Digital Momentum for the United Nations Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century

While digitalization fundamentally changes the range of options available for future civilizational development, the implementation of the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals requires a fundamental transformation of the economy and society.
“These two challenges can only be met by dedicated global thinking and action,” a policy paper by the German Advisory Council on Change (WBGU) stresses. “So what could be more appropriate than to use the momentum of digitalization to advance the Transformation towards Sustainability and launch decisive stimuli for achieving national and global sustainability targets?”
Digital solutions can make it easier to supply the world’s population with food and renewable energies in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way, according to the paper, titled ‘Digital Momentum for the UN Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century’.
The intelligent design, longevity, reparability and recyclability of products in a digitally supported circular economy can reduce the demand for resources. Individuals can further their education using digital commons and develop an awareness of responsibility for overarching sustainability and humanity issues. Polycentric networks based on a culture of global cooperation and as a foundation for global governance can increasingly use sustainability-oriented social platforms. International sustainability politics could follow principles of open government and improve democratic participation.
However, the paper stresses, leveraging this potential will not happen automatically. Taking into account the opportunities and risks of digitalization in selected fields, WBGU offers four stimuli for using the digital momentum to (1) develop a global (environmental) awareness, (2) establish a globally networked, digitally supported circular economy, (3) modernize sustainability governance, and (4) continue sustainability policy in the digital age beyond 2030.
The implementation of these proposals can provide essential impetus for global sustainability politics: it is a question of the further development of our civilization on a finite planet in the digital Anthropocene. “In this way, the WBGU wishes to generate impetus for inter and transnational initiatives that urgently need to be taken. At the latest, the UN Summit proposed by the WBGU for 2022 should agree on key steps for a sustainable Digital Age – 30 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.”

WBGU – German Advisory Council on Global Change (2019): Digital Momentum for the UN Sustainability Agenda in the 21st Century. Policy Paper 10. Berlin: WBGU.

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United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence

United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKOs) are increasingly engaging with local communities to support peace processes, including as part of the world organization’s new focus on the management of transitions during the drawdown and subsequent closure of peace operations.
Existing academic research, however, tends to focus on the coercive and state-building functions of UN PKOs at the expense of the concrete local activities being conducted with community leaders and populations.
In a new study, published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, HANNAH M. SMIDT investigates how peacekeepers’ community-based intergroup dialogue activities influence communal violence. She argues that facilitating dialogue between different communal identity-based groups locally can revive intergroup coordination and diminish negative biases against other groups, thereby reducing the risk of communal conflict escalation.
She tests her argument using a novel data set of intergroup dialogue activities organized by the UN PKO in Cote d’Ivoire across 107 departments from October 2011 to May 2016. “The analyses provide robust evidence that the UN PKO mitigated communal violence by organizing intergroup dialogues,” she writes in the article titled ‘United Nations Peacekeeping Locally: Enabling Conflict Resolution, Reducing Communal Violence’.
In 2013, more than half of the residents in the violence-prone region Western Comoe reported improved intercommunal relations, the author notes, adding that civilian peacekeepers may have contributed to this result. “This study provides robust evidence that UNOCI’s efforts to strengthen local conflict resolution capacity through intergroup dialogue activities decreased the average risk of communal violence. Its findings should encourage international and national organizations that local intergroup dialogue can meaningfully complement national-level peacebuilding initiatives.
Existing studies argue that peacekeeping works to reduce violence by monitoring belligerents’ behavior, imposing costs for coercive acts, replacing dysfunctional state structures, and de-escalating local conflicts through facilitating communication between political and armed group leaders, SMIDT states.
“Adding to this latter mechanism, this study examines peacekeepers’ intergroup dialogue activities and, thus, shifts the focus from political and armed groups to community leaders and local populations as well as from reactive responses to peacekeepers’ more preventive engagement in order to strengthen the locally rooted mechanisms and norms for peaceful dispute settlement.”
Furthermore, while conflict research tends to prioritize civil war–related violence by governments and nonstate armed actors, local-level ‘everyday’ or ‘peacetime’ violence after war can also undermine peacebuilding processes. Examining possible solutions is therefore important and the focus of her article, she writes.
“While recent research has significantly advanced our knowledge about coercive peacekeeping mechanisms at the local level,” SMIDT states, “this study is the first to systematically evaluate how civilian peacekeeping activities on the ground influence collective violence.”
Although her findings are limited to Cote d’Ivoire, the author states, case evidence from Somalia, Ethiopia and Liberia suggests that UN peacekeepers’ efforts to strengthen local conflict resolution mechanisms may also work in other war-torn countries.
It is difficult to test the persistence of the effects of intergroup dialogue activities because intergroup dialogues occur frequently over time and there is no sustained period without intervention following an intergroup dialogue event, SMIDT notes. “Yet, additional analyses suggest that intergroup dialogues held up to nine months previously still reduce communal violence if we hold constant the more or less frequent interventions in the meantime.”
Despite some anecdotal evidence, the article has to remain agnostic about the microlevel mechanisms through which intergroup dialogue interventions work, she states. Interviews with peacekeepers and community leaders, surveys of participants in UN activities, and similar individual-level data would help to empirically untangle the causal story.
Despite these limits, the study constitutes a crucial step forward in understanding peacekeeping mechanisms, providing some of the missing evidence on peacekeepers’ actions and policies, the author stresses. “[It] shows that it is also through strengthening conflict resolution locally that peacekeeping contributes to a reduction in violence.”

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UN Charter Review in 2020: An Urgent Necessity

Amid the unraveling of the liberal international order, the United Nations system has become dysfunctional to the point that maintaining it in its present form is a clear and present danger to the future of human survival, a leading expert argues.
“The challenge is to create institutions to be able to respond to international issues before they magnify the already existing crises,” TIM MURITHI states in the latest Global Governance Spotlight published by Bonn-based sef: Development and Peace Foundation.
The 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in 2020 is an opportune time to genuinely review and examine whether the UN system that we currently have is designed to effectively address the pressing issues which threaten to further fragment global society in a manner that precipitates forces of intolerance and violent extremism, MURITHI writes in the brief titled ‘United Nations Charter Review in 2020: An Urgent Necessity!’
“It would be naïve to think that the beneficiaries of the current system, notably the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council who form a cohort of self-selected elite global governors, will allow change to happen without them undertaking measures to bully and cajole compliance from those seeking change,” the author contends.
Many countries clamor to be a part of the ‘club’ at the UN Security Council, but, once there, are always ineffectual and relegated to marginal issues because the P5 have effectively ‘captured’ the UN system. It is unlikely that tinkering with the edges, in the form of so-called UN reform, will generate institutional models that lead to a deepening of global democracy, MURITHI states.
“It will be necessary for members of the UN General Assembly representing the 5 billion people who are excluded from being part of the elite global governance cohort, to build a ‘coalition of the willing’ to advance the collective interests of humanity.”
A UN Charter Review Conference, ideally convened in 2020, can be triggered by a General Assembly resolution activating Article 109 of the organization’s founding document, which will create a platform for global deliberation. A key outcome could be the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly which can promote inclusive dialogue and decision-making on pursuing effective collective problem-solving with the view to urgently addressing the global challenges, he states.

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