Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement stand as milestone diplomatic achievements. However, immense discrepancies between political commitments and governmental action remain. Combined national climate commitments fall far short of the Paris Agreement's 1.5/2°C targets. Similar political ambition gaps persist across various areas of sustainable development. Many therefore argue that actions by nonstate actors, such as businesses and investors, cities and regions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are crucial. These voices have resonated across the United Nations (UN) system, leading to growing recognition, promotion, and mobilization of such actions in ever greater numbers. This article investigates optimistic arguments about nonstate engagement, namely: (a) “the more the better”; (b) “everybody wins”; (c) “everyone does their part”; and (d) “more brings more.” However, these optimistic arguments may not be matched in practice due to governance risks. The current emphasis on quantifiable impacts may lead to the under‐appreciation of variegated social, economic, and environmental impacts. Claims that everybody stands to benefit may easily be contradicted by outcomes that are not in line with priorities and needs in developing countries. Despite the seeming depoliticization of the role of nonstate actors in implementation, actions may still lead to politically contentious outcomes. Finally, nonstate climate and sustainability actions may not be self‐reinforcing but may heavily depend on supporting mechanisms. The article concludes with governance risk‐reduction strategies that can be combined to maximize nonstate potential in sustainable and climate‐resilient transformations.This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

This article offers a comparative account of the engagement of two key transnational social movements, the agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) and the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), in global climate discussions, particularly the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since 2007 these movements have each developed their own framing of climate justice and sought political and legal opportunities to advocate rights-based policies. LVC has advanced a development paradigm grounded in food sovereignty and agroecology, and IIPFCC has sought to increase indigenous participation in United Nations climate schemes and regain control over ancestral territory.

Innovation has been central to development. Yet most assumptions around innovation stem from values derived by capitalist economies such as growth, individualism, and competition which prove to only widen inequalities and promote unsustainable environmental models of extraction and consumption. This paper explores what values and assumptions would underlie innovation in development if based on an alternative ontological and epistemological stance linked to the Andean cosmovision of Buen Vivir. We focus on the case of an Indigenous-led initiative in the Andes of Peru to highlight the underpinnings of its innovation processes. In doing so, we aim to contribute to both development studies literature and innovation studies by exposing the limitations to the accepted Western approach to innovation and exploring what decolonising innovation in development would look like.

While states have legal rights over more than 60% of the world’s forests, around one billion people inhabit and “manage” them often without proper legal recognition. Many countries are moving towards conferring legal rights over forested land to a broad range of private actors such as individuals or communities. However, and perhaps not surprisingly, two thirds of on-going violent conflicts involving rural communities are driven by contested claims over land and resources. In many Latin American countries, statutes and regulations on consultation have recently become strategic issues, even though these laws are suppose to comply with treaties and declarations signed by states some years or even decades before. Is it reasonable to claim that international approaches to indigenous rights, such as the ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) have actually begun to influence domestic regulations in a comprehensive manner? In that sense, what is the concrete impact of these approaches in policy-making processes? Is the recognition of the right to consultation bringing improvement to environmental conditions in the jurisdictions concerned? These questions are hereby addressed by means of two case studies where laws on consultation had parliamentary approval and were promoted by State’s agencies, but were contested by indigenous peoples’ movements: the framing of the Peruvian National Law on Consultation (Law No. 29785) and the ad hoc Law on Consultation (Law No. 222) over a planned road through the Indigenous Territory and Isiboro-Sécure National Park, regarded as the basis for the Bolivian Law on Consultation.

The accountability of market‐driven sustainability governance has long been controversial, reflecting the deeply political processes through which accountability contests shape governance transformations. Drawing on illustrative examples from internationally traded agro‐commodity sectors in the critical case of Indonesia, this paper examines the contested processes of accountability that have accompanied a recent period of institutional change in sustainability governance. Amidst rising critiques of global certification, there has been a parallel expansion of governance approaches that prioritise capability development over regulatory enforcement and engage more intensively with governments in commodity‐producing countries. As alternative governance models gain influence, tensions between competing governance stakeholders and agendas are mirrored and amplified through parallel accountability contests, in which distributional conflicts between global and local stakeholders are intensified by pressures to adopt contentious systems of compliance verification. While accountability gaps associated with contrasting institutional models produce strong pressures for partial institutional convergence, such convergence coexists with new forms of institutional fragmentation, as competition between global and national certification expands to encompass competition with localised capacity‐building and jurisdictional approaches. Analysis highlights the often‐neglected role of accountability politics in shaping institutional change, while raising pressing questions about the distributional implications of contemporary shifts away from global certification governance models.