In the last 15 years, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have framed global development efforts. Volunteer action for development has contributed to the MDGs in a wide variety of ways The new agenda for sustainable development will frame global peace and development efforts in 2016-2030 in all countries, regardless of their development level. It has a wider scope and aims at tackling both vertical and cross-cutting issues. It also explicitly recognizes volunteer groups as stakeholders to achieve the new set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , also known as global goals. Lessons learnt from the MDGs MDGs implementation showed that sustainable development requires approaches that complement technical, financial and institutional measures. To achieve the SDGs, people’s engagement in planning, implementation and monitoring needs to be facilitated and new partnerships forged. Volunteers will be instrumental in this process. This has strongly emerged ...