Biocracy and the 2030 Agenda: a systemic ecological governance framework for accelerating progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals

A decade after adoption of the 2030 Agenda, progress remains insufficient and uneven, while implementation continues to be constrained by fragmented institutions, policy trade-offs, short political time horizons and weak translation of ecological limits into routine governance. This conceptual analysis develops Biocracy as a systemic ecological governance framework for addressing that implementation problem. Biocracy is defined as “Government of the living, by the living, for the living” and organises governance around ten principles concerning non-human rights and representation, ecological limits on demographic and spatial pressure, resource use and waste, regenerative agriculture, ecological socialisation, bio-compatible settlement and local stewardship. The article advances earlier Biocracy publications by converting preliminary principle–SDG associations into a mechanism-based and testable framework. Three types of relationship are distinguished: direct causal, indirect causal and enabling institutional. Five pathways of potential acceleration are then specified: preventive, institutional, systems, behavioural and subsidiarity/proximity acceleration. The analysis further identifies an institutional chain linking ecological recognition and representation to adaptive limits, executive coordination, adjudication, monitoring and corrective feedback. Two analytical tables consolidate the principle–SDG pathways and propose observable indicators for future assessment. The argument is deliberately conditional: because no complete Biocratic state has been implemented, the article does not claim that Biocracy has already accelerated SDG outcomes. It instead establishes a theoretically coherent governance hypothesis whose mechanisms can be examined through comparative, longitudinal and process-tracing research. The principal contribution is to connect SDG policy coherence with ecological constitutionalisation and feedback-responsive governance, thereby treating the conditions that sustain life as an organising constraint on development rather than as a separate environmental policy sector.