Project R-13611

SDG-Governance – Assessing climate governance mechanisms to advance the SDGs in Belgium and South Africa. (Education)

Effective governance systems are key to addressing the global threat of climate change while ensuring equality and justice across the society. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for governance systems that embrace ecological integrity, sustainability and human rights as pillars of their core functioning and development before 2030. Furthermore, the global nature of the SDGs calls for sharing of knowledge and capacity-building across localities and Regions around the globe. The uneven distribution of climate change impacts based on differentiated vulnerabilities urges comparative knowledge development to prompt effective responses in the Global South as well as in the Global North. Yet, South-North collaboration to facilitate comparative legal analysis and knowledge exchange is limited, giving rise to a knowledge gap. This project will contribute to bridging this knowledge gap by engaging in a comparative legal analysis of the key climate governance instruments and institutional structures of Belgium and South Africa. More specifically, the project will appraise the climate governance of Belgium and South Africa against the SDGs indicators and objectives, drawing on the following main criteria as a proxy for comparison: - Legal culture; Gender equality; - Ecological integrity; - Social and climate justice and vulnerability. To this end, it will address specific legal and institutional issues, such as: the protection of human rights, access to information and access to justice, distributional impacts of climate policies across national territories and different vulnerable groups.

01 June 2023 - 31 August 2024