Christian Kroll

Sustainable Development Report 2020 - June 2021

The Sustainable Development Report 2021 features the SDG Index and Dashboards, the first and widely used tool to assess country performance on the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. The report analyses and outlines what needs to happen for the Decade of Action and Delivery of the SDGs. In order to build back better following the Covid-19 pandemic, especially low-income countries will need increased fiscal space. The report frames the implementation of the SDGs in terms of six broad transformations. The authors examine country performance on the SDGs for 193 countries using a wide array of indicators, and calculate future trajectories, presenting a number of best practices to achieve the historic Agenda 2030. The views expressed in this report do not reflect the views of any organizations, agency or programme of the United Nations. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Sustainable Development Report 2020 features the SDG Index and Dashboards, the first and widely used tool to assess country performance on the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. The report shows that all countries need to strengthen the resilience of their health systems and prevention programs. Some countries have outperformed others in containing the Covid-19 pandemic, yet all remain at serious risk. The report frames the implementation of the SDGs in terms of six broad transformations. The authors examine country performance on the SDGs for 193 countries using a wide array of indicators, and calculate future trajectories, presenting a number of best practices to achieve the historic Agenda 2030. The views expressed in this report do not reflect the views of any organizations, agency or programme of the United Nations. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Evidence-based policymaking must be rooted in sound data to inform policy priorities, budget allocations, and tracking of progress. This is especially true in the case of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as they provide the policy framework that all 193 UN member states have pledged to achieve by 2030. Good data and clear metrics are critical for each country to take stock of where it stands, devise pathways for achieving the goals, and track progress. Current assessments of the EU’s performance on the SDGs, however, tend to reach different findings and policy conclusions on where the priorities for further action lie, which can be confusing for researchers and policymakers. In order to demystify the drivers of such differences and make them transparent, this paper compares and contrasts the results obtained by four SDG monitoring approaches. We identify three main elements that are responsible for most of the differences: (i) the use of pre-defined targets for calculating baseline assessments and countries’ trajectories; (ii) the inclusion of measures that track not only domestic performance, but also the EU’s transboundary impacts on the rest of the world; and (iii) the use of non-official statistics to bridge data gaps, especially for biodiversity goals. This paper concludes that there is not one “correct” way of providing an assessment of whether the EU and EU member states are on track to achieve the goals, but we illustrate how the different results are the outcomes of certain methodological choices. More “forward-looking” policy trackers are needed to assess implementation efforts on key SDG transformations.

While the economic voting hypothesis is a well-researched approach to explain behavior at the ballot box, a broader perspective of economic, social and environmental issues regarding a government’s chances to get re-elected is still missing in the literature. In this context, this paper makes use for the first time of the Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the comprehensive policy framework that all 193 UN member states have pledged to achieve. The objective of our study is therefore to examine the relationship between SDGs’ progress and the likelihood of re-election. Our analysis of 124 countries regarding performance on the SDGs over time and voting behavior shows: the chance to get re-elected as a government significantly increases for progress made towards SDG 5 (Gender Equality). Notable differences are also found for high-income vs. low-income countries. The fact that governments are rewarded at the ballot box for successful action towards gender equality is encouraging, while the mechanisms behind other SDG areas deserve more research.

The Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides the framework that all United Nations (UN) member states have pledged to fulfill. The achievement of this agenda crucially depends on whether humankind will be able to maximize synergies and resolve existing trade-offs between the SDGs. We provide the first analysis of future interactions for projected SDG trends until 2030 within and between goals, and we analyze how trade-offs and synergies have evolved in the recent past globally. For certain goals, we find positive developments with notable synergies in our projections, especially for SDGs 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9: Poverty alleviation and strengthening the economy, rooted in innovation, and modern infrastructure, therefore continue to be the basis upon which many of the other SDGs can be achieved. However, especially SDGs 11, 13, 14, 16, and 17 will continue to have notable trade-offs, as well as non-associations with the other goals in the future, which emphasizes the need to foster innovations and policies that can make our cities and communities more sustainable, as well as strengthen institutions and spur climate action. We show examples of a successful transformation of trade-offs into synergies that should be emulated in other areas to create a virtuous cycle of SDG progress. The alarming inability to overcome certain persistent trade-offs we have found, and indeed the deterioration for some SDGs, can seriously threaten the achievement of the Agenda 2030.

While research on subjective well-being (SWB) has recently attracted much attention in richer nations, its potential in a development context remains underexploited. This paper, therefore, considers conventional development theory through an SWB lens. The Human Development approach with its three key elements of material conditions, health and education is re-assessed by examining to what extent these factors actually matter for people's life satisfaction in different nations. Using data from the World Values Survey for 100 000 people from 70 nations, considerable heterogeneity is identified and a new country ranking in the form of an SWB-adjusted Human Development Index, or ‘Happy Development Index’, is devised.

This article examines what can be the contribution of Sociology to the ‘new science of happiness’, and what can such happiness studies contribute to Sociology? It does so by presenting the example of a quantitative analysis of European Social Survey data for the UK on social capital and life satisfaction by age. It reveals heterogeneity in the relationship between social capital and SWB by age with, for instance, socialising being more strongly associated with SWB among younger and older people compared to a mid-age group. Using this analysis as a case study, the first aim is to illustrate how sociological theory can crucially enrich research on SWB by relating the under-theorised field to broader narratives. While a range of empirical findings on the correlates of subjectively reported happiness have been dutifully collected over decades, solid theory building has often been neglected. It is crucial, however, to draw the various pieces of evidence together in order to formulate viable theoretical frameworks. Sociology is a science rich in useful approaches for the study of well-being. Role-identity theory as well as socialisation theory allow us in this paper to develop testable hypotheses for well-being data and give the research field a much-needed grounding. At the same time, it is demonstrated in this article how analysing data on life satisfaction can deliver much needed empirical tests of and new perspectives on long-standing sociological theories. For instance, the unresolved debate about homo sociologicus and homo economicus as competing conceptions of man can gain new perspectives from data on SWB.