From Commitments to Outcomes: How the Globalisation Implementation Gap Shapes SDG Trade-Offs and the Role of Governance

This study revisits the globalisation–sustainability nexus by focusing on the divergence between formal policy commitments and realised integration. While the 2030 Agenda assumes coherence across the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), empirical evidence increasingly points to uneven progress and systemic trade-offs. We introduce the concept of the globalisation implementation gap, defined as the normalised difference between de jure commitments and de facto integration, and examine its impact on SDG performance. Using a panel dataset of 101 countries over the period of 2000–2023 (N = 2197), we construct gap indices based on the KOF Globalisation framework and estimate two-way fixed-effects models with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors. The results reveal a significant negative association between implementation gaps and overall SDG performance. However, this relationship is highly heterogeneous across goals. Larger gaps are strongly negatively associated with social outcomes, particularly poverty reduction (SDG 1), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), and sustainable cities (SDG 11), while being positively associated with certain environmental outcomes, including responsible consumption (SDG 12) and apparent biodiversity protection (SDG 15)—the latter, however, is interpreted as associational only, given evidence of reverse causation in placebo lead-testing. Further analysis using panel threshold regression demonstrates that governance quality moderates this relationship non-linearly. Above a critical threshold of institutional quality, the magnitude of the negative gap–SDG association increases substantially, suggesting that stronger governance amplifies rather than buffers the association. In addition, Gaussian mixture clustering identifies three distinct country archetypes (Balanced, Informal, and Policy-Led Integrators). A diagnostic placebo lead test indicates that the SDG 15 association is associational rather than causal (likely reverse causation), and the result for SDG 15 is therefore reported with that caveat. Each is characterised by different gap structures and sustainability trade-offs. Overall, the findings shift the perspective from a uniform globalisation–SDG relationship to a goal-specific and governance-contingent framework. The study highlights the importance of aligning policy commitments with actual integration processes and provides policy-relevant insights for managing SDG trade-offs under conditions of globalisation. The headline gap–SDG association is conditional on the listwise sample of 101 countries with complete data and on Driscoll–Kraay variance estimation; sensitivity analyses show that the result attenuates under multiple imputation on the full 208-country panel and loses statistical significance under cluster-robust standard errors, while the political-channel decomposition and the governance threshold remain robust under both stress tests.