SDG localization: finding the middle ground to top-down and bottom-up approaches with the help of digital networking

Abstract

A growing literature on localization of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflects persistent tensions between a generic and aspirational global sustainability agenda and the challenges that local actors face in implementing these goals under very specific local conditions. Contributors to this extant literature have struggled to resolve this tension, in part because they have not recognized that a potential solution to the problem of local diversity is inherent within emerging networks of local actors themselves. This Brief Report proposes an empowerment of local sustainability actor networks with the help of a digital infrastructure for worldwide peer exchange. It advocates for a process of global empirical data aggregation on local sustainable solutions knowledge that would fully complement the top-down agenda of the SDGs.

Keywords:

• SDGs
• SDG localization
• digitalization

Introduction

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seek to advance the cause of social and environmental sustainability at a global level through international cooperation. The SDGs certainly have been successful in generating an unprecedented degree of global consensus about the kinds of steps that are now urgently needed to move the world from the present state of unsustainable production and consumption to a future state of peace with nature and social justice. The 17 goals, 165 targets, and 230 associated indicators effectively constitute an aspirational map of the key elements of an integrated process of systemic transformation. As the recent Stockholm + 50 conference made abundantly clear, however, the future, when it arrives, will not be as it was hoped for when the goals were launched in 2015. We must understand why that is so, if the post-2030 Agenda is to be more successful.

Much thought and scientific advice has gone into the making of this “map,” and great diplomatic efforts were required to bring about its adoption as a political program. The SDGs, however, are not the “territory” of sustainability transformation, as it is unfolding in countless locations around the world. The SDGs are also, in one sense, more than a map. Colored by an ambition to change the territory, they were designed as a model for shaping a transformational process that would bring about an envisioned future state of the world, as it ought to be, by 2030. If the ambition of the SDGs had been restricted to serve as a tentative model and guideline to encourage global action in the right direction, that alone would have been a worthy cause and justify all the time and efforts invested by the United Nations and signatory countries. As a prescriptive model, however, it has sought to elicit compliance and demanded results. Serious tensions arose because of this approach.

While the initial decision to become a signatory may have been voluntary for each of the nation states that signed up, there is a degree of moral commitment, and various mechanisms of centralized control have been created to reach down not just to national governments, but also from there to federal states and local territories. This on-going process may be well-intentioned as well as necessary to an extent, but the further its bureaucratic apparatus reaches down from the visionary center in Geneva to a local level, the more it risks being perceived as an imposition. Local actors who had no say in setting or ratifying the 2030 Agenda, ironically, are now asked to shoulder much of the ultimate responsibility for realizing it. The SDG’s prescriptive agenda comes with a desire to benchmark, measure, and monitor from above, and is met with a sense of puzzlement and sometimes open resentment from below.

A growing literature on SDG localization has drawn attention to these tensions between a global sustainability agenda and the unique local conditions in which it must be implemented, but has struggled to offer a way forward. This Brief Report argues that the way forward lies in exploring the opportunities and harnessing the untapped potential inherent within emerging networks of local actors. In doing so, it advocates for a process of global empirical data aggregation on local sustainable solutions that would be complementary to the top-down agenda of the SDGs. Ultimately, the proposal is to address the diversity of local needs and circumstances by utilizing the matching diversity of local solutions knowledge, and to unleash this potential with the help of a global digital infrastructure that would facilitate systematic peer-to-peer exchange of solutions, as well as the monitoring of their impact.

What is preventing SDG localization?

The tension arising from the ambivalent character of the SDGs, which simultaneously welcome and prescribe local action, is felt right through the political process of implementation across different layers of governance.

National signatories joined the 2030 Agenda as a matter of choice but are now committed not only to the sustainability ideal but also to mandatory national progress reporting. The obligation to report is exerting moral pressure on national policymakers to push for compliance with the SDG targets domestically and to juggle the often intrinsically contradictory nature of associated demands, for example, weighing forest and biodiversity conservation against the need for more agricultural land to reduce hunger. Then there are political interests to weigh up, such as the need to reduce carbon emissions against the pressure exerted by the national fossil-fuel lobby.

