Partnerships for SDGs: Facilitating a Biodiversity– Climate Nexus?

In the past three decades, the UN has led the governance of sustainable development via three different global agendas that have taken different perspectives towards sustainable development and brought about some structural changes. The 2030 Agenda is the most recent one, and two key characteristics distinguish it from its predecessors: (1) it is the first agenda explicitly recognizing the interconnected nature of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals; and (2) multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) play a more central role in the implementation of the goals than ever before. SDG 17 actually calls for partnerships as the main vehicle of delivering sustainable development globally. With these two characteristics, the 2030 Agenda implicitly assumes that MSPs are an effective vehicle for bridging the goals. Whether MSPs can indeed act as nexus facilitators, and how they can achieve it, have received little scholarly attention. Thousands of partnerships have been registered on UNDESA’s Partnership Platform, many of which cut across SDGs and promise to deliver synergies between different issue areas. Empirically focusing on entries in this platform that declare they are working on SDGs 13 (Climate action) and 15 (Life on land), this chapter explores whether MSPs live up to the expectation that they act as nexus facilitators.