Evaluation of the financial support for the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals in the border regions of Poland and Ukraine

Abstract

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on the implementation of a new paradigm of the world development – the sustainable development. In the aforementioned resolution, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were formulated with the prospect of their implementation by 2030. The aim of the paper is to perform a multicriteria assessment of the level of financial support for the process of achieving the SDGs determined on the basis of the 2030 Agenda in Poland and Ukraine. The analysis focused on the Polish and Ukrainian regions adjacent to the external border of the EU. The subject matter of the research comprises theoretical, methodological and practical rules for performing this assessment, which can be useful for local authorities of the border regions in their decisionmaking. The research period, covering the years between 2017 and 2019, has been determined on the basis of the availability of statistical data. The 17 predefined SDGs (identified at a global level by the 2030 Agenda) have been divided into three components: social, economic and environmental. The multi-criteria assessment was performed on the basis of the index method, which involved the gradual defining of individual indexes (measures), group indexes (corresponding with the SDGs), cross-group indexes (corresponding with the components), and an integral index for specific border regions and border areas of Poland and Ukraine. The study confirmed the hypothesis that the border regions of Poland received significantly higher financial support for the implementation of the SDGs than the border regions of Ukraine. However, in all the studied regions during the research period these indexes saw a negative, downward trend. It has been concluded that the available statistical data are insufficient for the full measurement of the contribution of particular sources and areas of financing to the implementation of the SDGs. Therefore, creating an international database dedicated to this purpose has been recommended.