This vision-reality gap widens further as the implementation process moves down to the local level, where most of the real action needs to happen and where local actors in government, business, and communities may not feel a sense of ownership of the agenda at all. Even to the extent that local actors do recognize the plausibility of and scientific evidence base behind the SDGs, and are thus half-willing to yield to the compliance demands issuing from their national bureaucracy, they may or may not have the necessary funding or know-how to accomplish the very difficult task of integrated change in ways that also suit their specific circumstances. The SDGs and the targets themselves are a useful general guide but do not provide contextual advice on what the best solutions may be in every case and, indeed, they cannot be expected to do so, given the particularity and vast diversity of local conditions.

Reflecting these difficulties, few national governments have made a serious push toward setting specific local targets, and there areno mandatory local reporting mechanisms as yet. Voluntary local reporting has been trialed but remains very limited globally, and non-existent in most jurisdictions. In the United States, for example, only New York City and Los Angeles have developed the processes needed to report on local SDG progress. The situation is only slightly better in Europe, and most developing countries have made no attempt at all to push SDG reporting to this level. While there is generic policy pressure on local government and business to consider sustainability (primarily carbon-emission reduction) in most countries, this is often met with resentment. The resulting delay in SDG localization is a serious and potentially fatal impediment to realization of the 2030 Agenda, a point on which all of the reports and research papers cited below agree.

This Brief Report begins with short critiques of the two main policy approaches to SDG localization before outlining a new approach that creates a middle ground by empowering and supporting local actor networks with new digital knowledge-exchange infrastructure.

The two main policy approaches to SDG localization

While the views of policy advisors on how to remedy SDG localization issues differ widely, they tend to fall within two broad categories: the pathway of an ever-increasing prescriptiveness and monitoring culminating in mandatory local reporting vs. showing increased sensitivity to the uniqueness of local constraints, opportunities, priorities, and creativity. This is a simplification for the sake of clarity of presentation. Many commentators in fact oscillate between these opposite approaches, reflecting the unfortunate fact that neither is entirely satisfactory.

The prescriptive, top-down approach

The first, prescriptive approach is to enforce obedience to the 2030 Agenda by exerting more and more bureaucratic control from the center, with the help of an ever stricter and evermore detailed framework for regular reporting, standardized accounting, and, hopefully, compliance all the way down to millions of local jurisdictions. If this were possible, the benefit would be that the realization of the SDGs could be guaranteed.

Such a prescriptive monitoring system may still seem like a hopeful prospect to some but more like a potential nightmare to others and, in any case, it remains a dream, far removed from the realities of even the most highly developed and SDG-supportive regions in the world. For example, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center published the “European Handbook for SDG Voluntary Local Reviews” in 2020, and by February 2021 some 24 local city governments had submitted voluntary local reports (VLRs) in response, though only 16 of these documents included some kind of indicator and data analysis. The relevant European Union (EU) report notes that the challenge lies in “providing a framework to inspire the selection of appropriate indicators, making reviews both comparable across Europe and targeting local situations and challenges” (Ciambra, Siragusa, and Proietti 2021, 6). Similarly, a report published by the Japan-based Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, commenting on 15 VLRs (4 of them in Japan), notes that local governments struggle to translate their own, often quite advanced sustainability agenda into the language of the national reports (Ortiz-Moya et al. 2020), which may explain why only a few dozen among the millions of local jurisdictions around the world have tried to do so. In short, the bureaucratic top-down approach runs into difficulties because SDG localization seems to be impossible without setting specific local targets that make sense to local policymakers and other actors in these countless jurisdictions—clearly a daunting task. The more localized and unique these targets are, the more difficult they also are to compare.

