United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals: Hybrid Institutional Complexes as Hegemony-Building?

This paper adopts a Critical Political Economy (CPE) perspective to analyse the success or otherwise of the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) Hybrid Institutional Complex (HIC). The paper takes a counterintuitive approach in that it is less concerned with the institutional form of that HIC but rather their socio-economic content. The paper does this by building on Abbott and Faude's governance outcomes of ‘substantive’ and ‘political’ fit, emphasising the notion of ‘ideological fit’, understood as a crucial part of hegemony-building in the current conjuncture. Key to hegemony-building is that the greater degree of institutional diversity of HICs constitutes a way to reorganise inter-and intra-class relations to co-opt a greater variety of policy actors at multiple transnational scales. Rather than focusing on the SDGs' performance against specific development goals, the paper argues that the institutional coherence of the HIC lacks hegemonic depth that is translated into the uneven implementation of the SDGs and the disappointing progress against individual targets. Instead, the CPE approach shows how shallow hegemonies have failed at generating substantive development transformations but have instead succeeded at hegemony-building for class-based governance, just not for meaningful development.