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In this article we argue that international environmental law cannot continue to exist in its present form for the purpose of the Anthropocene. We show that analytically, international environmental law and its lawyers are unable to fully understand and respond to the complex governance challenges arising from a complex Earth system. Normatively, international environmental law has failed to provide appropriate norms to prevent humans from encroaching on Earth system limits. In a transformative sense, international environmental law has not been sufficiently ambitious to achieve the type of radical transformations necessary to ensure planetary integrity and socio-ecological justice. We need a new legal paradigm that is better suited for the purpose of the Anthropocene that must address international environmental law's analytical, normative and transformative concerns. We call this new paradigm earth system law. Building on our recent work, we offer here some preliminary thoughts about what we think the analytical, normative, and transformative dimensions of earth system law could and should entail, and why they would be more appropriate for the purpose of governing a complex Earth system in the Anthropocene.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed in 2015, chart an integrated and universal policy agenda to be realised by 2030. To this end, policy coherence for sustainable development is embedded in the SDGs as both an end in itself and a means through which to ensure that the fulfilment of some goals does not come at the expense of others. Yet, as a transformative process and outcome, policy coherence, as articulated in the SDGs, is narrowly predicated on technical means to address incoherencies that are inherently political. Using the case study of the Netherlands, where the concept of policy coherence has animated the development policy discourse for decades, we question whether such means necessarily improve policies for sustainability, asking what institutional arrangements established for the SDGs do through their (re)configuration and operation, and to what ends. Drawing on an extensive document analysis and a series of semi-structured interviews, we show that the means established to resolve policy incoherence in the Dutch context cast an apolitical façade that limits, if not prevents, possibilities for transformation. In particular, the focus on 'neutral' institutional arrangements and 'win-win' constructions in coherence building privileges the appearance of coherence over the more fundamental issue of its sustainability, decentring the key political question of what is, or is supposed to be, sustained.

Abstract
In 2015, the United Nations agreed on seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG s). These SDG s are not legally binding and lack strict enforcement mechanisms. International organizations that seek to implement these goals therefore rely on soft tools to influence governments and other actors, which is often described as "orchestration." This article focuses on regional governance and studies the yet unexplored role of the five UN Regional Commissions. These commissions seek to link the global ambitions of the SDG s with regional actors, contexts, and priorities. Drawing on extensive document analysis and a series of semistructured expert interviews, the article analyzes the orchestration efforts of all five Regional Commissions, focusing on agenda setting, coordination, and support. It concludes that instead of a unified orchestrating role, Regional Commissions play in practice a balancing role for agenda setting, a sharing role when it comes to coordination, and a conforming role in terms of support.

Abstract
In 2015, the United Nations agreed on seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to mobilize various actors, including international organizations, for a global transformation toward sustainability. The expectation was that international organizations would assist in the implementation of the goals and encourage, support, or coordinate others to work toward their achievement. But have international organizations over the last 8 years changed their behavior because of the SDGs? We present an in-depth examination of how the World Bank, an influential international organization with a broad development mandate, has engaged with the SDGs, especially with SDG 10 that seeks to reduce inequalities. Based on a mixed-method approach that included the study of 326 key documents and 23 interviews, we found no evidence of a policy impact of the SDGs on the World Bank. Instead, we conclude that the World Bank's engagement with the SDGs can best be described as "organizational jiu-jitsu," mobilizing the metaphor of the ancient martial art in which an actor uses the force and strength of the opponent to advance one's own position. We argue that the World Bank used the growing momentum of the SDGs to further its strategic objectives without being influenced by the SDGs in turn. The bank engaged with the SDGs selectively; efforts to integrate the goals into organizational practices remained limited; and their inclusion in country-level processes is primarily voluntary. These findings, which may be similar for other powerful international organizations, raise important questions about the ability of global goal-setting to realize a transformative impact.

AbstractIt is widely assumed that the fragmentation of global governance can affect coordination efforts among international institutions and organisations. Yet, the precise relationship between the fragmentation of global governance and the extent to which international organisations coordinate their activities remains underexplored. In this article, we offer new empirical evidence derived from the so‐called custodianship arrangements in which numerous international organisations have been mandated to coordinate data collection and reporting for 231 indicators of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These complex custodianship arrangements provide a fertile testing ground for theories on the relationship between fragmentation and coordination because the institutional arrangements for each of the 17 SDGs have emerged bottom–up with varying degrees of fragmentation. Through a comparative approach covering 44 custodian agencies and focusing on the most and least fragmented custodianship arrangements, we make three key contributions. First, we offer a novel operationalisation of institutional fragmentation and coordination. Second, we present empirical evidence in support of the claim that fragmentation negatively affects coordination. Third, we provide nuances to this claim by identifying factors that affect the strength of this relationship. Based on our analysis, we suggest further steps that might facilitate coordination in global sustainability governance.

The Anthropocene requires of us to rethink global governance challenges and effective responses with a more holistic understanding of the earth system as a single intertwined social-ecological system. Law, in particular, will have to embrace such a holistic earth system perspective in order to deal more effectively with the Anthropocene's predicaments. While a growing number of scholars have tried to reimagine law and legal scholarship in a more holistic way, these attempts remain siloed. What is required is a shared epistemic framework to enable and enhance collaborative intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and co-learning that go hand in hand with thorough transdisciplinary stakeholder engagement. We argue that the nascent concept of earth system law offers such an overarching epistemic framework. This article serves as an invitation to fellow explorers from various legal fields, other disciplines, and from a wide range of stakeholders to explore new frontiers in earth system law. Our aim is to further stimulate the study of earth system law, and to encourage collaboration and co-learning in a fertile epistemic space that we share.

Initiated in 2002, the International Environmental Agreements Data Base (IEADB) catalogs the texts, memberships, and design features of over 3,000 multilateral and bilateral environmental agreements. Using IEADB data, we create a comprehensive review of the evolution of international environmental law, including how the number, subjects, and state memberships in IEAs have changed over time. By providing IEA texts, the IEADB helps scholars identify and systematically code IEA design features. We review scholarship derived from the IEADB on international environmental governance, including insights into IEA membership, formation, and design as well as the deeper structure of international environmental law. We note the IEADB's value as a teaching tool to promote undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. The IEADB's structure and content opens up both broad research realms and specific research questions, and facilitates the ability of scholars to use the IEADB to answer those questions of greatest interest to them.

The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research community. This framework is composed of contextual conditions (transformations, inequality, Anthropocene and diversity), which capture what is being observed empirically, and five sets of research lenses (architecture and agency, democracy and power, justice and allocation, anticipation and imagination, and adaptiveness and reflexivity). Ultimately the goal is to guide and inspire the systematic study of how societies prepare for accelerated climate change and wider earth system change, as well as policy responses.

The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research community. This framework is composed of contextual conditions (transformations, inequality, Anthropocene and diversity), which capture what is being observed empirically, and five sets of research lenses (architecture and agency, democracy and power, justice and allocation, anticipation and imagination, and adaptiveness and reflexivity). Ultimately the goal is to guide and inspire the systematic study of how societies prepare for accelerated climate change and wider earth system change, as well as policy responses.