Politics matters! Political will as a critical condition for implementing the sustainable development goals

While commentaries often bemoan the lack of political will to “transform our world”, there is little analysis of country-level politics around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article aims to fill that gap through assessing the preferences and priorities of governments and local elites, as well as related conflicts around the SDGs. We want to investigate what political elites want to achieve through the SDGs. For this, we build on eleven exploratory country cases: Belarus, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Kenya, Palestine, Republic of Korea, Russia, South Africa, and Sudan. Alongside specific findings for these countries, the article presents conclusions on the significance of country-level politics for SDG implementation and three clusters of hypotheses for future research. The most prominent finding is governments’ emphasis on (pre-existing) top-priority programmes: Governments seek to make the SDGs serve their political objectives, while leveraging them for greater legitimacy. Other relevant aspects include state fragility and the SDG governance architecture at the national level. The article concludes with a discussion of policy-relevant implications and recommendations.