Higher Education and SDG16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

by Sarah E. Mendelson (Editor)

Overview

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.

Traditional approaches to teaching, researching, and advancing human rights need a refresh. The Sustainable Development Goals, the Leave No One Behind ethos, and the SDG16 agenda for peaceful, just, and inclusive communities offer a refreshed way to research and teach human rights and social justice in the twenty first century.

Exploring how to ground an emerging paradigm shift and field build the next generation so that they approach human rights with a different lens and set of skills, this edited collection presents local case studies from cities and communities and considers their meaning for the rights movement globally. Emphasizing the need to reduce silos between domestic and international work, the chapters combine build on local “right to the city” activism and the global human rights cities movement to examine a local-global approach informed by city-level data, analyses, and practice.

Higher Education and the Sustainable Development Goals is a series of 17 books that address each of the SDGs through the lens of higher education. Adopting a solutions-based approach, each book focuses on how higher education is advancing delivery of Agenda 2030. The series is edited by Wendy Purcell, Professor with Rutgers Universityand Academic Research Scholar with Harvard University; Emeritus Professor and UniversityPresident Emerita.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804558959
Publisher:	Emerald Publishing Limited
Publication date:	02/10/2025
Series:	Higher Education and the Sustainable Development Goals
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Amb. Sarah E. Mendelson is Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, leading an initiative to create a Center for Sustainable Futures.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction: SDG 16, Higher Education, and the Benefits of New Approaches to Teaching and Researching Human Rights; Sarah E. Mendelson
Chapter 2. Closing Access to Justice Gaps Globally; Elizabeth Andersen
Chapter 3. Judicial institutions, SDGs, and the 2030 Agenda across Latin America and the Caribbean; Alvaro Herrero
Chapter 4 . The potential of Participatory and Experiential Learning for the Promotion of Human Rights and the SDGs; Thomas Probert
Chapter 5. Toward More Just Societies: The SDG Agenda and Innovations in Higher Education; Ariel C. Armony
Chapter 6. Between Localization and Realization: Partnerships toward Advancing Human Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals in Los Angeles; Gaea Morales, Anthony Tirado Chase, Michelle E. Anderson, and Sofia Gruskin
Chapter 7. Unjust Recovery in the Wake of the Pandemic and the Need to Reframe Human Rights Using the SDGs; Sarah E. Mendelson

Editorial Reviews

Sarah Mendelson and her collaborators make a compelling case for the Sustainable Development Goals as a promising project for re-energizing progress on social justice, economic development, and human rights. In their vision, law remains a guiding standard, but the SDG approach puts law to work with a tool kit of community organization, operational know-how, and rigorously generated data. Academe has a central role to play in educating the new generation of principled pragmatists in the outlook, skills, and information they will need to boost rights and justice to a higher level.

Jack Snyder

The sobering fact is that the world is falling short of achieving the United Nations’ Sustainability Goals (SDGs). But the contributors to this volume firmly reject the idea that the goals should be abandoned. Instead of running away from the SDG project, the authors here focus on practical next steps toward global sustainability and human rights. The chapters explore a range of novel ways of localizing the goals. They outline new methods of engaging the next generation of policymakers and scholars in human rights and development work, and highlight important leadership roles that universities can play in effectuating the SDG goals going forward. In the process, contributors pinpoint ongoing – but surmountable — barriers to SDG implementation, such as the failure of government entities and researchers to capture disaggregated data that would support successful tailoring of policies to human rights-based goals. This is a book for those who understand that failure is not an option when it comes to the SDGs, and who are ready to lean into a sustainable future through concrete action.

Martha F. Davis