Beyond Cockpit-ism: Four Insights to Enhance the Transformative Potential of the Sustainable Development Goals

By M. Hajer, Mans Nilsson, Kate Raworth, P. Bakker, Frans Berkhout, Y. D. Boer, J. Rockström, K. Ludwig, M. Kok. 2015

429 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have the potential to become a powerful political vision that can support the urgently needed global transition to a shared and lasting prosperity. In December 2014, the United Nations (UN) Secretary General published his report on the SDGs. However, the final goals and targets that will be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 risk falling short of expectations because of what we call “cockpit-ism”: the illusion that top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organizations alone can address global problems. In view of the limited effectiveness of intergovernmental efforts and questions about the capacity of national governments to affect change, the SDGs need to additionally mobilize new agents of change such as businesses, cities and civil society. To galvanize such a broad set of actors, multiple perspectives on sustainable development are needed that respond to the various motives and logics of change of these different actors. We propose four connected perspectives which can strengthen the universal relevance of the SDGs: “planetary boundaries” to stress the urgency of addressing environmental concerns and to target governments to take responsibility for (global) public goods; “the safe and just operating space” to highlight the interconnectedness of social and environmental concerns and its distributive consequences; “the energetic society” to benefit from the willingness of a broad group of actors worldwide to take action; and “green competition” to stimulate innovation and new business practices. To realize the transformative potential of the SDGs, these four perspectives should be reflected in the focus and content of the SDGs that will be negotiated in the run up to September 2015 and its further implementation.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03acf1d7d004e79e92485290e73fe9ef7eeed7ca

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Citations in the corpus

The contradiction of the sustainable development goals: Growth versus ecology on a finite planet (2019, background): “Hajer et al. (2015) call for the SDGs to start with a firm commitment to respecting planetary boundaries and seek to achieve human development within those limits, following the “safe and justice operating space” model.”
Evaluating sustainability transitions pathways: Bridging analytical approaches to address governance challenges (2015, positive): “The differentiation and connectedness across socio-spatial scales has generated a ‘ geographical turn ’ in transitions studies (Coenen and Truffer, 2012; Carvalho et al., 2012; Hodson and Marvin, 2012; Hansen and Coenen, 2015).”
Towards systemic and contextual priority setting for implementing the 2030 Agenda (2017, background): “A literature overview1 suggests that there is a general call for further research and that the policy relevance of results has been limited (see, e.g., Hajer et al. 2015; Lu et al. 2015).”
Using industrial ecology and strategic management concepts to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals (2018, background): “…to understand not only the role sustainable businesses can play in achieving the SDGs, but how “ green competition ” and new business activities can stimulate innovation and be recognized as a source of future competitive advantage (Amit and Zott, 2012; Hajer et al., 2015; Rahdari et al., 2016).”
Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective (2017, background): “…that take critical analysis of planned change as their starting point as this feeds very well into current governance debates and resembles what Hajer et al. (2015) nicely coins as cockpit-ism: the illusion that top-down steering by governments and intergovernmental organisations alone can…”
Bridging analytical approaches for low-carbon transitions (2016, positive): “This approach to governance downplays three issues: first, policymakers (particularly at national and local levels) are usually constrained by their dependence on other actors (such as firms, electorates and civil society) for skills, financial resources, deployment and legitimacy 45 .”
Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: An enabling role for accounting research (2017, background): “…result, the SDGs “have the potential to become the guiding vision for governmental, corporate and civil society action for a shared and lasting prosperity” (Hajer et al., 2015, p. 1657) and have been described as “the next era of human development that is transformational” (Caprani, 2016, p. 102).”
Disclosure on the Sustainable Development Goals – Evidence from Europe (2021, neutral): “While the SDGs offer a unique opportunity to bundle corporate and governmental efforts for sustainable development (Caprani, 2016; Hajer et al., 2015), there is also criticism of the evaluation of actions taken to achieve the SDGs (Bebbington & Unerman, 2018; Biermann et al., 2017).”
The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer: a new context for social innovation and transformations to sustainability (2017, background): “Although the need for integration is widely recognized in the ecological and social sciences focused on sustainable development goals (Norström et al. 2014, Hajer et al. 2015), there has been little explicit integration of this thinking into social innovation research.”
Multinational enterprises and the Sustainable Development Goals: An institutional approach to corporate engagement (2018, background): “Whether companies can make this material depends on their further actions, in interaction with governmental policies and strategies of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (GRI, UN Global Compact, & WBCSD, 2015; Hajer et al., 2015; UN Global Compact, 2017).”