Special Issue: The Sustainable Development Goals

Guest editors:

• Stefan Cibian, Visiting Professor, Department of Political Science, Babes-Bolyai University, (stefan.cibian@gmail.com)
• Ana-Maria Lebada, Adviser on Post-2015 Agenda, Permanent Mission of Romania to the United Nations, (lebada.anamaria@gmail.com).
• Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University (thomas.pogge@yale.edu).

Two cross-cutting debates about development are preoccupying officials, academics and civil society groups in the middle of this decade. One concerns the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), due to expire at the end of 2015. Some describe them as the most successful poverty eradication effort ever, others as a fraud or abysmal failure. The other debate is about the formulation of the MDGs’ successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 and meant to guide development efforts until 2030. What goals, targets and indicators should be included in the final document? Who should be involved in the drafting process and how?
Symposion is inviting contributions that enrich the ongoing debates on the SDGs and related concepts, theories, policies, methodologies and practice. This special issue aims to illuminate the conceptual, institutional, systemic and procedural frameworks underpinning the new goals. The number of SDGs proposed, 17, constitutes a substantial increase from the 8 MDGs and will pose a serious challenge to the international community. At the same time, the expansion of areas covered by the proposed SDGs invites critical reflection. The participation of a wide web of local, national, and international organizations, both in the implementation of the MDGs and in the preparatory process of the SDGs, reflects a rich fabric of stakeholders and of policy choices and practices. How responsive is the process through which the SDGs are shaped to the current global realities, to the local realities of developing countries and to the experience with the MDGs? What are the structural implications of adopting such goals and what are the institutional preconditions for achieving them? What would an effective monitoring and accountability mechanism for the SDGs look like? How do the SDGs differ from the MDGs, and what impact might these differences have? How do the SDGs fit into the broader UN post-2015 development agenda? What are the major challenges to their implementation? We welcome interdisciplinary work addressing these and related questions.

Requirements regarding the papers and deadline
For this special issue, the desired essay length is 8,000 words, including footnotes and references. The editors reserve the right to ask the authors to shorten their texts when necessary. All submitted articles must have a short abstract not exceeding 200 words and 3 to 6 keywords. Authors are asked to compile their manuscripts in the following order: title, abstract, keywords, main text, appendices (if any), references. All manuscripts submitted for the special issue should be in English. For more details please consult http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/author-guidelines/.
Please submit your manuscripts electronically by the 1st of June 2015 to symposion.journal@yahoo.com. Authors will receive an e-mail confirming the submission. All subsequent correspondence with the authors will be by e-mail. When a paper is co-authored, one author should be identified as the corresponding author.