Governing Climate-Smart Livestock in Kenya: a local-to-global study PhD (PhDKe1) Towards sustainable development governance mechanisms for cross-level and cross sector alignment: Defining SDG2 interactions with SDG5, SDG10 and SDG13 in Kenya

SDGs are a global effort to promote prosperity while protecting the planet set to be attained by 2030. While targets have been made globally, national governments take steps specific to their own country to contribute to this global agenda (Salvia et al., 2019). In each Nation different stakeholders are at play in this effort whether private businesses or the civil society. The stakeholders contribute to this agenda based on their own objectives driven by their specific interests and operate at different levels within various sectors of the economy. The result of this is each stakeholder cherry-picking an SDG that helps them achieve their objectives often without such organizations leveraging either other SDGs or stakeholders handling them. This results in missed opportunities for synergies, tradeoffs, duplication of efforts on the ground and a mismatch between national policies, multilateral development programmes and diverging private sector investments. This way of handling the SDGs prevents the achievement of the set goals by 2030 with recent assessments showing that inequality is widening, hunger is on the rise, ecosystems are eroding at an alarming rate, and climate change threatens the entire SDG agenda (Sachs et al. 2019; UN 2019). Working on the SDGs as a part of a whole instead of stand-alone would ideally be more effective to realize their achievement and address tradeoffs. This would mean a cooperation between different SDGs and therefore stakeholders. This study broadly investigates how governance mechanisms can be leveraged to enhance positive interactions between SDGs and minimize negative interactions across scales. As a proof of concept, the study in Kenya investigates how SDG2 (No hunger) interacts with SDG13 (Climate action), SDG10 (reduced inequalities) and SDG5 (gender equality) in their implementation.