Given that the urgency of the global sustainability crisis would seem to warrant drastic measures, it is a rather inconvenient truth that we cannot simply prescribe sustainability compliance at a local level. The top-down approach remains attractive to policymakers because it conveys at least a rudimentary sense of control in a desperate situation. But models for measuring compliance are at risk of breaking down under the weight of their own complexity and losing their usefulness for benchmarking—precisely to the extent that they do attempt to embrace local diversity. For that reason, most of them do not really “go local.” As Fisher and Fukuda-Parr (2019, 383) note, “despite their aspirational claims of transformative impact, substantively, SDGs [have] retained the centrality of metrics, data and measurement, framing development problems as ‘technical, managerial and measurable’ and,…through the infrastructure of measurement, construct and reinforce an ‘evaluation’ society.” Even advanced countries like the UK struggle to overcome this attitude, and thus show a “lack of a clear national policy framework for the localization of the SDGs” (Jones and Comfort 2020, 1).

Similarly, many academics continue to work on grand schemes of target-setting, creating ever new lists of “recommended indicators for cities and communities” (e.g., Abraham 2021), and so do the major geopolitical players. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, in an influential recent report recommends the use of “the SDGs as a vehicle to enhance accountability and transparency through engaging all territorial stakeholders,” given that “at least 105 of the 169 SDGs targets will not be reached without proper engagement and coordination with local and regional governments” (OECD 2020, 1). Building on this report, the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion (ESPON) prepared an SDG localizing tool for the EU “to measure, monitor and benchmark the SDGs at the regional level [based on] Eurostat’s SDGs reference indicator framework, which is used to monitor progress toward the SDGs in the EU context and particularly at the national level” (ESPON 2020, 7). A pilot study was conducted in three locations, and local indicators were selected following the OECD’s so-called “RACER” criteria (relevant, acceptable, credible, easy, and robust). This exercise shows just how laborious SDG localization can be if a purely top-down approach is retained.

Amidst all the measurement frenzy, consensus is also nowhere in sight. The following are but a few of the competing indicator sets: Ecological Footprint, Environmental Sustainability Index, Dashboard of Sustainability, Welfare Index, Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, City Development Index, Emergy/Exergy, Human Development Index, Environmental Vulnerability Index, Living Planet Index, and Environmentally-adjusted Domestic Product (for a detailed comparative analysis, see Zinkernagel, Evans, and Neij 2018).

All this begs the question whether it would not be easier to trust, empower, and support local actors.

The bottom-up approach

The United Nations itself has realized that SDG localization assessment requires concessions in terms of comparability, regardless of whether it incurs a cost in terms of accountability and control. A roadmap for localizing the SDGs was therefore drawn up jointly by the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and UN Habitat to “support cities and regions to deliver the 2030 Agenda” (GTLRG 2016, 1). The report makes it clear that “the roadmap is not a prescriptive ‘how to’; rather, it covers a range of strategies that can be adapted to the specific contexts and needs of different cities and regions.” It also notes that “all of the SDGs have targets directly related to the responsibilities of local and regional governments, [who therefore] must be at the heart of the 2030 Agenda” (GTLRG 2016, 7). In short, the report recognizes that the SDGs are not locally enforceable except in a broad sense, as an exemplary cultural model or vision of sustainable living (see UCLG 2015, recommendation No. 4). Implementing is a more complex matter than visioning. Integrated sustainable ways of life thus cannot be prescribed, rather they emerge “at the nexus of ecological, social, economic, and cultural aspects as well as of normative and political issues of equity and justice” (Caniglia et al. 2020, 93). Herrera (2019, 107), for example, in a study focused on SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation for all), points out that “access to water [for example] is a problem of governance—and particularly local governance—rather than merely a problem of technology, infrastructure or financing.”

Unfortunately, simply leaving the matter to local actors is also not a viable option. Local governments and businesses need help in mapping and monitoring their own sustainability-transformation space. As another report notes, “without having technical capacity or know-how, a regional government might not be able to map the field and design an adequate policy. [A]wareness raising campaigns and partnerships for capacity building and technical support might be needed” (Regions4 2018, 15).

