Achieving the Global 2030 Agenda: What Role for Voluntary Sustainability Standards?

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a plan of action for “people, planet and prosperity”. The 17 goals cover all crucial policy areas to secure a sustainable future, including education, health, economic development, social protection, environmental protection, and natural resources governance. The 17 goals are operationalised in 169 targets which need to be reached by 2030 or earlier. The SDGs build on the Millennium Development Goals. A crucial difference between the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals is that the former were mainly targeted to governments, while the latter target many different stakeholders, including the private sector and voluntary sustainability standards. Indeed, a shift in approach between the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals is the recognition that policy objectives are best achieved by involving and integrating different stakeholders in the policy process. This is explicitly recognised in SDG 17, which aims to foster partnerships for these goals (see Georg von Schnurbein’s introduction to this volume). As a result, the 2030 Agenda carves out an important role for private actors in governing for sustainable development. Among private (understood as “non-state”) actors, Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) can play an especially important role for the SDGs and for SDG 17 in particular, as they can both serve as implementation means and help revitalise the partnerships for these goals. First, VSS can act as enforcement mechanisms for these goals, since they share similar objectives with the SDGs (WWF 2017). Although the language of the SDGs distinguishes between “goals”, “targets”, and “indicators”, the generic term “objectives” is used in this chapter to refer to the fact that complying with specific standards of a VSS can contribute to achieving specific targets of an SDG. Second, VSS contribute to foster partnerships, since they operate globally and connect the Global South to the Global North through values chains (Ponte 2019). In a world characterised by an exponential growth in international trade and, more importantly, a change in the nature of trade, VSS can potentially play a crucial role to contribute