ABSTRACT
When the Balsillie School of International Affairs was founded ten years ago, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were unknown in the international community, which was focused instead on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Over the course of the past ten years, as there has been a significant shift in the focus from the vast yet difficult to quantify MDGs to the more tailored and quantifiable SDGs, there has been a concomitant shift in the ways in which global governance has been incorporated by – and incorporates – how the international community seeks to address the most fundamental challenges before it. These shifts demonstrate the ways in which global governance structures are essential to the achievement of the SDGs and how the SDGs, in turn, provide unique opportunities for global governance mechanisms in the present moment and in the future.
