Three necessary conditions for establishing effective Sustainable Development Goals in the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.

Local lens for SDG implementation: lessons from bottom-up approaches in Africa

“…Thus, "despite the need for global outcomes, most implementation [of the SDGs] will be local" (Smith et al 2018;p. 1483), and incorporating current knowledge on the dynamics of social change processes at multiple scales will be critical to achieving the SDGs (Norström et al 2014). Multiple academics and practitioners have emphasized the importance of the context, as the interlinkages and overlaps among goals and targets will vary as a function of the local realities and contexts where they are implemented (Reed et al 2015;Stephens et al 2018).…”

“…This principle aims to balance the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Unlike the previous UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda is focused on capturing complex interdependencies between goals and targets, illustrated by the many cross-references between targets and indicators and their explicit contextualization into social-ecological systems (Norström et al 2014).…”

Crafting Sustainable Development Solutions: Frugal Innovations of Grassroots Entrepreneurs

“…Furthermore, the SDGs potentially open up an intriguing debate about the multiple, often contested, pathways to sustainability that can be enriched by including the too often un-heard voices from the grassroots universe paving the road to a more participate model of development interventions. New ways of providing energy, clean water, housing and decent jobs will be needed [105,106] and the original, possible frugal, contribution of the "bottom" can potentially have a disrupting impact in this sense. From this perspective, the notion of sustainability-driven innovation and entrepreneurship appears complex, hybrid and often contested [107,108].…”

Urban Food Systems Strategies: A Promising Tool for Implementing the SDGs in Practice †

“…As a whole, the successful implementation of the SDGs is deemed to be contingent upon science-based [13,[16][17][18] and time-sensitive [19] metrics and a social-ecological systems approach [20] to sustainability planning. While neither goal-setting nor technocratic measurement alone are a guaranty for success-and a deeper ethical foundation must be laid at the outset of sustainability governance and planning [21][22][23].…”