Prioritising SDG targets: assessing baselines, gaps and interlinkages

By Cameron Allen, Graciela I. Metternicht, T. Wiedmann. Sustainability Science, 2018

363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) provide an integrated, evidence-based framework of targets and indicators to support national planning and reporting. For countries to begin implementation of the SDGs, it is critical to build the evidence base for action. The integrated nature of the SDG targets mean that progress towards one target is also linked through complex feedbacks to other targets, placing demands on science and research to support national implementation. A range of different tools and approaches are recommended by experts, and an emerging challenge is to coherently apply and combine these different approaches to support decision-making. This study makes a significant contribution to filling this knowledge gap, adopting a novel integrated assessment approach to support the prioritisation of SDG targets through a case study for 22 countries in the Arab region. The research adopts a multi-criteria analysis decision framework which assesses and prioritises SDG targets based upon their ‘level of urgency’, ‘systemic impact’, and ‘policy gap’. A range of complementary evidence- and science-based approaches are applied within the assessment framework, including baseline assessment and benchmarking of indicators, systems and network analysis of target interlinkages, and mapping of policy alignment and gaps. The study highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each of these analytical approaches, and demonstrates how they can be rapidly combined and applied.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8eea55e874439d96cc48a09da7cbd59f3057dd7f

How researchers see this paper

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

In Building and Construction

1. Jan Anton van Zanten
2. R. van Tulder

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Anne Warchold
2. P. Pradhan
3. Jan Anton van Zanten
4. R. van Tulder

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Anne Warchold
2. P. Pradhan
3. Jan Anton van Zanten
4. R. van Tulder
5. C. Kroll

Citations in the corpus

• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Are we successful in turning trade-offs into synergies? (2019, background): “…goals (Scherer et al., 2018), or with a case study to facilitate the prioritization of SDG targets for 22 countries in the Arab region (Allen et al., 2019), or at the local level in Sweden for selected SDG interactions (Engström et al., 2019), or relating urban scaling with SDG 11…”
• Towards nexus-based governance: defining interactions between economic activities and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2020, methodology): “One method quantifies interactions between SDGs using public statistics (e.g. Spaiser et al. 2017; Allen et al. 2019; Bali Swain and Yang-Wallentin 2020).”
• Translating Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interdependencies into Policy Advice (2019, background): “An alternative proposal for establishing a priority order that underlines the importance of systems analysis and network analysis has been presented by Allen, Metternicht and Wiedmann [21].”