Assessment of the Governance Dimension in the Frame of the 2030 Agenda: Evidence from 100 Spanish Cities

Carmen García-Peña,Moneyba González-Medina,Jose Manuel Diaz-Sarachaga

doi:10.3390/su13105519

Carmen García-Peña, Moneyba González-Medina + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105519

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Abstract

The 2030 Agenda highlights the importance of governance to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). However, we observe that there is an underestimation of the governance dimension in the SDG indices. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, indices assign a lower weight to governance compared to the other dimensions of sustainability. Secondly, most governance indicators do not measure the relational dynamics that underlie sustainable development policies. The aim of this study is thus to provide alternative methods for a more accurate assessment of the governance dimension in the frame of the 2030 Agenda. With this purpose, we examine the performance of 100 Spanish cities on the SDGs included in the first report elaborated by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Spain in 2018. Using this data, we first develop a methodology to rebalance the current underestimation of the governance dimension, comparing its impact on the SDG performance of these cities. Secondly, we build a new indicator of ‘Strategic Culture’ to get a more accurate measure of governance in urban contexts. As a result, the study validates the proposed methods and provides evidence that better performance on sustainable development is favored by the implementation of strategic planning processes.

Highlights

There is a prolific debate about the core meaning of ‘sustainable development’ (SD)and ‘governance’, and how to measure them [1,2,3]
We examine the suitability of the governance indicators selected by REDS, since the underestimation of the governance dimension can be related to the type of indicators
The purpose of our study was to empirically assess the way in which the governance dimension of SD is addressed in the frame of the 2030 Agenda, through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Indices

Summary

Introduction

There is a prolific debate about the core meaning of ‘sustainable development’ (SD)and ‘governance’, and how to measure them [1,2,3]. SD has been defined as “the development that meets needs of current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [4]. Despite this definition constituting an important milestone, it is rather vague in terms of policy development. There is no universally agreed upon definition of governance This notion is based on the idea that the nature of the state has changed [5,6], so ‘governance’ differs from ‘government’, but it is a central component of it. The latter refers to the institutions and actions of the state, while the former goes further and stresses the relational dynamics between different stakeholders that underlie policymaking processes [7]

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