Enhancing Governance for Sustainability

Pathways to a sustainable post-COVID world – reports from the IIASA-ISC consultative platform

Enhancing Governance for Sustainability

The authors suggest that global cooperation is enhanced in mission-oriented ways to drive governance reform at all levels. This crisis may constitute an opportunity to enable higher levels of change in international governance arrangements, particularly with a view to mainstreaming a risk perspective and advocating for more reflexive, transformative governance, thus adding new dynamics to ongoing global governance reform initiatives.

The report’s recommendations include increasing awareness and understanding of compound and systemic risks across governance arrangements at multiple scales to be better prepared for similar crises in the future; moving systemic resilience center-stage; and devising and implementing a science-based tracking mechanism to assess the degree of alignment of COVID-19 recovery packages with the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals while focusing on generating systemic resilience.


This report is one of five publications developed through the IIASA-ISC Consultative Science Platform “Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID world” and launched in January 2021.

Skip to content