significance of political structures and ideas. Among the exceptions were William Ophuls’ Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity and Murray Bookchin’s Ecology and Freedom , each of which was critically engaged by the environmental political theorists who followed ( Ophuls 1977 ; Bookchin 1982 ).

It seems fair to say that, as it has emerged since these earlier decades, EPT as a specific field has been largely an Anglo-American academic dialogue. More precisely, it has been writers in and from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States who have been most visible in the construction of the field, though thinkers from continental Europe have also made important contributions. To be clear, though, this description of the field of EPT only refers to the primary centers of self-identified scholarship and teaching activity. Many of those involved draw upon the work and ideas of other scholars, intellectuals, and activists from the Global South and other parts of the world, though the latter do not—at least at present—usually characterize their work as EPT per se.

Having attempted to define and situate EPT in this introduction, we hasten to add that the field remains inchoate and its boundaries porous (for more developed accounts of EPT’s emergence and contours, see Meyer 2006 and Luke 2015 ). By no means would everyone whom we have identified as an environmental political theorist—including some contributors to this volume—self-consciously adopt the label for themselves.

Labeling the Field

Finally, no attempt to answer the question “what is environmental political theory?” can end without some consideration of the very name of the field (and hence the title of this volume!). A number of different labels have been—or might be—applied: among others, “green political thought,” “political ecology,” and “political theory of sustainability.” As editors of this handbook, we considered all of the above and more as potential titles. Yet in the end, despite the fact that EPT is far from a perfect name, no other title seemed to have the sort of broad acceptance necessary to supplant it.

“Green” political thought (or theory), widely used especially throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, is perhaps the most obvious alternative. Some have argued that “green” is a broader label than “environmental”: specifically, that it more effectively flags the field’s expansive interest in the intersection of environmental concerns with those of social justice, nonviolence, and the valuation of the non-human world for more than instrumental purposes. By contrast, according to this argument, “environmental” political theory appears to connote the mere application of already formed political theories to the “issue” of “the environment.” While this argument raises important criticisms, and a number of theorists have continued to use this moniker as a result, other theorists worry that the “green” label is too readily identified with green political parties, and that work in the field will thus be construed as necessarily aligned with these parties or their ideology. A more inclusive or less partisan label seems needed.

“Political ecology” might serve the purpose. The term “ecology” has the advantage of connoting a more holistic and interconnected system, whereas “environment” often just connotes our “surroundings.” Adding the adjective “political” to “ecology” could draw many elements of the field together. Yet there is an academic reason to shy away from this name, as it is already widely identified with the established work of a generation of scholars in anthropology, geography, and related fields, whose work often focuses upon the commons, resource use, and management issues, especially in rural communities. While work by these political ecologists has often greatly influenced that of environmental political theorists, it is in no way identical to it.

As with “green” and “ecology,” the term “sustainability” is also understood by many as a more encompassing term than “environmental.” Sustainability is often said to be premised on a foundational interconnection of three elements: the “3 Es” of ecology, economy, and equity. Thus, sustainability might be used to describe political theory in this area. The reality, however, is that relatively few have done so. In this handbook, we examine sustainability as a singular concept within a broader field of potential issues, interactions, and actors in the environmental space.

Our ambivalent conclusion, then, is that, despite its inelegance, “environmental political theory” is currently both the most recognizable, distinctive descriptor of this field and the least inadequate one. It is for these practical reasons more than any more principled ones that we have adopted it in the title, and throughout the contents, of this handbook.

The Vision for the Volume

As EPT has developed as a field of inquiry, so too have its practitioners developed as an academic community. Those interested in the intersection of political theory and the topic of environment aimed to differentiate their subject from both traditional foci within the field of political theory and the standard understanding of environmental politics as solely concerned with environmental policy . As is the case with many new cross-field efforts, this differentiation was initially difficult in the everyday life of political science conferences. While the main conferences of political scientists were not particularly receptive places for environmental theory (something that has begun to change in recent years), the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association (WPSA) in the United States, with its reputation for excellent panels and participants in both political theory and environmental politics, became a place where those interested in the intersection came together. The “Environmental Politics and Policy” section, with its growing panels in science and technology policy and theory, environmental movements, and, importantly, “New Books in Environmental Politics,” became a place for EPT and engagement with key books and authors. The WPSA has been supportive of the development of communities, as demonstrated by the various groups it has encouraged to host annual pre-conference workshops, including on feminist political theory and Latino/a politics. With this support, the EPT community grew. It began to host its own workshop in 2002, at times including over 60 scholars ranging from senior faculty to new Ph.D. students. And in 2004, EPT gained its own section in the Association’s annual conference; the section currently averages approximately 14 panels with some 50 papers presented each year.

