The United Nation’s recent endorsement of a stand-alone urban Sustainable Development Goal and the immanent formulation of Habitat III marks a watershed in global development discourse on cities. The ...New Urban Agenda, currently under debate, is located in its historical context to reveal who the major actors and institutions were that defined global urban policy; what the shifting normative positions on cities are; and why the increasingly complex process of the global policy environment makes defining a universal agreement on urban development so hard. At stake in UN negotiations are fundamental issues about the centrality of urban pathways to sustainable development. A historical view of the Habitat process reveals that even at the global scale it is possible for those with strong convictions to change the normative base and mode of working on urban issues, but that the compromise politics of the international system also masks important compromises and contradictions. Looking back over the decades of international debate on development priorities shows not only that there is now greater acceptance of the importance of defining and agreeing to “an urban agenda” but that global policy on urban and regional issues has indeed evolved. There is no longer a question of whether cities are important for sustainable development, but rather why and how the urban condition affects our common future.
Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion enables professionals, scholars, and students engaged with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to develop a richer ...understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal. Each of the 17 chapters tells the decades or centuries-old backstory of one SDG, including an examination of how the SDG problem impacted past societies and the various attempts at understanding and addressing it. Collectively, the chapters reveal the multiple and often interwoven histories that have shaped the challenges later encompassed in the SDGs. The book’s chapters, written in an accessible style, are authored by international experts from multiple disciplines. The book is an indispensable resource and a vital foundation for understanding the past’s indelible footprint on our contemporary sustainable development challenges.
While the technological revolution is accelerating, digital poverty is undermining the Sustainable Development Goals. This article introduces a justice-oriented digital framework which considers how ...fair access to digital capabilities, commodities, infrastructure, and governance can reduce global inequality and advance the SDGs.
•Agenda 2030 requires tracking progress towards the SDGs in an ‘integrated’ way.•The SDG Index does not allow for the ‘integrated’ nature of the SDGs.•The MSI overcomes problems associated with the ...arithmetic and geometric means.•The new MSI inspired I-SDI embraces synergies between and within goals.•The I-SDI provide new monitoring tools for global, national and local policy.
Monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is an important challenge and strategic opportunity for stakeholders and beneficiaries involved with Agenda 2030 at all levels. To monitor progress across a diverse set of goals with multiple targets and indicators and to track overall progress, Jeffrey Sachs and associates have developed the SDG Index. Although their index is robust and permits comparisons across countries, it neglects the ‘balanced’ and ‘integrated’ nature of the SDGs (set out in Transforming Our World), and exhibits well-known problems associated with the use of an arithmetic mean (which assumes perfect substitution between dimensions). To overcome these difficulties, this paper introduces an adjusted ‘Integrated Sustainable Development Index’ (I-SDI) that can take account of trade-offs and synergies between goals and targets as well as across the economic, social and environmental spheres of sustainable development. This is accomplished by introducing a new aggregation method based on the Multidimensional Synthesis of Indicators (MSI) approach. This approach overcomes well-known problems associated with replacing the arithmetic mean with the geometric mean (a difficulty encountered by the post-2010 HDI). Specifically, it makes an allowance for the heterogeneity of dimensions, while avoiding the tendency of the geometric mean to collapse to zero. In this paper, the I-SDI scores and rankings are compared with those generated by the SDG Index and the geometric mean. Moreover, to capture the heterogeneity within goals, the I-SDI2 is introduced (which applies the MSI method within as well as between goals). By taking account of heterogeneity within and between goals as well as across the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, and by capturing synergies and trade-offs among indicators, our study reveals crucial differences in I-SDI scores and rankings that illustrate the value of a more flexible and integrated measure for guiding policymakers and monitor overall progress.
This timely book explores the sustainabledevelopment goals, how well universitieshave been able to integrate them into their curriculum, and how universitiescan institutionalize the goals and ...sustainable development into their strategicplans and institutional culture.
Energy and environmental studies (E&E) have faced a significant turning point due to the lack of reliability of the existing models, as well as the lack of policy governance. Most papers in E&E have ...adapted data envelope analysis due to its popularity, which is a result of its structure of having multiple inputs and outputs. However, due to its crucial weakness in statistical reliability, diverse new methodologies to gain better reliability have been developed, such as difference-in-difference and computational general equilibrium models, but they are still do not popular because the world has not shown significant progress in the abatement of carbon emissions. This comes not only from the lack of appropriate, precise research models, but also from a worldwide lack of governance. Most countries advocate for the necessity of E&E policies, yet their policies alone are not enough for sustainable performance, due to the lack of reliability and/or weakness of public–private partnerships. This Special Issue shall examine all of these new challenges to the methodologies, as well as the implications and suggestions arising from their empirical results.
With transitions to more sustainable ways of living already underway, this book examines how we understand the underlying dynamics of the transitions that are unfolding. Without this understanding, ...we enter the future in a state of informed bewilderment. Every day we are bombarded by reports about ecosystem breakdown, social conflict, economic stagnation and a crisis of identity. There is mounting evidence that deeper transitions are underway that suggest we may be entering another period of great transformation equal in significance to the agricultural revolution some 13,000 years ago or the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This book helps readers make sense of our global crisis and the dynamics of transition that could result in a shift from the industrial epoch that we live in now to a more sustainable and equitable age. The global renewable energy transition that is already underway holds the key to the wider just transition. However, the evolutionary potential of the present also manifests in the mushrooming of ecocultures, new urban visions, sustainability-oriented developmental states and new ways of learning and researching. Shedding light on the highly complex challenge of a sustainable and just transition, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned with establishing a more sustainable and equitable world. Ultimately, this is a book about hope but without easy answers.
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