The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man - as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him - and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature - the true resurrection of nature - the consistent naturalism of man and (...)

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and (...)

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False“ are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to (...)

In short, the economic, political, and cultural features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those who fight for it.

The new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the “standard of living“.

However, the requirements of profitable mass production are not necessarily identical with those of mankind. The problem is not only (and perhaps not even primarily) that of adequately feeding and caring for the growing population-it is first a problem of number, of mere quantity.

The concept of the primary, initial institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution. This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the alternative: it would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty, which is the prerequisite for the turn from quantity into quality: the creation of a reality in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness. This goal implies rejection of those policies of reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are bound to perpetuate (...)

in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accord with a new sensibility - the demands of the life instincts.

Recent scientific reports highlight the urgent need for transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and long-term sustainability. This paper presents a new approach to partnerships that focuses on their role in transformations, the types of partnerships that may be needed and their enabling environment. It introduces transformation effectiveness as a criterion to evaluate a portfolio of partnerships and pathways as a tool to frame discussion of required partnerships.

The future relationship between the environment and development was a core issue of Rio+20. Ultimately, governments decided to reunite them by creating SDGs, merging the MDG’s separate development agenda back into Agenda 21’s environment and development process. While prioritizing poverty reduction, the SDGs aimed to revitalize sustainable development and promote synergies between environment and development by using the MDG’s goal/ indicator approach.

The SDGs were presented as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, when the member states of the United Nations agreed upon the creation of a global agenda for sustainable development based on 169 targets grouped into 17 SDGs. The Sustainable Development Goals tackle a wide spectrum of issues relevant to sustainable development such as poverty, health, education, climate change, and environmental degradation. According to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, business plays a critical role in the achievement of these goals (Agarwal et al., 2017; Rosati and Faria, 2018). The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and (...)

The SDGs have set the 2030 agenda to transform the world by ensuring, simultaneously, human well-being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. Comprising of 17 goals and 169 targets, SDGs aim at tackling multiple and complex challenges faced by humankind. Accordingly, they are implicitly interdependent and it may happen that conflicting interactions among the SDGs may result in diverging results

While not legally binding, the sdgs do provide a globally endorsed normative framework for development. Governments and other stakeholders are expected to establish national and regional plans for their implementation. The 2030 Agenda is neither a blueprint for specific action nor for navigating the complexities and trade-offs that will undoubtedly emerge during implementation.

The seventeen goals are intended to provide a framework for policymaking in member states over a period of 15 years. The SDGs were officially adopted at the UN summit in New York in September and become applicable as from January 2016. The deadline for the SDGS is 2030. There are seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) which can be grouped into six thematic areas: Dignity, People, Planet, Partnership, Justice and Prosperity

The BHR literature contains well-developed theory on corporate responsibilities in regard to their impacts on human rights. The academic theory is complemented by guidance instruments adopted by the UN. Like the SDGs, these guidance instruments explicitly recognise the role of business for sustainable societies. The key element in the interdisciplinary BHR literature is the corporate responsibility to respect human rights by avoiding harm.

All sdgs interact with one another – by design they are an integrated set of global priorities and objectives that are fundamentally interdependent. Understanding the range of positive and negative interactions among sdgs is key to unlocking their full potential at any scale, as well as to ensuring that progress made in some areas is not made at the expense of progress in others. The nature, strengths and potential impact of these interactions are largely context-specific and depend on the policy options and strategies chosen to pursue them.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is often referred to as an integrated agenda and its advocates frequently describe it as an ‘indivisible whole’. What does this mean in practice? First, in contrast to the conception of the Rio ‘pillars’ of economic development, social development and environmental protection, the three dimensions of sustainable development are described in the introductory sections of the 2030 Agenda as intertwined, cutting across the entire Agenda. These interactions also featured strongly in the deliberations of the Open Working Group that developed the sdgs. In fact, while most of the 17 sdgs have a clear starting (...)

When investigating the adoption of new sustainability practices and guidelines, most of the literature tends to focus on the effects of regulatory instruments and stakeholder pressure (Kolk, 2010; Spence et al., 2010), while the influence of internal organizational factors, such as organizational structural characteristics, governance, and performance, is often considered a black box

It thus took almost 50 years to vindicate the idea of “stakeholder capitalism” – that is, to acknowledge that the purpose of an economy is to serve society and to recognize that no business can succeed in the long term without serving its workers and communities. The World Economic Forum took the US Business Roundtable declaration as an opportunity to refresh the original Davos Manifesto and expand it by incorporating some of today’s emerging issues. This resulted in the Davos Manifesto 2020. It reiterates the fundamental importance of stakeholder responsibility, stating that the universal “purpose of a company is to (...)

PCSR literature perceives companies as not just economic but also ‘political’ actors that may contribute to the delivery of public goods and services that are generally considered state tasks (Scherer et al., 2016; Scherer and Palazzo, 2007, 2011) PCSR occurs when companies take over tasks that are essentially governmental functions with regard to the protection, facilitation and enabling of citizens' rights (Matten, Crane and Chapple, 2003) or filling institutional voids (Scherer and Palazzo, 2011; Vogel, 2008). A related shift in the role of the private sector in global politics is also evident in the SDGs, and the inclusion of industry (...)

