An often highlighted principle of the Sustainable Development Goals is that they are truly global, i.e. that they apply to all countries and are owned by all countries. By contrast, the Millenium Development Goals were often seen as a construction by the North for the betterment of the South. Yet our knowledge about how African governments relate to and employ the SDGs domestically remains limited.
In this paper, we present evidence from research on the domestication of one particular SDG in Zambia, namely Goal 13 on Climate Action. Like all other goals, the climate change agenda does not start from scratch with the SDGs, but comes loaded with a past history and connects to broader political struggles – not only at global scales but also nationally.
Drawing on 4 years of collaborative research in Zambia, our paper argues that there is more to the politics of climate change in African countries than global negotiations and donor discourses. Focusing on policies that deal with adaptation to climate change, we show how an initially donor-driven climate change agenda has become an arena for broader struggles over institutional authority and resource control between and among state agencies, local governments, chiefs and other actors.
We discuss how climate change adaptation policies and programmes serve certain immediate strategic interests of the central state, but also act as a more fundamental vehicle for the state in its efforts to assert and legitimize authority and natural resource control in a rural setting where state authority is otherwise fragmented. We show how chiefs, local governments and other local actors seek to counter this and establish their own legitimacy through climate change adaptation. The climate change agenda and associated policies and programmes can thus be seen as an emerging new arena for political and institutional contestation over broader, long-standing issues such as land control, resettlement, decentralization and customary versus statutory authority.
We conclude by discussing what these findings means for how we should understand and study the domestication and implementation of SDGs more broadly, and how we may capture the ways in which they are shaped and reconfigured in national policy- and implementation processes.