THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS, or SDGs, are a framework of social, economic, and environmental global goals to be achieved by 2030. The SDGs were adopted by 193 member states of the United Nations in September 2015, and have become a point of reference for charting progress in countries around the world. The SDGs, also known as the Global Goals or the 2030 Agenda, address challenges that affect individuals, countries, and the world at large. From the beginning, it’s been clear that the SDGs must be closely tied to the Data Revolution – a movement, also defined and framed by the United Nations (UN), to use data for innovation and social good. The concept of the Data Revolution recognizes that we now face “an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment.”
The Data Revolution can harness many kinds of data for use, including traditional government data, administrative and financial data, geospatial and earth observation data, citizen-generated data, and data from businesses. Rather than collecting data only as snapshots in time, as census data is collected, the Data Revolution envisions using real-time dynamic data to achieve global, national, and local goals, including the SDGs, and to measure progress in achieving them.
The SDGs have the potential to bring together diverse stakeholders around the use of data. Businesses and nonprofit organizations are integrating the SDGs into their planning and analysis, as are international non-governmental institutions like the World Economic Forum and initiatives such as the UN Global Compact. National and sub-national governments around the world are also adopting the SDGs and integrating them into their local strategies. The SDGs are global goals that are beginning to have a local impact. They are providing a common context for governments to engage with stakeholders around shared goals.
At the same UN General Assembly where the SDGs were adopted, a new organization called the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) was also launched. The Partnership brings together governments, international agencies, businesses, civil society groups, and statistics and data communities “to build an enabling environment for harnessing the data revolution for sustainable development.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The SDGs are part of a history of multilateral efforts to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient pathway. Intergovernmental efforts formally began with the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. The phrase “sustainable development” was adopted and popularized in 1987, in the report of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, known widely by the name of its chairwoman, Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The Brundtland Commission provided a definition of sustainable development that was used for the next 25 years: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This intergenerational concept of sustainable development was adopted at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment & Development in Rio de Janeiro. Over time, the definition of sustainable development has evolved to capture a more holistic approach, linking the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic development, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. This three-part vision of sustainable development was emphasized at the 2012 Rio+20 Conference. The SDGs aim to provide a global framework for cooperation to address the three dimensions of sustainable development within an ethical framework based on:
(i) the right to development for every country,
(ii) Human rights and social inclusion,
(ii) Convergence of living standards across countries, and
(iv) shared responsibilities and opportunities.
THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGS)
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals form a cohesive and integrated package of global aspirations the world commits to achieving by 2030. Building on the accomplishments of their predecessors the MDGs, the SDGs address the most pressing global challenges of our time, calling upon collaborative partnerships across and between countries to balance the three dimensions of sustainable development — economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion.
Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.
Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.
Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries.
Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
The SDGs build upon the success of the 8 Millennium Development Goals agreed upon in 2000 to halve extreme poverty by 2015 as a midpoint towards eradicating poverty in all its forms. The MDGs focused on the many dimensions of extreme poverty, including low incomes, chronic hunger, gender inequality, lack of schooling, lack of access to health care, and deprivation of clean water and sanitation, among others. They achieved some great successes, for example halving the likelihood of a child dying before their fifth birthday. Yet, many countries did not make sufficient progress, particularly on environmental sustainability, and it is now widely recognized that additional work is needed to achieve the ultimate goal of ending extreme poverty in all its forms. Further, there is consensus that the scope of the MDGs needs to be broadened to reflect the challenges the world faces today. Around 700 million people still live below the World Bank’s poverty line, and billions more suffer deprivations of one form or another. Many societies have experienced a rise of inequality even as they have achieved economic progress on average. Moreover, the entire world faces dire environmental threats of human-induced climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Poor governance, official corruption, and in dramatic cases overt conflict, afflict much of the world today.