There is an emerging consensus at international level that such transformations require governments to adopt new governance frameworks, covering, for example, long-term integrated planning, new stakeholder engagement mechanisms, economic, social and political policies, aligned budgeting practices and procedures, among others [8–10,29,30,33]. New frameworks are required to address the enormous and complex governance challenges posed by sustainable development and systemic transformations [9].

The 2030 Agenda refers to two main types of partnerships for implementing the SDGs. First, there is the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, to be led by governments, which is seen as a vehicle for improving international cooperation for implementation of the 2030 Agenda. It aims to “bring together governments, civil society, the private sector, the UN system and other actors to facilitate an intensive global engagement around implementation and mobilizing all available resources”.

Regardless of the intended definition, the 2030 Agenda views the two types [Governmental and stakeholder] of partnerships as distinct, yet indispensable to each other. SDG 17 and the targets 17.16 and 17.17 call for an enhanced Global Partnership and more effective public, public–private and civil society partnerships. The Global Partnership is really about solidarity, cooperative action and the governance of sustainable development. The SDGs are then to be achieved through a “partnership of partnerships” or global system of partnerships.

First, to initiate transformation, partnerships between winners and losers may be needed to build support and implement appropriate policies. For example, partnerships that compensate losers or give losers a stake in the future may be needed to overcome losers that use their incumbent positions, e.g., political influence, media connections, market power, to strategically block required changes, especially in areas of policy. This has almost certainly happened for climate policies, e.g., anti-climate activities of the U.S. fossil fuel lobby [88–91]. An example of a partnership to build support for transformation is the Just Transition Fund, which seeks to create economic opportunity (...)

First, a core feature of transformations is winners and losers and partnerships with losers may be important to initiate and smooth transformation. For example, fossil fuel producers will lose out to renewable energy suppliers under decarbonization. Livestock farmers will lose out to fruit and vegetable suppliers in the planetary diet [11,89–91]. The voluntary approach to partnerships has no mechanism for incentivizing losers to participate in transformation. This I refer to as the compensation problem since this participation issue is essentially about incentive compatibility. Presumably, the losers from transitions will not seek to partner even though they often have the capacity (...)

Fifth, voluntary partnerships may not be aligned to transition, i.e., address problems required to achieve it. This I refer to as the mis-alignment problem. In some cases, this is an incentive problem, ie., private incentives to partner (i.e., winnings) may diverge from the social benefits of achieving the transition, e.g., blue washing partnerships that advance special interests, e.g., by using the UN logo, but do not contribute to sustainable development [104]. In other instances, it could be a classification problem, i.e., the partnership contributes to societal wellbeing but not in a way that helps to achieve the required transformation.

Consider first the compensation problem. To increase the participation of losers in partnerships for transformation, governments have, in principle, two main policy instruments at their disposal: compensating transfers and regulation. The main idea behind the transfer approach is to create an incentive for losers to participate in, for instance, policy change, e.g., carbon tax, or capacity adjustment, e.g., decommission coal capacities, or making markets, e.g., preferential grid access to renewable suppliers. Similar compensating transfers have been proposed in the political economy literature of reform in transition economies, e.g., to buy the acceptance of insiders that stand to lose most from (...)

To encourage effectiveness [of SDG Partnerships; “volountary“ and “orchestrated“], a transparent, accountable and participatory monitoring system could be developed to provide information on these partnerships and their performance. Many recommended practices can be applied to monitor transformative partnerships, e.g., online registries, strict registration criteria, detailed regular reporting, delisting of non-performing partnerships, etc. (cf. Beisheim and Simon [64,71] for a summary of these recommendations). Furthermore, there could be a rating and reward system and a website tracking keystone transformation partnerships. Indeed, a stronger monitoring system seems more appropriate for missing transformative partnerships than for bottom-up partnerships where grassroot organizations and NGOs (...)

To overcome the geopolitical climate, one approach could focus on building a coalition of governments/stakeholders, willing or already leading on the SDGs, to implement a multi-level framework for (missing) transformative partnerships. The framework could cover policies, infrastructure, platforms, deliberative procedures, etc., aimed at identifying and implementing transformative partnerships. Lessons can be learnt from existing frameworks, e.g., Kenya SDG Partnership Platform, SIDS Partnership Framework, Ghana Civil Society Organization (CSO) Partnerships Platform, etc. The framework should aim to cover the six SDG transformations and to identify and implement the missing transformative partnerships by transformation. The approach could work first with energy decarbonization, (...)

To the degree to which the goal of pacification determines the Logos of technics, it alters the relation between technology and its primary object, Nature. Pacification presupposes mastery of Nature, which is and remains the object opposed to the developing subject. But there are two kinds of mastery: a repressive and a liberating one. The latter involves the reduction of misery, violence, and cruelty. In Nature as well as in History, the struggle for existence is the token of scarcity, suffering, and want. They are the qualities of blind matter, of the realm of immediacy in which life passively suffers (...)