Integration: the key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals

By M. Stafford-Smith, D. Griggs, Owen Gaffney, F. Ullah, Belinda Reyers, N. Kanie, B. Stigson, P. Shrivastava, M. Leach, D. O’Connell. Sustainability Science, 2016

766 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On 25 September, 2015, world leaders met at the United Nations in New York, where they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. These 17 goals and 169 targets set out an agenda for sustainable development for all nations that embraces economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection. Now, the agenda moves from agreeing the goals to implementing and ultimately achieving them. Across the goals, 42 targets focus on means of implementation, and the final goal, Goal 17, is entirely devoted to means of implementation. However, these implementation targets are largely silent about interlinkages and interdependencies among goals. This leaves open the possibility of perverse outcomes and unrealised synergies. We demonstrate that there must be greater attention on interlinkages in three areas: across sectors (e.g., finance, agriculture, energy, and transport), across societal actors (local authorities, government agencies, private sector, and civil society), and between and among low, medium and high income countries. Drawing on a global sustainability science and practice perspective, we provide seven recommendations to improve these interlinkages at both global and national levels, in relation to the UN’s categories of means of implementation: finance, technology, capacity building, trade, policy coherence, partnerships, and, finally, data, monitoring and accountability.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cdab85a25e1695da7b22bb5f52dae2db4f07d95

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Citations in the corpus

The Evolution of Sustainable Development Theory: Types, Goals, and Research Prospects (2019, background): “The core purpose of SDGs is that in the process of achieving poverty alleviation and promoting economic development, people should not survive at the cost of damaging the ecological environment, and must adhere to and implement the concept of SD [74].”
Mapping the Sustainable Development Goals Relationships (2020, background): “However, although this global initiative is an authoritative source of inspiration, the different interpretation of the SDGs calls for further efforts by policymaking to improve the understanding and scientific resonance of future SDG-like initiatives, and there are still open issues regarding SDG p”
The Reporting of SDGs by Quality, Environmental, and Occupational Health and Safety-Certified Organizations (2019, background): “However, there are still open issues regarding SDG performance measurements, operationalization, and interlinkages [7].”
Applying the SDGs to Cities: Business as Usual or a New Dawn? (2018, background): “The SDGs comprise 17 goals covering different aspects of sustainable development, as defined by the Brundtland commission [27,28].”
Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice (2019, background): “[38] demonstrate that greater attention must be paid to interlinkages in three dimensions: across sectors (e.”
Initial progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): a review of evidence from countries (2018, background): “Despite calls for greater attention to policy coherence and integrated planning for the SDGs (Stafford-Smith et al. 2017), such approaches are not widely embedded in national planning at this stage.”