THE BENEFITS OF GOAL-BASED PLANNING
Why do we need Sustainable Development Goals? Do global goals matter? The evidence from the MDGs is powerful and encouraging. Global goals such as the MDGs and the SDGs complement international conventions and other tools of international law by providing a globally shared normative framework that fosters collaboration across countries, mobilizes all stakeholders, and inspires action. Well-crafted goals are able to accomplish the following:
• Provide a shared narrative of sustainable development and help guide the public understands of complex challenges. The SDGs will raise awareness and educate governments, businesses, civil society leaders, academics, and ordinary citizens about the complex issues that must be addressed. Children everywhere should learn the SDGs as shorthand for sustainable development.
• Unite the global community and mobilize stakeholders. Community leaders, politicians, government ministries, academics, nongovernmental organizations, religious groups, international organizations, donor organizations, and foundations will be motivated to come together for a common purpose around each SDG. The shared focus on time-bound quantitative goals will spur greater mobilization, promote innovation, and strengthen collaboration within epistemic communities or networks of expertise and practice. The experience in public health under the MDGs provides a powerful illustration of how communities can mobilize around time-bound goals.
• Promote integrated thinking and put to rest the futile debates that pit one dimension of sustainable development against another. The challenges addressed by the SDGs are integrated and must be pursued in combination, rather than one at a time. As a result, SDGs cannot be ordered by priority. All are equally important and work in harmony with the others. Each goal should be analyzed and pursued with full regard to the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, and environmental).
• Support long-term approaches towards sustainable development. The goals, targets, and indicators will allow public and private actors to identify what is needed and chart out long-term pathways to achieve sustainable development, including resources, timelines, and allocation of responsibilities. This long-term perspective can help to insulate the planning process from short-term political and business imperatives.
• Define responsibilities and foster accountability. In particular, the goals can empower civil society to ask governments and businesses how they are working towards every one of the new goals. Timely, accurate data on progress is crucial for effective accountability. The SDGs must drive improvements in data and monitoring systems, which look to capitalize on the “data revolution,” i.e. significant improvements in local, national, and global data collection, processing, and dissemination, using both existing and new tools.
New opportunities for sustainable development
As noted, the SDG framework has been designed to address today’s challenges. While some trends, such as human-induced climate change or social exclusion, are moving in the wrong direction, other development trends offer reasons for hope. We live in an “a time of immense opportunity,” with the end of extreme poverty in sight. There have been tremendous technological advances that have led to improved development outcomes, particularly in the key fields of health, energy, nanotechnologies, systems design, and especially information and communications technologies (ICTs), which have dramatically improved global interconnectedness and opened vast new opportunities for productivity advances across the world economy. The SDG agenda sets out five key opportunities for development that is
(i) inclusive, (ii) universal, (iii) integrated, (iv) locally-focused, and (v) technology-driven.
Inclusive Development
“All stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan [SDG Agenda].” The SDGs will engage multiple stakeholders at all levels of society to actualize the agenda. No one is left behind or left out, as “governments, international organizations, the business sector and other non-state actors and individuals must contribute.” Participatory processes will allow stakeholders to give voice to the needs and interests of the people they represent, enabling better-planned and better-informed initiatives.
Universal Development
The MDGs set out goals mainly for developing countries, to which rich countries added assistance through finances and technology. In contrast, the SDGs are “universal goals” that apply to all countries and “involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike”, “taking into account different national realities.”Countries are asked to build on current policy instruments and frameworks to meet the goals and targets, taking into account differences in national contexts and development levels. Achievement of any of the SDGs will require concerted global efforts to achieve all of them. The 2030 Agenda is not about what the rich should do for the poor, but what all countries together should do for the global well-being of this generation and those to come.
Integrated Development
The SDG Agenda moves away from siloed approaches to development and promotes the integration of the economy, environment, and society. The SDGs are “integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development.”The success of one leads to the success of all. Included in this is the need for good governance and strong social networks, which translates into a framework focused on “people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships.” For example, a country’s ability to combat hunger is directly connected to its agricultural system, its strategy for rural development, economic and income growth, management of natural resources, level of infrastructure, natural disaster mitigation plans, and the health of its population, requiring that many actors work together across and outside of government.