The elephant in the room, however, is that most of the thinking on bottom-up SDG localization remains caught in the logic of target-setting and measuring, though admittedly with more sensitivity to the wide diversity of possible local actions for sustainability. In my own work with local actors across all sectors, however, the feedback I hear most often is not that there is a need for more locally appropriate targets, but rather a need for effective, practical solutions. Local actors very much do want to know how to implement the SDGs, in locally appropriate ways, and do not know where to turn to obtain tailored advice. They do not resent outside help when it comes to finding solutions that work in their circumstances and have the potential to improve their lives. Measuring and monitoring are at best secondary concerns to those individuals who are called upon to act. In discussions of SDG localization, therefore, the language needs to shift emphasis from local targets to local solutions. Nevertheless, insofar as local action needs to be incentivized, monitoring does have its place.

Finding the middle ground between top-down and bottom-up approaches

A more sensible approach to SDG localization would be to seek a middle ground between these two basic approaches. There is one important reason, however, why a successful compromise has not been reached: local actors cannot uphold their end of such a bargain, as they are not yet sufficiently empowered and networked to do so.

On the surface a middle ground may seem easy enough to define. Policymakers could content themselves with measuring what can be measured and comparing what can be compared locally, while avoiding overly rigid targets and accounting overreach. This would allow local transformation spaces to remain open. Local actors would be asked to develop and report on a diversity of SDG solutions, having noted earlier that the SDGs are merely a map providing general guidance on what a systemic transformation may look like in broad and general terms. As noted above, they are not an empirical map of the transformation territory. While local actors could do with more central support in many ways, much of today’s sustainability innovation is in fact taking place independently at the local level, both in terms of problem identification and solutions. This local creativity should not be stifled or dismissed but encouraged, disseminating solutions and, where possible, upscaling them.

Several policy statements point in this direction. “Promoting innovation, leadership…[and] systems thinking” at the local level is seen by many as a better option than exerting centralized control over every detail of local policy (NITI Aayog and UN India 2019, 31). Empowered local leadership in the SDG effort is what some researchers now refer to as “deep localization” (Lanshina et al. 2019, 219). Others still promote a more shallow localized approach, and thus speak more cautiously of the need to “work with local communities to downscale global sustainability goals and co-create pathways to their achievement” (Szetey et al. 2021, 2).

The main reason why a workable compromise is still lacking, however, is that a locally-led SDG implementation approach is not yet feasible. While local actors need the autonomy to innovate within their own sustainability-solution space, it makes no sense for them to do so in isolation. What we lack is a mechanism to empower not just individual local actors, but to empower their networks and boost the potential for mutual aid.

Local jurisdictions are so numerous and diverse that it is virtually impossible to support them with all the finely tailored advice on sustainability solutions or the equally tailored means of impact monitoring they need from the limited resources of government or science institutions. To attempt this is like trying to stand a pyramid on its tip, rather than on its strong and broad base. This broad base comprises not individual local actors, however, but global networks of local actors that are beginning to emerge, such as ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability and the Global Covenant of Mayors.

A decentralized, diversified, and bottom-up process of data aggregation, led by local actor networks, would reveal what solutions local actors are in fact developing, support peer exchange of innovative ideas among them, and simultaneously keep track of progress. This is the solution proposed in this Brief Report to escape the prevailing ambivalence of the SDG localization debate. Local actors need to organize globally to empower one another and to uphold their end of the bargain.

Such global networks of local actors would need to be globally accessible and inclusive to ensure that developing countries are not left behind. As Rahman, Khan, and Sadique (2020, 1) point out, “in localization of the SDGs and ensuring disaggregated and inclusive implementation of the goals, Asia [for example,] is facing formidable challenges both at regional and sub-regional levels.” What would such a global and fully inclusive bottom-up process of data aggregation and solution-sharing look like? It would no doubt be digitally driven, and it would be designed to meet the following needs.

Requirements for SDG localization

Based on the understanding of the global and national politics of sustainability transformation I have gained from two decades as an executive of various key science institutions and a science advisor, as well as more than thirty years of research as an anthropologist with local actors in developing countries, it seems to me that the following seven essential prerequisites must be met for SDG localization to be successful.

1. The SDGs need a broader base, and this broader base is, and can only be, local.

2. Local actors must be encouraged to develop a sense of ownership of the sustainability agenda, which means they need to be given the authority and space to define it and render it meaningful and practicable locally.

