Fernando Ortiz-Moya

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) hinges on well-designed and implemented follow-up and review (FUR) processes. Cities lack official recognition in the FUR architecture of the 2030 Agenda. This is a notable shortcoming, as cities are responsible for implementing at least two-thirds of their targets. To engage with the 2030 Agenda, cities have initiated FUR exercises through Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs) to establish benchmarks, report on their progress, and share best practices. This paper explores how cities are operationalising FUR through a thematic analysis of interviews with city officials of seven European cities that conducted two or more VLRs between 2019 and 2022. Our findings highlight three main ways in FUR processes through VLRs affect local sustainable policymaking: (i) by aligning global goals and targets with local monitoring and reporting; (ii) by integrating and timing evaluation with local action, thereby embedding the SDGs more deeply into municipal strategies; and (iii) by accelerating local action through innovative approaches (e.g. sustainability budgeting). We conclude that conducting FUR through VLRs positively contributes to SDGs implementation. However, to make this more likely to happen, FUR should be embedded in municipal processes and local FUR efforts should be better recognised in global sustainability agendas.

The implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) relies on effective policy integration at all levels of government. However, integration across policy domains remains challenging for local authorities, particularly when it comes to articulating policies that recognise trade-offs and interactions between different SDGs. This study explores how the Voluntary Local Review (VLR) process—a tool to localise the 2030 Agenda—contributes to policy integration by thematically analysing interviews with city officials in 12 frontrunner cities that conducted a VLR between 2019 and 2020. Our results suggest three main ways in which the VLR process affects policy integration: (1) by facilitating cooperation and interdependencies between different policy sectors; (2) by creating new instruments to mainstream SDGs; and (3) by enhancing sustainability competencies. Hence, our study suggests that conducting a VLR has the transformative potential to achieve greater policy integration and further the 2030 Agenda.

As more countries witness depopulation, the expansion of High-Speed Rail (HSR) to reach shrinking cities in peripheral regions is renewing the debate on the effects of this infrastructure. This is the case in Japan, a country that continues to extend its highly developed HSR network hoping to curb regional decline. This paper investigates whether HSR had a positive effect on the shrinking trajectories of connected medium and small-sized cities in peripheral regions by examining the impact of extending the Shinkansen network on five municipalities in the prefectures of Iwate and Aomori, northern Japan. Although depopulation decelerated in some of the case studies, the findings highlight that HSR did not reverse shrinkage and benefits are mainly found in increased accessibility, albeit unevenly distributed. This suggests that, rather than uniformly uplifting socio-economic outlooks, the Shinkansen contributed to reshaping the trajectories of the connected cities and reproduced core–periphery dynamics at the regional level.

Cities are increasingly adopting potentially sustainable climate plans. Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into these plans could help stabilize the climate while generating jobs, narrowing equity gaps, fostering innovation, and delivering other sustainability benefits. Yet, how much cities are integrating the SDGs into climate plans remains poorly understood. This article shed light on this question with a text analysis of SDG “keywords” in climate plans for two British and two Japanese cities. The results revealed that none of the surveyed cities have connected climate with socioeconomic priorities covered in SDG1 (poverty), SDG8 (employment), SDG5 (gender), and SDG10 (inequalities). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom cities made more connections between climate and responsible consumption and production (SDG12) than the Japanese cities. Further, Kyoto, Japan shares a climate-SDGs linkages profile that resembles the United Kingdom cities more than Kawasaki. Though not without limitations, text analysis can facilitate the city-to-city peer learning needed to make urban climate plans sustainable within and across countries.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00962-7

Global environmental change, the depletion of natural resources, and unacceptable levels of pollution, among other anthropogenic impacts on the planet and its ecosystems, demand a radical shift in the way humankind develops. Global agreements like the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” or the “Paris Agreement on Climate Change” seek to promote sustainable development and its integration in policymaking. Against this backdrop, the Government of Japan in its Fifth Basic Environment Plan of 2018 proposed the concept of the Circulating and Ecological Sphere (CES) to guide sustainable transitions in light of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The CES provides a framework for a new paradigm in sustainable development bringing together existing approaches, namely, rural–urban linkages, ecosystem-based solutions, decarbonisation, and resource circulation. Still in an embryonic stage, some regional and local authorities in Japan have started to experiment with ways to apply this concept on the ground. Drawing on a systematic literature review on the different components covered by the CES, along with analysis of a case study in Suzu, Japan, this paper explores how this new concept can contribute to achieve a sustainable future.

China and Japan are currently in opposing stages of the expansion process of capitalism. While China is at the centre of the global accumulation of surplus capital through urbanisation and industrial expansion—i.e. the creation stage—Japan has been stagnant in recent decades and its periphery is de-urbanising—i.e. the destruction stage. Consequences of the global spatialisation of capital, however, are similar in both cases, resulting in growing social inequalities. This article uses films to explore the influence of this process on popular culture, specifically focusing on a Chinese film—Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013)—and a Japanese one—Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s Sketches of Kaitan City (2010). The two films are composed of interconnected segments that portray the social by-products of the spatialisation of capitalism. We argue that, despite the apparent dissimilarities, this process creates parallel realities consequential to the broken promises of advancement made by the economic system. Ultimately, this generates a distorted social space that normalises the new, worsened living conditions resulting from capitalism’s continual expansion.