Abstract
In 2015, the United Nations established the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, addressing the major challenges the world faces and introducing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). How are countries performing in their challenge toward sustainable development? We address this question by treating countries and Goals as a complex bipartite network. While network science has been used to unveil the interconnections among the Goals, it has been poorly exploited to rank countries for their achievements. In this work, we show that the network representation of the countries-SDGs relations as a bipartite system allows one to recover aggregate scores of countries’ capacity to cope with SDGs as the solutions of a network’s centrality exercise. While the Goals are all equally important by definition, interesting differences self-emerge when non-standard centrality metrics, borrowed from economic complexity, are adopted. Innovation and Climate Action stand as contrasting Goals to be accomplished, with countries facing the well-known trade-offs between economic and environmental issues even in addressing the Agenda. In conclusion, the complexity of countries’ paths toward sustainable development cannot be fully understood by resorting to a single, multipurpose ranking indicator, while multi-variable analyses shed new light on the present and future of sustainable development.
Highlights
In 2015, the United Nations established the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, addressing the major challenges the world faces and introducing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
As established by the United N ations[11], progresses in the Sustainable Development Goals are estimated using a set of indicators providing quantitative information about countries performances; each indicator measures the attainment of certain targets across the 17 SDGs
In light of this complexity, in this work, we have introduced a novel perspective on sustainable development in which we addressed–within a network science framework–the need for ranking countries for their status concerning the Agenda
Summary
In 2015, the United Nations established the Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, addressing the major challenges the world faces and introducing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is clear that the ensemble of countries and Goals within the Agenda 2030 is a complex system of its own[27] (i.e., characterised by non-trivial and non-random interactions among many e ntities28), which requires proper mathematical approaches to monitor the status of countries, and able to account for their heterogeneity and the interconnections across the Goals Such interconnections among the Goals and, no less, the synergies and trade-offs among development sectors, can be unveiled thanks to the use of complex network theory (see, e.g., Le Blanc[23] and Guerrero et al.[18]). We propose to tackle the definition of rankings of countries by promoting the use of the hidden bipartite network structure of the system defined by countries and Goals performances to highlight and unravel the intrinsic complexity of this system Such representation of the Agenda 2030 allows one to use network methodologies to provide data-driven solutions to the problem of indexing of countries and weighting of the Goals
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