3. They must be empowered to act for sustainability by moving the emphasis from goals and targets to solutions. While monitoring is necessary as an incentive to promote action and efficiency, it needs to build on a process of mapping local solution spaces.

4. Practical action and solutions are needed for such empowerment, and solutions must be as diverse as the local ecological, political, economic, demographic, historical, social, and cultural conditions under which they are implemented.

5. The greatest source of innovative and effective solutions for local actors are other local actors who have successfully implemented one or several of the SDGs, particularly peers who experience similar local conditions and constraints.

6. Global funders or relevant institutions or foundations must provide financial resources to facilitate this peer exchange on a grand scale, primarily with the help of digital technology.

7. While science can also offer various sustainability solutions, such solutions must be tested across localities with diverse conditions through intense collaboration of scientists with local actors, a collaboration that again would best be facilitated with digital network technology to match specific scientists and end users.

Digitally leveraging local solutions to meet global challenges

What we need is a bottom-up process for capturing the complex empirical realities of local SDG implementation and harnessing the potential for mutual support among local actors who are currently still experimenting with solutions and innovating in isolation. A unified database on local action would complement the top-down, “monitor, incentivize, and control” approach inherent in the prescriptive targeting dimension of the SDG model. It would also help to monitor and evaluate the impacts of diverse local actions in relation to general targets, connecting the realities of practice with the aspirations of the 2030 Agenda. The SDG’s key role should be to serve as an exemplary global guideline for systemic sustainable transformation. Ideally, a local actor-driven process of implementation would provide “compliance” largely as a byproduct, without resentment, because it would build on and amplify cultural change from below. Cultural orientations are largely driven by peer-to-peer interactions, however, and to change them, local actors need to connect with one another in new ways that allow them to reshape these orientations. Digital platforms are the ideal means of facilitating such transformative interactions on a global scale.

Local actors would be motivated to share detailed information on their own successful sustainability actions on a platform by the prospect of receiving new solutions from their peers. Given that most local actors have made uneven progress across the spectrum of the 17 SDGs, everyone would have something to teach and something to learn from such an exchange. Local actions, described by participating local actors on a digital platform, could be clustered into groups of similar actions by applying algorithms to an emerging pool of empirical data concerning the solution space. This data would fulfill a monitoring function, but with greater empirical realism and respect for diversity, while the platform’s networking function would encourage more local actors to identify with and implement the SDG agenda.

This proposal is consistent with what local and regional governments (LRGs) themselves have been asking for. For example, a major United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) report to the United Nations High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) states that

[B]ottom-up localization works better than top-down approaches…[but] many countries don’t take subnational levels into consideration or conceive localization as a top-down process in which the SDGs passively “trickle down” to LRGs. Approaches revolving too strongly around a top-down decision-making process can ultimately feed the misconception of the SDGs being an external burden or imposition, hindering local participation and restraining the richness and vision of local initiatives (UCLG 2017, 11).

The report instead recommends decentralization, territorial approaches to public investment, bottom-up monitoring supported by disaggregated data, and support for international knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning between LRGs. UCLG also understands the necessity of inter-sector collaboration as a prerequisite for “systemic action” (see Tan et al. 2019), arguing that “strong partnerships and the participation of LRGs, the civil society, the private sector, social partners and academia in national SDG coordination mechanisms, and also in the definition, follow-up and monitoring of the SDGs, are critical” (UCLG 2020, 20). In all this the role of the SDGs, they say, is to “inspire our [local] actions” (UCLG 2020, 10). This inspiration should not stop with local governments but extend to all sectors, but “many [national] countries are yet to discover the full power of local partnerships (between sub-national governments, enterprises, civil society, universities, philanthropies and communities) in SDG delivery” (Revi 2017, ix).

