Abstract
Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations, sustainability has been a key priority for European governments. While previous studies have investigated the associations between indicators of sustainable development, few have directly considered a multidimensional approach to assess and compare the performance of regions in terms of sustainable development. As such, a comprehensive assessment of regional sustainable performance is thus still needed. In this paper, the concept of sustainability relies on the construction of six composite indices (environment and natural resources, energy transition, sustainable mobility, economic dynamism, social cohesion and solidarity, and governance and citizenship) with the aim to provide an evaluation framework for empirically comparing the performance of the 96 metropolitan French Departments. Each dimension is explored by spatial autocorrelation analysis and Hierarchical Ascending Classification (HAC) to classify French Departments providing five different regional profiles of sustainable development. The findings make it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the departments in the implementation of sustainable development. This approach provides the bases for a systematic monitoring of sustainable development policies at the regional scale.
Highlights
Since the Brundtland et al [1] report and the adoption of Agenda 21 at the UnitedNations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, sustainability has been a key priority for European governments who adjusted their policies
We aim to provide an evaluation framework for empirically comparing the performance of the 96 metropolitan French Departments belonging to Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics 3 (NUTS3)
The department that presents the maximum value of the index is located in the other extreme of the country, that is to say, in the west, being the department of Deux-Sèvres (79) with a value of 37.2. This index seems to be a clear indicator of local efforts towards the energy transition driven by local policy. It seems that French departments must continue to devote all their efforts to achieve energy transition in all areas of the economy
Summary
Since the Brundtland et al [1] report and the adoption of Agenda 21 at the UnitedNations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, sustainability has been a key priority for European governments who adjusted their policies. The new 2030 Agenda with its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was adopted by all member states of the United Nations at the Paris Weather summit in September 2015 [2,3]. In Europe, within the framework of new legislation on the transformation of the linear economy into a circular economy, local public and private agents are encouraged to achieve these objectives. One example of this commitment is the integration of the SDGs in Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization (RIS3) that have been used to implement European Union Cohesion Policy in recent years, aiming to achieve economic, social, and territorial development by reducing disparities between regions [4].
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