Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0001-5263-2742

Date of Award

8-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Global Governance and Human Security

First Advisor

Jeffrey Pugh

Second Advisor

Craig Murphy

Third Advisor

Anna Agathangelou

Abstract

In 2015, to euphoric acclaim, the world adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. But with less than five years to deliver its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Agenda’s “transformational vision” remains unrealized. To understand why, this dissertation looks not to the Agenda’s implementation but to its birth, asking how the three-year process that produced it was designed, implemented, and experienced, and whether its mechanisms reinforced or challenged the structures that shape global sustainability governance. The premise is simple: how global agreements are negotiated matters as much as their substance. The study thus pushes back against a celebratory view of the process as global participatory democracy, and against critical international relations (IR) scholarship that envisions human-centered governance but rarely examines the practices that could realize it.

Informed by critical IR scholarship on change, pluralism, human security, and global democracy, this research applies an analytical framework adapted from public policy and planning. Based on the integrative theory of collaborative rationality, the framework guides interrogation of each post-2015 mechanism across five elements: leadership, participation, knowledge, dialogue, and decision-making. Methodologically, the study adopts an open-systems inquiry spanning global, regional, subregional, national, and subnational levels of governance, with Asia-Pacific, South Asia, India, and Odisha as nested cases. Data come from fifty-four semi-structured interviews and detailed document analysis.

The findings reveal a threefold typology: conservative mechanisms reproduced normative structures, reformative mechanisms contested them by emergence rather than design, and transformative mechanisms were intentionally designed to contest them. While no mechanism alone sustained structural change, the reformative and transformative ones point to concrete practices for advancing human-centered governance. The study argues that transformation requires an intentionally transformative approach to process design at all levels. By foregrounding practice, it contributes to debates on human security, global democracy, and sustainable development, and offers guidance for designing more equitable processes of sustainability governance.

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