Visiting talk: “Everything everywhere all at once: Sustainable Development Goals and interlinkages”
Universal, ambitious, and arguably ambiguous, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are difficult to measure, monitor, prioritize and achieve. They are a multi-dimensional construct of economic, social and environmental indicators that work through complex interlinkages. We investigate these interlinkages at the SDG target level to identify the trade-offs and synergies between the SDGs. Second, we identify the community of interlinked SDG targets to determine if the SDGs can be benchmarked and prioritized for different regions. Employing a network analysis approach the analysis is based on the IAEG-SDG data for the period 2000–2017. We find several positive and negative interlinkages (reinforcing and balancing feedbacks) between the SDG targets. The trade-offs, however, are much weaker than the synergies. Analyzing network structures for different regions, our results suggest that universal benchmarking of SDGs is counterproductive. We argue that it may be useful to identify a specific community of SDG targets and use them as a guide to prioritize certain goals in different regions.
Short Bio:
Ranjula Bali Swain is Research Director at Center for Sustainability Research, SIR, Stockholm School of Economics and Professor of Economics at Södertörn University. Her research interests extend to Microfinance, Vulnerability, Sustainable Development and Circular Economy. Read more about her research at https://www.hhs.se/en/persons/b/bali-swain-ranjula/