Die Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) der Vereinten Nationen sind ein universell gültiges System verschiedener Zielindikatoren mit denen bis 2030 auf globaler Ebene eine Transformation zu nachhaltiger Entwicklung erreicht werden soll. Die SDG lösen die so genannten Millennium Development Goals (MDG) von 2001 ab. Aber was macht die SDG so besonders? Ein internationales Autorenteam aus Wissenschaft und Praxis hat sich in diesem Sammelband aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären und thematischen Blickwinkeln dem komplexen Phänomen der SDG und der Politik der Festlegung messbarer Ziele genähert.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) aim to provide humanity with a global roadmap to sustainability. Official SDG indicators have been intensively developed, and they have a prominent and pronounced role as a key monitoring and policy instrument. Furthermore, various complementary or alternative indicator sets have been introduced at the global, regional and national levels. This article focuses on the risks related to the national indicators. The analysis is based on experiences from the preparation processes of sustainable development indicators in Finland and insights from indicator professionals and stakeholders in Finland and Germany. The risks related to overuse, nonuse and misuse of indicators are analyzed from the perspectives of indicator contents, processes of production and communication and external context factors. Opportunities for avoiding different risks and improving the desired societal impacts and influences of indicator usage are discussed. The concept of risk is helpful in terms of empirical diagnosis and for formulating mitigation recommendations.

Sustainability communication is of increasing importance. While sustainability communication in traditional media has already been well researched, more research is needed about social media platforms in this regard. By focusing on sustainability communication on TikTok, this study makes an important contribution to the literature. More specifically, we investigate how eco influencers communicate sustainability on TikTok. Findings from content analysis (n = 242) reveal that eco influencers cover a wide range of different topics. Individual responsibility attributions are dominant in short videos posted on the platform. Videos presenting broader perspectives are more likely to refer to empirical evidence. Implications for science and environmental communicators are discussed.

In this paper, we bring together the literature on citizen science and on deliberative democracy and epistemic injustice. We argue that citizen science can be seen as one element of “deliberative systems,” as described by Mansbridge et al. But in order to fulfil its democratic potential, citizen science needs to be attentive to various forms of exclusion and epistemic injustice, as analyzed by Fricker, Medina and others. Moreover, to tap the potentials of citizen science from the perspective of deliberative democracy, it needs to move towards a more empowered approach, in which citizens do not only deliver data points, but also, in invited or uninvited settings, participate in discussions about the goals and implications of research. Integrating citizen science into the deliberative systems approach embeds it in a broader framework of democratic theory and suggests the transmission of certain practical strategies (e.g., randomized sampling). It can also contribute to realism about both the potentials and the limits of citizen science. As part of a deliberative system, citizen science cannot, and need not, be the only place in which reforms are necessary for creating stronger ties between science and society and for aligning science with democratic values.