About

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development embraces a multistakeholder-based governance system for sustainable development that relies on partnerships. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 centres on revitalising the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development^[1] and its Target 17.16 calls for the promotion of multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) to “mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technologies and financial resources to support the achievement of sustainable development goals in all countries, particularly developing countries”. These multistakeholder partnering initiatives now encompass all domains of sustainable development, including the provision of global public goods such as food, health, education and water that are also human rights.

The proliferation of MSPs reflects a turn towards multistakeholderism in domains that have traditionally been governed largely on state-driven international legal orders, such as human rights law. The rise of partnerships, therefore, presents both a paradigmatic shift of the normative order from multilateralism towards multistakeholderism and an operational shift away from state-based towards multistakeholder-based norm-making and implementation mechanisms.

GENESIS is the first project to systematically uncover how, through what mechanisms and under what conditions human rights are increasingly governed by MSPs. GENESIS is a timely project that employs a novel combination of methods to address the normative and practical consequences of the use of the two distinct yet overlapping governance models for human rights: multilateralism and multistakeholderism. GENESIS will derive insights for research and policy on whether and how international law expressed through human rights law and multistakeholder governance expressed through MSPs can generate common ground when governing public goods that are human rights.

[1] The idea of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development was launched in 1992 with the Rio Conference’s Agenda 21 and formalized in 2000 as Goal 8 of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).