When the idea of a handbook on EPT first came up in 2012, the possibility was presented to the attendees at the WPSA pre-conference workshop in Portland, Oregon, who discussed it as a group. The goal of the discussion was to collectively develop general categories and specific topics to cover, a basic structure for the endeavor, and a list of potential contributors and editors. Over 50 people participated in a lively conversation about the field and its representation, leading to an initial list of 60 potential topics to address. Looking back on that crowd-sourced listing of ideas, we are pleased to note that the current collection covers all but seven of those suggestions. This process of engagement with the EPT community allowed for a broader conception of the field than any small set of editors could provide, generating suggestions for chapters and topics broadly intersecting with both other political science subfields and environmental subfields of related disciplines, including sociology, geography, economics, women’s studies, and philosophy. At the conclusion of this discussion, the current team volunteered to serve as editors of the handbook.

Our primary goals in constructing this Handbook of Environmental Political Theory have been to respect past work in the field, represent the broad landscape of present concerns and scholarship, and point to new directions. Wherever possible, we have sought to be forward looking, engaging a variety of ideas about where the field may go in the coming years and even decades. Our task, as we see it, has not just been to identify foundational ideas and arguments in the field, but also to press outward to highlight key new ontologies, directions, foci, movements, pedagogies, and more.

We commissioned a number of chapters that illustrate these new directions, and explore areas not yet familiar to some—perhaps even many—who are familiar with the field of EPT. EPT has always been an inclusive endeavor, open to a wide range of approaches to the intersection of politics, theory, and the environment in which we are immersed. In this light, we have included a number of chapters from authors in disciplines other than political science whose work is nevertheless crucial to this mission; this includes philosophers such as Steven Vogel, Kyle Whyte, Paul Knights, and John O’Neill, and political economists such as Joan Martinez-Alier. We have also included many from political science who do not necessarily self-identify as environmental political theorists, though it is our conviction that their interests fit squarely within this field of inquiry; this includes Mark Beeson, Diana Coole, and Matthew Paterson. Overall, we believe the current collection represents how far the field has come, illustrates its broad base of material and appeal, and offers some sparks for new conversations—and, hopefully, some controversy.

Given the broad conceptual base of EPT, and as is evident in our wider than usual casting of the net for authors in a handbook of this type, we aim to appeal to an expansive readership. Clearly, one key audience is the range of existing scholars in the self-identified EPT community. Another key audience is students—both undergraduate and graduate—interested in learning about and potentially joining this engaged (and inviting) field. But we also hope to appeal to the growing number of political theorists and political scientists reflecting on the questions at the heart of our endeavor, perhaps as a result of frustration with the limits of attention to the non-human world in their own fields. And we aim to bring EPT to a range of environmental thinkers in other disciplines, and interdisciplinary fields such as environmental studies, who wish to explore a broader interdisciplinary conversation on the political change necessary to address the vast environmental challenges we face today.

The Organization of the Volume

Environmental political theory as a field of inquiry.

While we understand the field of inquiry of EPT to be shaped by lively engagement with a broad and interdisciplinary array of scholarly work, we begin with a section that acknowledges EPT’s indebtedness to and deep roots in the field of political theory. With chapters dedicated to the traditions of liberalism, republicanism, and critical theory (by Piers Stephens, Peter Cannavò, and Andrew Biro, respectively), this section both explores Western political thought as a rich resource for environmental political theorists and probes its limits for understanding, unpacking, and explaining a host of current political problems related to nature, non-humans, and the environment. As Harlan Wilson explains in his opening chapter, through close readings of Western thinkers, environmental political theorists have both appropriated and critiqued the approaches, concepts, and logics of past political theorists so as to explicate the politics that have contributed to our current ecological crises and to imagine more just and sustainable alternatives. Complementing these chapters, Farah Godrej’s essay examines the potential of non-Western approaches for conceptualizing environmental issues. As a whole, the essays in this first section engage the past as a source for contemporary theorizing and revitalize our understandings of influential texts by considering how they respond to new orientations and concerns. Initiating a conversation that is sustained over the entire volume, they reflect on how we might best bring our normative commitments and critical theorizing to bear on contemporary material practices that, in many instances, threaten the future of humans and non-humans alike. The next set of essays turns to EPT’s place in the academy in order to distinguish EPT from adjacent fields such as political science and environmental ethics and to convey its unique contribution to emerging disciplines such as sustainability and environmental studies. Focusing on the student, these essays pull the reader into the classroom by detailing the role of experiential learning, action research, and practically engaged political theory in the pedagogy of many EPT courses (chapters by Romand Coles, and Seaton Tarrant and Leslie Thiele).