Locally-Focused Development
Local authorities and communities are responsible for the realization of the goals at local scales, recognizing in particular interdependent relationships between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. The Rio+20 follow-up document, Key Messages and Process on Localizing the SDG Agenda, notes that “many of the critical challenges of implementing the SDG Agenda will depend heavily on local planning and service delivery, community buy in and local leadership, well-coordinated with the work of other levels of governance.” A bottom-up approach can be successful in achieving transformational sustainable pathways through direct contact with communities, which informs national-level policy decisions. Cities will be particularly important to this process. By 2050, the world’s urban population is projected to grow by 2.5 billion people, to over 70% of the world living in cities, with approximately 90% of the growth expected to be in the developing regions of Asia and Africa. Cities are the locus of worldwide consumption and production. The contribution of cities to global output is expected to rise to three-quarters in 2050. Placing attention, investment, and innovation in cities will bring the world closer to the SDGs.
Technology-driven Development
Rapid technological change, particularly in ICT and data, but also in material science, manufacturing (e.g. 3D printing), genomics, and other areas, is deepening the integration of the world economy and enabling breakthroughs in productivity across the economy, with a significant potential to speed the pace of global development and economic convergence. Of great note for the SDGs is the current “data revolution,” characterized by an explosion of available data resources and rapidly evolving technologies for analyzing those data. One key lesson learned from the MDGs is that a lack of reliable data can undermine governments’ ability to set goals, optimize investment decisions, manage development processes, and measure progress. Drawing from this MDG experience, in 2014 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon advocated for the harnessing of the current data revolution in support of sustainable development. New technologies also offer tremendous opportunities to deliver public services, including healthcare, education, and basic infrastructure to more people at lower cost. E-government can offer new approaches to manage the complex and dynamic relationships between institutions and stakeholders with diverse objectives and competencies, assess and integrate initiatives at different governance levels, and support synergies to meet different goals.
TOOLS FOR DESIGNING SDG STRATEGIES AND ROADMAPS
Backcasting
Sustainable development requires a long-term transformation, which in turn requires longer-term planning processes than the usual annual budgets or medium-term expenditure frameworks. The SDG framework calls for 15-year strategies that provide national roadmaps and coordinate stakeholders and activities for collective action. Some of the SDGs will require planning over a period of several decades. For example, SDG 13 on climate change will necessitate the development of deep decarbonization pathways to 2050.
A best practice in long-term planning is backcasting. This means “generating a desirable future, and then looking backwards from that future to the present in order to strategize and to plan how it could be achieved.” In the context of the SDGs, backcasting is a problem-solving framework that envisions how development should progress, with intermediate actions based on long-term quantitative targets. Unlike forecasting, which estimates the probabilities of various outcomes based on expected trends, backcasting begins with a projection of the desired outcome(s), and works backwards to understand what is needed for their realization.
Needs assessments and costing
Countries must mobilize adequate public and private resources to invest in key sustainable development areas. In some cases, regulations, taxes or subsidies can help redirect private investments towards supporting SDG outcomes, such as a shift from coal-fired power plants to solar power generation. In other cases, national budget outlays should be increased to finance a scaling-up of public services and infrastructure investments. If private and domestic public resources are insufficient to finance the SDGs they need to be complemented by non-concessional and concessional international public finance, including official development assistance (ODA) for the poorest countries.
Conducting needs assessments to determine the volume of public and private investment required is a complex undertaking that will require significant work in most countries. To start the process, countries may consider six major investment areas that cover the principal investments needed to achieve the goals:
1. Health
2. Education
3. Social protection
4. Food security and sustainable agriculture
5. Infrastructure
6. Ecosystem services and biodiversity
Another important SDG investment need — though one requiring vastly lower volumes of incremental financing — is data collection, analysis, and dissemination. This item is considered in the next section.
Global sector needs assessments are available that can help provide a sense of the scale of incremental investments needed to achieve the SDGs. Investment Needs to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in Low- and Lower-Middle-Income Countries reviews common investment needs expressed in US dollars per capita or as a share of GDP that can provide a starting point for a more thorough analysis.
