Enabling Integrated Policymaking with the Sustainable Development Goals: An Application to Ireland

Abstract

This article addresses policy coherence for sustainable development demonstrating the important role that dashboards of interlinked indicators can play as tools to coordinate interrelated government ministries for integrated policymaking at national level. Specifically, a monitoring and coordination tool is proposed based on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators and mappings of SDG responsibilities across ministries. Drawing on studies in sustainability science of SDG interlinkages, the article presents a five-step procedure that government departments can use to construct indicator sets from official SDG indicators to support integrated policymaking for a specific sector. I apply the method to Ireland’s marine sector. Ireland is an interesting case because although many countries report mapping SDG responsibilities across ministries, Ireland’s Voluntary National Review explicitly maps these responsibilities for all 17 SDGs and 169 targets. Using performance gap analysis, concrete recommendations are developed for the lead department of the marine along three dimensions: which departments to cooperate with, on what policy areas discussions should focus, and how Ireland performs in each area compared to a selection of peer countries. In particular, the article recommends cooperation with nine other departments on fifteen policy issues. Relative to peers, Ireland is ranked amongst sustainability “leaders” on three of these issues and amongst “laggards” on nine issues. The proposed procedure, which has wide application (to other countries and sectors) as a starting point for integrated policymaking, can help to raise awareness among policymakers of outcomes in linked policy areas and enable dialogue between ministries on coherent policies to address interrelated gaps in sustainability.

A framework to harness effective partnerships for the sustainable development goals

“…The 2030 Agenda places a strong emphasis on partnerships as an important instrument to harness means of implementation such as finance, technology, data, etc., (United Nations 2015). While it is recognized that linkages between SDGs can be used to identify relevant actors to engage in and enable better partnerships Weitz et al 2017;Stafford-Smith et al 2016;Horan 2021Horan , 2020a, little research has been devoted to translating such connections into types of partnerships that might help with integrated implementation.…”

“…While much research has focused on assessing interactions between SDGs (Nilsson et al , 2018Zhou and Moinuddin 2017;Weitz et al 2014), much less attention has been devoted to developing approaches that use interlinkages to foster effective partnerships (Breuer et al 2019a, b;Nilsson and Weitz 2019;Horan 2021Horan , 2020a. Specifically, the article will address how knowledge of SDG interlinkages can be translated into practical proposals useful for improving participation in partnerships.…”

“…Alcamo 2019) and in practice (cf. One Health Initiative (World Bank 2018; One by One UHC Report 2020)), helps to keep the number of linkages at a manageable level (Alcamo et al 2020), and by highlighting key interactions, it offers useful information to negotiate portfolios of coherent actions for integrated implementation (Alcamo 2019;Horan 2020a).…”

End-of-Life Alternatives for Wind Turbine Blades: Sustainability Indices Based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals

“…It is therefore necessary to select metrics carefully with regard to their applicability to the setting and their ability to discriminate between the five end-of-life alternatives. The eleven chosen metrics are grouped into the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental and follow a similar pattern to Van Schoubroeck et al (2019) It is not possible to define the SDGs as being distinctly economic, social or environmental in character (Elkington, 1994;Horan, 2020) as there is no consistent way to separate the SDGs into three distinct groups. For instance, (Costanza et al, 2016;Barbier and Burgess, 2017;Scherer et al, 2018) and (Clark et al, 2020) disagree on how to categorize SDGs 1,2,3,6,7,11 and 12.…”

“…All the metrics are normalised onto a scale from zero to one, where zero is the least beneficial/desirable and one is the most beneficial/ desirable following (Clark et al, 2020) and (Horan, 2020). The following transformations, in Eq.…”