Science in Negotiation: The Role of Scientific Evidence in Shaping the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 2012-2015

129 Pages·2022·1.55 MB·English

by  Jessica Espey

Connecting the Goals
Jessica Espey
Science in
Negotiation
The Role of Scientific Evidence in Shaping
the United Nations Sustainable Development
Goals, 2012-2015
Sustainable Development Goals Series
The Sustainable Development Goals Series is Springer Nature’s inaugural
cross-imprint book series that addresses and supports the United Nations’
seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. The series fosters comprehensive
research focused on these global targets and endeavours to address some of
society’s greatest grand challenges. The SDGs are inherently multidisciplinary,
and they bring people working across different fields together and working
towards a common goal. In this spirit, the Sustainable Development Goals
series is the first at Springer Nature to publish books under both the Springer
and Palgrave Macmillan imprints, bringing the strengths of our imprints
together.
The Sustainable Development Goals Series is organized into eighteen
subseries: one subseries based around each of the seventeen respective
Sustainable Development Goals, and an eighteenth subseries, “Connecting
the Goals,” which serves as a home for volumes addressing multiple goals or
studying the SDGs as a whole. Each subseries is guided by an expert Subseries
Advisor with years or decades of experience studying and addressing core
components of their respective Goal.
The SDG Series has a remit as broad as the SDGs themselves, and
contributions are welcome from scientists, academics, policymakers, and
researchers working in fields related to any of the seventeen goals. If you are
interested in contributing a monograph or curated volume to the series, please
contact the Publishers: Zachary Romano [Springer; zachary.romano@
springer.com] and Rachael Ballard [Palgrave Macmillan; rachael.ballard@
palgrave.com].
Jessica Espey
Science in Negotiation
The Role of Scientific Evidence
in Shaping the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals,
2012-2015
Jessica Espey
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
ISSN 2523-3084 ISSN 2523-3092 (electronic)
Sustainable Development Goals Series
ISBN 978-3-031-18125-2 ISBN 978-3-031-18126-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18126-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
Color wheel and icons: From https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/
Copyright © 2020 United Nations. Used with the permission of the United Nations.
The content of this publication has not been approved by the United Nations and does not reflect
the views of the United Nations or its officials or Member States.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor
the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
Between 2010 and 2015, I was deeply involved in the international negotia-
tions for a new global development agenda. It began when I was working as
a researcher with a large International Non-Governmental Organisation
(INGO), exploring women and children’s rights and how to advance them in
policy development. The global development cooperation framework, known
as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), was set to expire in 2015
and discussions were rumbling amongst a small cadre of UK development
professionals about what would come next and how any new agenda could
help to advance specific issues. I decided to write a short opinion piece for my
colleagues about what a ‘post-2015’ agenda might offer for children’s rights,
health and well-being and how we could potentially use this international
agenda-setting moment to advance our concerns. The piece triggered a surge
of interest across the INGO and soon after I was tasked with co-authoring a
‘manifesto’ of sorts on what the INGO believed the new development agenda
should look like. The report, entitled Ending Poverty in Our Generation, was
the first publication of its kind from a large INGO like ours and attracted
attention, not least of all from representatives in the United Nations (UN)
who were deciding the modalities for a post-2015 consultation and decision-
making process. Personally, the effects of this report and the various activities
that stemmed from it were profound. In the years that followed, I found
myself serving as an adviser to the President of Liberia, working for Professor
Jeffrey Sachs, and directing the New York office of a global research network
established by the UN Secretary General. It was a turbulent yet thrilling expe-
rience and a great insight into the machinations of global politics and policy-
making. The experience also crystallised my deep research interest in
processes of international policy development and understanding how differ-
ent political and research inputs form political outcomes.
Through my professional experience I was able to take a look ‘under the
hood’ of international governance and to see first-hand how compromises
were reached, wording was crafted, and decisions were made. But I never felt
I had a truly comprehensive picture. How were the thousands of positions
statements issued by Member States, the messages from advocates and cam-
paigners and the policy and research papers actually being used to derive a
final UN General Assembly conclusion? Concurrently I wondered about the
weight of inputs. Academics and NGOs were both invited to present at vari-
ous moments in the deliberations. Was one group more compelling than the
other? Who were Member States really listening to? And what weight was
v
vi Preface
being given to the new and emerging science on the state of our planet? All of
these questions prompted me to step away from the policy world and take the
time to critically analyse the various dynamics at play within international
governance. Some of these questions are addressed by this book, but they are
the tip of an iceberg and the deeper I dig the more issues and challenges
become apparent. Excitingly, these are issues I hope to research long into the
future.
Also motivating my professional transition from policy to academia is the
state of our planet. The world is on the cusp of an environmental precipice.
The institutions of global governance are more important than ever before if
we are to galvanise attention to and manage dramatic climatic and ecological
