Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The UAE government has demonstrated a policy pledge to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a collaborative effort by building active partnership within different entities of the government as well as with non-state actors such as the civil society organizations (CSOs) and the private sector. After integrating climate action into the national plan as early as June 2012 (during the “Rio+20” conference), the government showed it the SDGs policy commitment by forming a National Committee on the SDGs in 2017. Alongside the government, the private sector and other non-state actors including various CSOs, media, and academic institutions have also been playing a supplementary role in fulfilling the government’s climate change agendas. However,they need a space to work closely with the National Committee . This exploratory research focuses on the role and potential impact of the UAE CSOs, as part of networked governance, in implementing the SDGs and the challenges they face. Two CSOs - Emirates Environmental Group and Azraq have been studied as cases the purpose of the study. As some reports show that the CSOs and private sector face internal challenges such as lack of awareness, under-developed processes and isolated initiatives (Rung, Fomichenko and El Chedrawi, 2019), therefore there is a need to understand how the CSOs could be better organized to work as a community, alongside government, to contribute to the SDGs in an effective manner.