Joshua Castellino, member of the global SDSN Leadership Council and Dean of the School of Law at Middlesex University, looked at the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the lens of “global justice”.

The pursuit of SDGs will keep raising questions of justice, which need to be constantly reinterpreted within societies, between societies and in relation to future generations. The prominence given to issues such as climate change and inequality, as well as the call for a variety of actors to behave in a manner that promotes sustainability for all, suggests that concerns of justice are already built into the SDGs. After engaging with what "global justice" may entail and why it is important, this presentation set about examining the SDGs for their conceptual and practical contribution to it.

Can the SDGs create momentum to transform political and economic structures that have led to individual deprivations in the past? Can they play a role in guiding "just" responses to the global refugee crisis?  Is "global justice", in turn, a useful lens to promote fair benefit and risk sharing in SDG implementation across societies and countries? Joshua Castellino seeked to identify pathways and challenges to realizing the vision(s) encapsulated within the goals, drawing conclusions on the extent to which the SDGs and adherence to them could further the agenda of global justice.

The discussion was subsequently joined by Christoph Bals, Policy Director at Germanwatch, and Sven Grimm, Senior Researcher at DIE and Extraordinary Associate Professor at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). The event was moderated by Johannes Blankenbach, Researcher in DIE's Training Department and in the SDSN Germany Secretariat.

The Public Lecture is part of a lecture series from the Managing Global Governance (MGG) context.

The MGG Academy, conducted for the 13th consecutive time this year, is aimed at highly qualified young professionals from rising powers. It comprises among other elements the two-month Global Governance School (GGS) at the DIE, training units for soft skills development as well as a two-week seminar at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. MGG is implemented on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).