Chapter 15 evaluates the challenge of SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals, which aims to address global issues related to sustainable economic development and reviews how alternative indicators reflect progress toward global sustainability. Although there have been recent advances in areas such as development aid, remittance flows, and technology access, international development funding remains a significant challenge. Global challenges like institutional inertia and vested interests, alongside private sector opportunities for sustainable economic development, are examined. Economics plays a vital role in acknowledging critical planetary limits and boundaries. This requires establishing global partnerships and international environmental agreements, improving how we secure and invest wealth from natural resource exploitation using Sovereign Wealth Funds, creating and correcting global markets, and raising funding for global public goods. Additionally, economics can help analyze ways to stimulate global innovation, increase private sector involvement, and implement safety nets like Universal Basic Income to reduce extreme poverty during environmental crises.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global collective action problem but humanity lacks a global government. A global government would create a mandatory compliance mechanism because this is the only way to incentivize a successful global effort. For almost three years, national governments have instead tried to reach a voluntary agreement in which countries agree on a fair allocation of the emissions reduction and the burden of costs. This has predictably failed and will continue to fail. The only hope for success is if some leading countries take domestic actions and apply carbon tariffs on imports from high-emission countries. These leading countries should try to join forces in “climate clubs” which, as they grow in economic importance, would motivate more countries to join, eventually reaching a tipping point for the development of a global compliance mechanism.