Some important factors to keep in mind when estimating SDG investment needs include:
• Make SDG needs assessments transparent. Sound needs assessments help understand how ambitious goals can be achieved over the long term. Such analyses should be transparent so that key stakeholders can review assumptions and results.
• Ensure that climate change adaptation and mitigation needs are accounted for. Tackling climate change will be key to achieving the SDGs. Many investments in mitigation and adaptation — such as a low-carbon energy plant or climate-resilient infrastructure — are operationally indistinguishable from investments in “development” and must be structured and executed together.
• Include operating and capital costs. Both sets of expenditure must be financed if the SDGs are to be achieved, so an SDG needs assessment must address operating and capital expenditure.
• Consider economy-wide effects of SDG investment needs. As described in Investment Needs to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in Low- and Lower-Middle-Income Countries, SDG implementation is expected to have significant spillovers into the larger socioeconomic conditions within a country. Some important effects that might include supply-side effects on economic growth, changes in the labor market, and domestic government resource mobilization.
On the basis of SDG needs assessments countries, regions, or cities can develop a financing strategy that distinguishes between (i) private financing opportunities, (ii) incremental government resource mobilization as well as opportunities for greater efficiency in government spending, and — where needed — (iii) international public financing (concessional and non-concessional). Please refer to Investment Needs to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in Low- and Lower-Middle-Income Countries for more details on how to conduct SDG needs assessments and sound financing analyses.
Preparing to monitor the SDGs: setting indicators and harnessing the data revolution
The success of the SDG Agenda hangs on careful monitoring of our progress. As recognized in the SDG outcome document, Transforming Our World, “quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data will be needed to help with the measurement of progress and to ensure that no one is left behind. Such data is key to decision-making.” The high visibility given to indicators and data collection within the SDG dialogues, and throughout the final outcome document, reflects a major shift in recent years. Key lessons learned from the MDGs underscore that high-quality, disaggregated data is essential to ensure equitable progress against goals and targets. We have learned that data will only drive policy and decision-making if it is timely, and that there are sizeable gaps in our knowledge that require a change in the way we collect data and evidence.
Collecting reliable data to support our measurement of progress on the SDGs will depend on three key processes:
1. Crafting a robust set of national monitoring indicators
2. Strengthening statistical capacity
3. Capitalizing on the data revolution, harnessing new technologies and new sources of data
Achieving better quality, high frequency data in support of the SDGs will require a step-change in the way governments and National Statistical Offices (NSOs) do business. NSOs will remain the key functionaries in the process of generating data to monitor and manage sustainable development at the national level, but they must work within the context of a broader ecosystem that includes additional data contributors including local and regional governments, private companies, academia, civil society, and citizens. NSOs must commence an evolution from data producer to coordinator, managing the various data inputs from the broader ecosystem, ensuring data quality, comparability and harmonization. This will ensure that data streams are relevant and useful for national policy makers and other stakeholders looking to manage and monitor progress.
Over the course of the last 2 years SDSN has developed a set of guidance documents on designing SDG-relevant indicators, assessing the quality of statistical systems for SDG monitoring, and on the data revolution for sustainable development.
Crafting a robust set of national SDG indicators
Indicators will be the backbone of monitoring progress towards the SDGs at the local, national, regional, and global levels. A sound indicator framework will turn the SDGs and their targets into a management tool to help countries and the global community development implementation strategies and allocate resources accordingly. Indicators will also serve as a report card to measure progress towards sustainable development and to help ensure the accountability of all stakeholders for achieving the SDGs. The monitoring framework and indicators for the SDGs should reflect the lessons learned from the MDGs, namely that timeliness is crucial for the indicators to inform decision-making. MDG data often came with lags of three or more years, making it irrelevant for planning purposes. And data needs to be carefully disaggregated to track equity in achievement.