Rethinking Nature and Political Subjects

The chapters in this section address two fundamental questions: “What is the environment?” and “Who or what is included in the political community?” These chapters are positioned less directly with respect to the historical texts of political theory; instead, they engage more closely with a Euro-American lineage of environmental thinkers that includes conservationists, preservationists, social constructionists, and, most recently, new materialists. Essays under the subheading “Nature, Environment, and the Political” each draw out the implications of different conceptualizations of the environment for our ability to address large-scale socio-political-ecological problems such as global climate change, environmental management, and human–non-human relations. From Steven Vogel’s identification of the processes that tend to reify the built environment to Samantha Frost’s discussion of the challenges that posthumanism presents to the human/environment dualism, this section offers insights for how we might think more productively about environment. The next set of chapters, gathered under the subheading “Environment, Community, and Boundaries,” investigates questions of inclusion and exclusion as they inform our understandings of key political concepts such as sovereignty, power, justice, and obligation. The reach of these chapters is broad, including well-established topics such as cosmopolitanism in Simon Caney’s essay as well as much more recent areas of inquiry such as the sensory powers of plants in Catriona Sandilands’ essay. As a whole, the section demonstrates EPT’s interdisciplinary character through chapters that engage with scholarship in geography, philosophy, animal studies, feminist theory, science and technology studies, and postcolonialism. The section is populated by plants, buildings, humans, animals, nation-states, networks, global processes, and habitats . . . all toward the end of better understanding how already existing interspecies relations, biopolitics, and conceptions of the environment and political community inform our ability to address environmental challenges in the age of what some have come to call “the Anthropocene.”

Ends, Goals, Ideals

From the more phenomenologically minded section focused on who and what is explored in EPT, in this section we turn to the question of why . What values motivate both environmentalists and EPT scholarship? Echoing the concerns of many other political theorists, authors in this section illuminate core political ideals including justice (Giovanna Di Chiro), responsibility (Robyn Eckersley), and rights (Kerri Woods). But several of the chapters in this section also demonstrate EPT’s engagement with values inspired by environmental movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including sustainability and environmental justice, or reorient political concepts such as “limits” (Andrew Dobson) and “human flourishing” (Breena Holland and Amy Linch) to address the non-human as well. As a whole, these essays consider both how environmental political theorists have made use of traditional political ideals and norms such as justice and rights, and how environmental concerns have inspired re-conceptualizations of these ideals. At root, these chapters offer responses to the classic question of political theory, “What does the (or a) good life entail?,” while taking into consideration some combination of the major factors that characterize our time, including capitalist logics of growth (John Barry), climate change, the pleasures of consumer society, the practices of neo-liberal forms of governance, the pressures of population growth (Diana Coole), the structures of racial, gender, and class inequalities, and widespread and growing environmental degradation. Tensions proliferate within and across these essays as the authors grapple with the conflicts that emerge among and between environmental and political values, collective and individual ends, and contemporary needs that bump into long-standing discursive formulations and institutional structures.

