Earth System Governance 24 (2025) 100244 Available online 21 February 2025 2589-8116/© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/). Politics matters! Political will as a critical condition for implementing the sustainable development goals Marianne Beisheim a,* , Muriel Asseburg a , Eric J. Ballbach a , Karoline Eickhoff a , Sabine Fischer a , Nadine Godehardt a , Gerrit Kurtz a , Marcel Meyer b , Melanie Müller a , Stephan Roll a , Astrid Sahm a , Christian Wagner a , Claudia Zilla a a SWP – German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany b ZIF – Center for International Peace Operations, Berlin, Germany ABSTRACT 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. 1. Introduction In 2015, the UN member states agreed the 2030 Agenda and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The goals were adopted by consensus. Closing the deal required a degree of ambiguous language and typical flexibility clauses like “respecting national policies and priorities” (UNGA, 2015, para. 5, 21, 55). UN member states tend to reject any foreign intervention in their political or economic priorities and national development strategies. These political priorities and strategies are, at the same time, an important factor behind the highly divergent patterns of SDG implementation. To put it in a positive way: The broad language of the 2030 Agenda and SDGs can be employed “to advance norm localization through selective framing and adaptation” (Okitasari and Katramiz, 2022, p. 10). But there is also a downside: Since member states are “free to interpret and adapt the agenda in their own context”, this “flexibility built into the SDGs’ approach to governance seems to pose a structural limit” to compliance mechanisms and full SDG achievement (Long et al., 2023, p. 152f.). Thus, member states’ funda- mental reservations over sovereignty may form a major obstacle to ambitious implementation of global goals (Beisheim, 2021, p. 26f). A recent analysis of global governance failures points at the national-level forces behind this: “In particular, the destructive forces in society are clinging to national sovereignty as their rampart against interference with their selfish ways” (Dahl, 2023, p. 1). Accordingly, in discussions around the national implementation of the SDGs, the term political will – or rather, the complaint that it is lacking – comes up time and again. But the debate often stops there, when the analysis should go further and deeper, asking who is committed to doing what, where the political will is lacking, and why. This is where our article in this issue comes in: We unpack “political will” and shed light on the underlying motives, incentive structures and other causes. Building on empirical research of the country-level politics around the SDGs, we develop hypotheses for future research to specify and test when explaining successes and failures of SDG implementation. 2. Reviewing the literature After reviewing the academic literature (see also Post et al., 2010), we decided to base our understanding of political will on Derick W. Brinkerhoff’s definition as “the commitment of actors to undertake ac- tions to achieve a set of objectives (…) and to sustain the costs of those actions over time” (Brinkerhoff, 2010, p. 1). We acknowledge that This article is part of a special issue entitled: Sustainable Development Goals published in Earth System Governance. * Corresponding author. Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Ludwigkirchplatz 3-4, 10719, Berlin, Germany. E-mail address: marianne.beisheim@swp-berlin.org (M. Beisheim). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Earth System Governance journal homepage: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/earth-system-governance https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2025.100244 Received 2 July 2024; Received in revised form 15 November 2024; Accepted 6 February 2025