Countries will need to develop a set of national indicators that align with context-specific priorities and concerns to help track progress on the SDG agenda. These indicators should build upon existing monitoring methods used by the national statistical office or system, while also aiming to be aligned with the set of global monitoring indicators currently being devised by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators under the auspices of the UN Statistical Commission. The process of devising national indicators needs to start quickly to allow for the setting of baselines. Review processes should be conducted in partnership with Parliaments, as well as through the global follow-up and review process under the High-Level Political Forum.
The SDSN has been working on guidelines for developing robust global, regional, and national SDG indicators for the past two years. Through intensive global discussions involving thousands of experts from UN organizations, academia, civil society, business, and a large number of national statistical offices (NSOs), it has devised a set of principles for framing indicators, as well as a set of 100 key indicators which have been offered as input to the global indicator dialogues.
Indicators for SDG monitoring should be:
1. Limited in number and globally harmonized: Recognizing that capacities vary and data collection is resource-intensive, the SDG indicators should build upon existing data sources and be limited in number. Global indicators should be complemented by national indicators designed to cover a country’s specific challenges.
2. Simple, single-variable indicators with straightforward policy implications: Indicators need to be simple to compile and easy to interpret and communicate. They must also have clear policy implications. Composite indices should be avoided where possible since they require more complex data collection methods, and often rely on imputation for missing variables and arbitrary weighting. Moreover, composite indices do not lend themselves easily to policy recommendations, and they expand the number of (underlying) variables that need to be collected through official statistical systems.
3. Allow for high frequency monitoring: Timeliness is crucial for data to be a useful management and policy tool. SDG monitoring should operate on an annual cycle to align with national planning and budgetary processes, and prioritize indicators that lend themselves to annual production (or bi- or tri-yearly production).
4. Consensus-based: Indicators should be underpinned by a broad international consensus on their measurement and be based on international standards, recommendations, and best practices to facilitate international comparison.
5. Constructed from well-established data sources: Indicators should draw on well-established sources of public and private data, and be consistent to enable measurement over time. For a small number of new indicators, well-established data sources may be unavailable. In such cases, the establishment of a baseline will need to be an urgent priority over the next two or more years.
6. Disaggregated: Preference should be given to indicators that lend themselves to disaggregation in order to track inequalities in SDG achievement. As noted in Transforming Our World, targets should only be considered achieved if they are met for all relevant groups. Key dimensions for disaggregation include: characteristics of the individual or household (e.g. sex, age, income, disability, religion, ethnicity and indigenous status); economic activity; and spatial dimensions (e.g. by metropolitan areas, urban and rural, or districts).
7. Universal: When setting indicators at the global level, indicators should be applicable in all countries, developed and developing alike. When setting indicators at the national level indicators should be relevant at different territorial scales. The ability of indicators to be localized is particularly important to encourage active implementation of the agenda within sub-national levels of government, such as cities.
8. Mainly outcome-focused: As with SDG targets, it is generally preferable for indicators to track outcomes (or the ends) rather than means. Yet, in some cases, input metrics can play a critical role in driving and tracking the changes needed for sustainable development.
9. Science-based and forward-looking: The SDGs will cover a 15-year period. Much will change in that time. For example, the world population is projected to increase by 1 billion people by 2030, and two-thirds of those will be living in cities. Indicators must be designed in such a way to account for these changing global dynamics and to anticipate future changes. National indicator frameworks must be flexible and allow for new indicators to replace outdated ones.
10. A proxy for broader issues or conditions: A single indicator cannot measure every aspect of a complex issue, but well-chosen proxy indicators can track broader concepts. For example, to measure rule of law and access to justice, several aspects must be measured, including the capacity to redress crime, citizens’ trust in the police and court systems, and the rates of redress. An indicator on the investigation and sentencing of sexual and gender-based violent crimes is an example of a possible proxy for the treatment of vulnerable groups and access to justice overall.
Strengthening Statistical Systems
Collecting a broad range of indicators on sustainable development, at higher frequency and with more attention to quality, requires that we modernize statistical systems. Given the breadth and complexity of the SDG Agenda, many different types of data will be required (demographic, economic, social, and environmental) with varying levels of coverage.