Power, Structures, and Change

The final section of our volume, dedicated to the question of how we might move forward, encompasses a great deal of territory. The first seven chapters examine some of the primary structures that constrain and/or enable the institutionalization of environmental ends. Together these chapters question and reflect on current relations among the state, citizens, the environment, and the economy. They draw our attention to the discourses and concepts that inform our understandings of these roles and the mechanisms through which power is articulated. Adrian Parr’s analysis of neo-liberal forms of governance is followed by chapters that examine governmentality, the “green” state, scientific expertise, democratic action, authoritarianism, and global systems. They also parse contemporary systems of power to expose those affordances that might be amplified or reworked to produce positive environmental and social change. While most of these investigations revolve around the Western state, Mark Beeson’s chapter examines the emerging “environmental authoritarianism” of China and John Dryzek’s treats the larger system of global environmental governance. The final six chapters of this volume, collected under the subheading “Theorizing Citizenship, Movements, and Action,” consider two interrelated questions: First, how do organizations, activists, and other actors themselves represent or embody environmental theorizing, and second, how does EPT understand the range of methods for bringing about change, including social and political organizations, movements, and other strategies? In response to the first question, chapters by Joan Martinez-Alier, Kyle Whyte, and Sean Parson and Emily Ray offer analyses of the power of environmental movements to affect conceptual vocabulary and the function of governance institutions; in response to the second question, chapters by Cheryl Hall, Sherilyn MacGregor, and Lisa Disch offer varying perspectives on how we might both green and democratize political action. Demonstrating the prominent place of praxis in EPT, these chapters illuminate the confluence of discourse, framing, nudging, democratic space, and embodiment in political action. And they draw from diverse intellectual resources—including actor-network theory, feminist theory, Marxism, postcolonial studies, radical environmentalism, the environmentalisms of the poor, and indigenous environmental movements—to both expose the limitations of contemporary thinking and push toward more just and sustainable futures.

Challenges for the Future

In collections of this scope, there are always unforeseen circumstances that interfere with the realization of the ideal. The essays collected in this handbook reflect a wide and diverse range of topics, insights, and viewpoints within EPT today. We are proud of the final set, but we recognize that inevitably the handbook has not been able to include all things that it might, equally well. We thus end this introduction by noting a few areas where more needs to be said.

Not surprisingly, some of the limits of the volume—and future opportunities for exploration—are topics of interest that were raised in the initial discussion of this handbook at the EPT workshop but that we were unable to address in full. Some of these topics are issues deeply constitutive of the idea of environmental theory itself, such as a thorough engagement with the romantic or transcendentalist tradition—especially in the history of American environmental thought. While much of that tradition would be considered conservative in the current academic climate, there has also been an increasing interest in rethinking contemporary conservative justifications for environmental ethics, action, and politics; this, again, was identified at our initial session and yet we were unsuccessful in commissioning a piece on the issue. The largest absence, however, is the participation of scholars representing perspectives outside of the Anglo-American world, and especially those who approach these questions from a non-Western perspective. As noted earlier, EPT has to date been taken up as a distinct field of study in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and is addressed by a range of contributors across Europe in numerous languages. But the field needs to reach out to audiences beyond these familiar academic geographic boundaries. Across Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, scholars are addressing the human/ politics/environment intersection in engaging, creative, and productive ways. It will be a key task of the field to establish relationships with a new generation of environmental scholars, and to break down existing boundaries to establish a broader and more inclusive EPT community. We wrap up this handbook convinced that this cross-national, cross-cultural, and often cross-ontological engagement will be one of the key directions for future research, and relationships, in the field.

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Elections and Environmental Quality

• Published: 02 November 2022
• Volume 84 , pages 593–625, ( 2023 )

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• Nicolae Stef   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9471-4669 1 &
• Sami Ben Jabeur 2  

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This paper investigates how political elections influence environmental quality. From this perspective, we rely on the reward-punishment hypothesis ( RPH ) developed by democratic accountability theories. RPH implies that legislators can be held accountable by voters for increased pollution and/or environmental disasters. Consequently, incumbent politicians tend to limit environmental degradation during election campaigns because voters may switch their political preference as punishment for such degradations. Using a panel data set of 67 developed democracies over the period 2002–2015, our estimates reveal that the environmental quality tends to improve during the periods of legislative elections mainly in non-OECD countries. Such results provide evidence of the capacity of voters to influence incumbent politicians to embrace pro-environmental behavior as legislative elections approach.

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4% is the difference between 1 and the exponential coefficients of Legislative Elections and Legislative Elections t−1 .

We are grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions in identifying those measures of environmental awareness.

In the case of missing data, the values reported for one wave were used for the missing periods.

We thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

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Stef, N., Ben Jabeur, S. Elections and Environmental Quality. Environ Resource Econ 84 , 593–625 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00739-1

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