Towards systemic and contextual priority setting for implementing the 2030 Agenda

By Nina Weitz, Henrik Carlsen, Mans Nilsson, K. Skånberg. Sustainability Science, 2017

483 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How the sustainable development goals (SDGs) interact with each other has emerged as a key question in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, as it has potentially strong implications for prioritization of actions and their effectiveness. So far, analysis of interactions has been very basic, typically starting from one SDG, counting the number of interactions, and discussing synergies and trade-offs from the perspective of that issue area. This paper pushes the frontier of how interactions amongst SDG targets can be understood and taken into account in policy and planning. It presents an approach to assessing systemic and contextual interactions of SDG targets, using a typology for scoring interactions in a cross-impact matrix and using network analysis techniques to explore the data. By considering how a target interacts with another target and how that target in turn interacts with other targets, results provide a more robust basis for priority setting of SDG efforts. The analysis identifies which targets have the most and least positive influence on the network and thus guides, where efforts may be directed (and not); where strong positive and negative links sit, raising warning flags to areas requiring extra attention; and how targets that reinforce each others’ progress cluster, suggesting where important cross-sectoral collaboration between actors is merited. How interactions play out is context specific and the approach is tested on the case of Sweden to illustrate how priority setting, with the objective to enhance progress across all 17 SDGs, might change if systemic impacts are taken into consideration.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aa4a4f3eefadd3f36e2d479afcda21b54816822

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. Volker Krey
2. Gunnar Luderer
3. D. P. Vuuren
4. Keywan Riahi
5. J. Minx
6. Pete Smith

In Global and Planetary Change

1. D. P. Vuuren
2. Volker Krey
3. Keywan Riahi
4. J. Minx

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. P. Azcárate
2. Volker Krey
3. E. García-González
4. Rocío Jiménez-Fontana
5. D. P. Vuuren
6. A. Popp
7. Keywan Riahi
8. Jérôme Hilaire

Citations in the corpus

• Education for Sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals: Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions and Knowledge (2020, background): “Addressing the SDGs without considering their interactions could cause a loss of their effectiveness [61] in building a fairer and more sustainable world.”
• Sustainable development goal interactions: An analysis based on the five pillars of the 2030 agenda (2020, methodology): “(International Council for Science, 2017; Nilsson, 2017; Weitz et al., 2018) to answer our central research question: Are potential synergies and trade-offs linked with the classification of the targets? The regression shows that targets having different classifications are more likely to have negat”
• Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice (2019, methodology): “Moreover, some of these frameworks focus just on a restricted number of goals [5] or targets [6], which may result in a selection bias.”
• Analysing interactions among Sustainable Development Goals with Integrated Assessment Models (2019, background): “However, the understanding of interactions among the policies targeting different SDGs presents a gap in the knowledge [2].”