shifts, and yet they are in a state of disarray. The past decade in particular has
seen declining UN funding, declining international aid budgets, reneging on
international rights commitments and more. If we are to devise an interna-
tional governance architecture that is responsive to Member State concerns,
whilst also sufficiently inspiring as to motivate transnational cooperation, we
need to really understand the present system and understand the power differ-
ent actors have, the value of different processes and inputs and how decisions
are reached. Only with this understanding can we improve upon it and hope
to inspire confidence in the future in new international governance models, be
they like the existing UN or no. When I started to explore the theory behind
international policy processes, I was quite startled to find it was relatively
thin. Whilst political science offers concepts for understanding negotiation
and compromise and policy studies offer theories of policy processes, there
are few if any empirical publications testing these theories with reference to
the international institutions of global governance. And there are none, that I
could find, attempting to explore this with reference to multiple sectors. It
appeared to me, and continues to do so, that sectoral experts spoke only to
their epistemic community, and few attempts were being made to tease out
replicable lessons that might bridge sectoral divides and be as interesting in a
journal on climate science as on public health. It is this gap in the policy and
political science literatures that I hope to contribute to.
I should note to the reader that there is quite a bit of terminology used
interchangeably throughout this book. First are terms relating to policy pro-
cesses, policy cycles and policymaking. All are intended to refer to the pro-
cess by which government officials deliberate upon and eventually reach
consensus on a given area of government practice. In this book, it is acknowl-
edged that policy processes can take many different forms and are messy and
complex, as discussed in Part 2. Any use of this terminology should therefore
be construed as referring to the complex and oftentimes chaotic processes
that accompany policy development.
Two other sets of terms are used interchangeably. First, the focus of this
book is the use of science and scientific evidence in policy processes, but I
oftentimes refer to academics and academia as well, meaning the person or
group of persons producing scientific evidence. I use the term science holisti-
cally to refer not only to the natural sciences but also social sciences, with a
very wide range from those studying anthropologies to policy or criminology.
People contributing written publications to these disciplines, in a university
Preface vii
setting, are considered to be academics (i.e. representing academia) and are
assumed to have achieved a level of academic study (a PhD or otherwise),
which has equipped them with a robust understanding of research methods.
This methodological training has the intention of enabling them to produce
findings aligned with and in accordance with a broad scientific tradition and
(assuming they follow this training and make such methods transparent) the
evidence produced is referred to as science.
Finally, the empirical analysis is focused on a specific process that ran
under the UN General Assembly from 2012 to 2015; the post-2015 delibera-
tion process. It was called post-2015 as 2015 was the year the MDGs would
expire, and the UN and other international stakeholders were mobilizing to
discuss what, if anything, would come next. At the Rio+20 Conference in Rio
de Janeiro 2012, it was proposed that a set of Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) were developed to succeed the MDGs, and whilst the term met some
resistance at first (from those eager to maintain a focus on social development
and not environmental concerns) by 2013 the idea of there being SDGs was
well accepted by the members of the Open Working Group and had become
common parlance. The Post-2015 and the SDG deliberative process, there-
fore, refer to the same thing and are used interchangeably; the international,
deliberative proceedings that ran from 2012 to 2015 to decide the new devel-
opment agenda.
Bristol, UK Jessica Espey
Author’s Note
Before publication, a variation of this manuscript was submitted to the
University of Bristol for the pursuit of a Doctorate of Philosophy.
ix
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the immense personal and
professional support offered by Professor Susan Parnell (University of
Bristol). Without her encouragement, I might never have been brave enough
to embark on it and dream of a full-time academic career. I can’t thank her
enough. Dr Sean Fox (University of Bristol) also supervised this research and
offered incredible, constructive feedback throughout, constantly helping me
to streamline and focus.
Professionally, I am indebted to Dr Guido Schmidt Traub who was for-
merly Executive Director of UNSDSN. Over the 7 years that we worked
together he was an inspiration; efficient, thorough, personable and motivat-
ing. He was always asking what we could do to improve processes, to get the
best out of our people and to motivate political action. The President of
UNSDSN was Professor Jeffrey Sachs; a tour de force, constantly writing,
researching, encyclopaedic in his knowledge of sustainable development, and
above all a fearless advocate for the world. I feel incredibly lucky to have
been able to work so closely with both of these gentlemen, as well as the rest
of the wonderful UNSDSN team and members of UNSDSN TReNDS. There
are too many people to mention, but, suffice to say, they were all an inspira-
tion in their own way.
All my love and thanks are extended to my wonderful family, particularly
my dear husband Richard Graham and our two children, Toby and Tristan,
who have loved and supported me throughout this process. We have had some
intense personal trials over the past few years, but they help me weather any
storm and come out smiling.
A final word of thanks to my dearest Granny, Christine Ross, who is near-
ing 100 but never stops marveling at our beautiful world. She is the ultimate
inspiration, always reminding me how precious each and every little bee, bug
and leaf is and finding reserves of strength through their beauty. This book is
dedicated to her.
xi