Seven Steps to Strategic SDG Sensemaking for Cities

Abstract

This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to an understanding on the complexity of how SDGs are related to the analysed phenomena, and catalyses the SDG localisation process, which helps make sense of how to navigate and measure progress in such complex environments. More research and applications are, however, needed, so as to further understand how urban governance can meet holistic, sustainable-development needs. Future work will, firstly, comprise further integrating SDGs into city-level strategies with a focus on the local, regional, national, and global impact on sustainable development and the actualisation of SDGs, and secondly, on further developing SST so that it can serve these purposes.

The Paradoxes of the SGDs from the Sustainable Development Report

“…The starting point in our research was the Sustainable Development Report 2022, from the analysis of which we observed a series of paradoxes both between the results of the SDG Index and between the results presented in this report and those presented by other researchers (i.e., Horan, 2020;Puertas and Bermúdez, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Rocchi et al, 2022;Taajamaa et al, 2022).…”

“…Our methodology consists of a critical analysis of literature starting from the Sustainable Development Report 2022, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the representative work of relevant scholars (i.e., Hwang and Yoon, 1981;Bravo, 2014;Costanza et al, 2016;Dhaoui, 2018;Ding et al, 2018;Burlea-Schiopoiu, 2019;Horan, 2020;Puertas and Bermúdez, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Rocchi et al, 2022;Sachs et al, 2022;Taajamaa et al, 2022).…”

“…Without considering the Dispersal of Information, Taajamaa et al (2022) concluded that cities worldwide face similar challenges but use different ways to solve the problems. Therefore, Taajamaa et al (2022) developed, in the context of the City of Espoo, the SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST).…”

Contributions of the voluntary local review process to policy integration: evidence from frontrunner cities

“…Through the VLR, the city strove to incorporate the SDGs into key municipal processes such as budgeting or public relations. As such, Espoo sought to realise policy integration by bringing together the initiatives of its three largest departments (education and culture, health, and infrastructure), while helping internal capacity building and creating the conditions for better integration across policies in the future 45 so that 'everyone [in the organisation] can understand what their work means in relation to the [SDGs] targets and indicators' (I5). Moreover, the city aimed at maximising engagement with citizens by working with students in middle and high schools, asking them what they considered the most relevant projects for the city-an activity that resulted in the selection of around 90 projects to be included in the VLR.…”

A Circularity Mapping Framework for Urban Policymaking

“…Resilience also cuts across the UN Agenda 2030 (Croese et al, 2020). Countries worldwide have placed the UN 2030 Agenda and, in particular, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the center of the sustainable policies needed to achieve sustainability targets, mitigate climate change, and improve city resilience (Niemets et al, 2021;Taajamaa et al, 2022;Tarsitano et al, 2019).…”