Digital Network Architecture Infrastructure, such as an open-access digital platform, would seem the best way to facilitate a complementary bottom-up effort to realize the SDGs because it is the best way to connect local actors globally and inclusively (El-Massaha and Mohieldinb 2020, 4). As a recent Brookings Institution report notes,

[S]erious local implementation is unlikely to achieve meaningful scale if perceived as a compliance exercise or just another reporting requirement. …Increasing the spaces for sharing of best practices, challenges, and innovations, with city-specific tools and products, will be critical,” but, until now, “there is no active facilitation of city-to-city dialogues or platform for curated, city-specific information that shares and showcases implementation efforts (Pipa 2019, 2).

This excellent report was based directly on the feedback of local city leaders who met in Bellagio in 2019 to discuss SDG localization, and thus reflects the local perspective. Local leaders were reported to be

skeptical about attempts to standardize a set of city targets or indicators that would be applicable to each of their specific contexts. Instead, they suggested identifying a small subset, or a data floor, that might be common to all cities pursuing the SDGs. They recognized a healthy tension between comparability across cities, which helps spur innovation and share lessons, and customization to their local realities” (Pipa 2019, 3).

The city leaders recommended “an online research platform with material designed specifically for city and local governments, and curated for applicability and usefulness, to make it as easy as possible to identify high-quality tools applicable to a city’s specific needs.” Some researchers refer to such specific local needs as “community-defined sustainable development goals (CDSDGs)” (Winans et al. 2021, 2).

A recent report by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics echoes these views, noting that TReNDS’ vision is for “a user-centric system that actively supports public and private data users and encourages collaboration” (SDSN 2019, 8). The United Nations Environment Program, too, has proposed a “digital ecosystem framework,” according to the TReNDS report. Researchers also have made similar recommendations, arguing that “modern communication technologies and social media platforms could play a major, even transformative role, in participatory decision-making” (Guha and Chakrabarti 2019, 15).

These calls have not gone completely unheeded. For example, Kawakubo and Murakami (2020, 1) report on experiments in Hokkaido and Kyushu, Japan, with building a “local SDGs Platform that enables stakeholders to register, search and share their efforts and best practices toward achieving the SDGs.” The researchers found that “only 5% of global SDG indicators proposed by United Nations Statistics Division could be used without modification at the local level in Japan.…However, approximately 50% of global SDG indicators could be used after localization.” Such experiments are few, and even fewer are designed to map the solutions space by capturing local innovations. For example, the SDG Portal developed by the German Association of Cities and the Bertelsmann Foundation, at least for now, is more focused on measuring and comparing achievements relating to SDG indicators than facilitating peer-to-peer sharing of ideas within the solutions space.¹ Meanwhile, efforts led by local government networks themselves to help local actors share experiences, such as the SDG Cities Challenge recently completed by the biggest global network, ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, are still of limited scale and geographic reach (eight cities in the United States are involved). More importantly, the expensive digital infrastructure that would be needed for systematic solutions-sharing cannot be provided by these networks as yet, due to a lack of funding.²

Conclusion

The idea of digital solutions for sustainability is not entirely new. There are indeed already numerous platforms that attempt to provide answers to some of the issues local actors contend with, as identified above. None so far have been able to capture a substantial part of the global solution spaces unfolding at the local level, or to provide a solid and easily usable tool for peer-to-peer engagement.

The key issue is: What services should such a platform ideally provide for local sustainability actors? While some of these needs were listed above, the question is ultimately not one to be answered by academic experts. If digital approaches are to avoid falling into the same pit as policy-driven approaches, the answer would seem obvious: Such digital services must be built from the outset with the full participation of local stakeholders in the initial design and continuous review of a flexible and portable set of digital tools, and in the generation of a database of peer-generated solutions tried and tested by local experts. Such a peer-driven solutions-sharing platform could be further augmented with a demand-driven system for accessing scientific expertise on specific SDG implementation issues across a wide range of themes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Notes

1 See https://sdg-portal.de.

2 Personal communication from Pourya Salehi, Head of Urban Research and Innovation Team, ICLEI World Secretariat, and Co-chair of the Research and Innovation Technical Working Group, Global Covenant of Mayors. The author has worked with ICLEI to seek funding sources for a digital solutions platform referred to as the Sustainability Action Platform.