Policy innovation, regional integration and sustainable democracy-building : the millennium development goals as challenges and vehicles?

Abstract

This Special Issue aims to interconnect policy innovation, regional integration and sustainable democracy building with a view to providing socio-politically empowering insights in the midst of an acute global crisis of self-definition. It also aspires to contribute to a clearer elucidation of how to regionally respond to intertwined multilevel challenges and to search for alternative systemic paradigms in a context marked by an increasing combination of questioning and resilience. Furthermore, it focuses on the case study of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as both challenges and vehicles to achieve a fruitful retroactive cycle between a growingly interdependent set of determinant variables: socially thoughtful policy innovation mechanisms at the global level; the socioeconomic cohesion-enhancing potentialities of regional integration experiences; the evolution and outcomes of transitional politics in post-conflict states; a positive intertwining of new approaches to diplomacy and to development policy and the quality of democratic global governance.