PCE Seminar: ‘What Makes Monitoring Useful? – Lessons Learnt for a Global Monitoring Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals’
Speaker: Martina Kuhner, PhD candidate Politics
When: Wednesday 18 January, 15.30-17.30
Where: Spiegelzaal, GG 80-82
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The first PCE research seminar of 2017 will take place next Wednesday afternoon. Martina Kuhner will present her research in a presentation entitled: ‘What Makes Monitoring Useful? – Lessons Learnt for a Global Monitoring Framework for the Sustainable Development Goals’. You are warmly invited to attend.
In her presentation, Martina will briefly present the overall research design of her PhD project, and then discuss the empirical findings of one of her case studies – global monitoring of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their “successor” goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). My dissertation answers the following question:
What has been learnt (or not) from the experience with previous Global Monitoring Mechanisms (GMMs) for the institutional design of two recently established GMMs – namely those of the Paris Agreement and of the Sustainable Development Goals?
The case study presented in the second part of the talk focuses on the lessons learnt from the monitoring framework of the MDGs. Its main contribution lies in a better understanding of the debates and challenges around the monitoring of the SDGs. This study explores:
(1) the perceptions different stakeholders have regarding the usefulness of the “predecessor” of the SDG monitoring, namely the MDG monitoring framework;
(2) how these usefulness perceptions are reflected in the set-up of global monitoring of the SDGs under the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF);
(3) what these usefulness perceptions can tell us about the quality of institutional change and whether institutional learning has taken place; and
(4) tentative explanations of why the new global SDG monitoring framework has been designed this way.
The empirical data is derived from interviews with key stakeholders, field observations of the SDG negotiations and existing evaluations of the monitoring framework of the MDGs. Building on this material, the chapter maps and discusses the collected usefulness perceptions on the MDG monitoring. The analysis focuses on dimensions of institutional design of the GMM, which are considered as relevant to categorize and assess the usefulness perceptions. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how usefulness perceptions and lessons learnt from them are reflected in the institutional design of the new SDG monitoring architecture. On this basis, I make a critical assessment of the institutional design of the SDG monitoring and offer some tentative explanations as to why the SDG monitoring looks the way it does. In doing so, this study adds to the ongoing political and academic debates on “good” institutional design and the effective monitoring of the SDGs.
