A Systemic and Contextual Framework to Define a Country’s 2030 Agenda from a Foresight Perspective

Oliveira Oliveira,Calili Calili,Sousa Sousa,Almeida Almeida

doi:10.3390/su11226360

Oliveira Oliveira, Calili Calili + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su11226360

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Abstract

A fundamental issue in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the national level refers to the systemic analysis of interactions of global targets, considering the context-specific understanding of these interactions within a long-term vision. Another critical issue is how to apply and combine different approaches and tools to provide a consistent analysis for evidence-based decision-making on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and global targets. Consistent with both concerns, a systemic and contextual framework to prioritize SDG targets for a country’s 2030 Agenda is proposed, by integrating fuzzy multicriteria decision-making methods, prospective structural analysis, and network theory tools. The applicability of the proposed framework could be demonstrated through a socio-technical experiment carried out during 2018 for the definition of the 2030 Agenda in Brazil. The experiment is especially designed to bring methodological insights to this decision-making process, and empirical results highlight the targets that will drive the Brazilian 2030 Agenda. Although the empirical results presented in this paper are exclusive to Brazil, we believe that the proposed framework can be replicated in other countries, especially those that are going to prioritize the global targets to be included in their respective Agendas.

Highlights

The 2030 Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 global targets associated with them, all aimed at an integrated and transformative vision for a better and sustainable world
Implementation of the SDG framework at the national level started in 2016, following the stages of a generic policy-planning toward global targets achievement by 2030
When all keywords were combined in one search string, the results indicated the research gaps, reinforcing the importance of developing a systemic and contextual framework for prioritizing SDG targets from a foresight perspective

Summary

Introduction

The 2030 Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 global targets associated with them, all aimed at an integrated and transformative vision for a better and sustainable world. Implementation of the SDG framework at the national level started in 2016, following the stages of a generic policy-planning toward global targets achievement by 2030. Allen et al (2016) [7] reviewed and compared strengths, weaknesses, and general utility of different models from the perspective of providing analytical support for national development planning for the SDGs. The authors highlighted a range of potential gaps in current modeling capabilities and concluded that the best methodological approach for prioritizing global targets is to apply a variety of complementary methods and to focus on a limited set of highly interrelated goals and targets. Foresighting and scenario analysis have been recommended strongly in several works addressed to the planning and implementation of the 2030 Agenda at the national level [7,15]

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