Abstract
A body of work is starting to emerge that seeks to build on the challenges and lessons of the current global coronavirus crisis for long term sustainability planning and development. This perspective article argues that central to such reflections should be an acknowledgement of the intense territorial impact of the crisis, especially in the places where most of the world’s population is increasingly living: cities. We review existing frameworks for SDG implementation in the cities of Bengaluru (India), Medellin (Colombia) and Cape Town (South Africa) and use this as the backdrop for an analysis of local responses to the pandemic. We build on this analysis to reflect on three main avenues for SDG implementation going forward: multi-level governance, the science-policy interface and citizen and society engagement. We argue that strengthening these structures and collaborations will be central to more sustainable, long-term inclusive and evidence-based decision-making processes and global policy implementation in cities in a post COVID-19 world.
Highlights
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a global, ambitious,and comprehensive effort to achieve sustainable development in its social, economic, and environmental dimensions
We argue that central to such reflections should be an acknowledgment of the territorial impact of the crisis in cities, considering their central contribution to securing sustainability (Evans, 2019), and that they have been the hotspots of both cases and responses to the pandemic
The city understood that access to real-time data is important, but insufficient to confront this challenge, so it relied on monitoring and prediction, for instance through the collection of data with an online platform called Medellín me cuida (Medellin takes care of me)
Summary
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a global, ambitious,and comprehensive effort to achieve sustainable development in its social, economic, and environmental dimensions. While many national governments recognize the importance of the contribution of subnational governments to achieving global development agendas, the involvement of subnational governments in the planning, implementation and reporting of SDGs varies widely across the world (OECD/CoR, 2019; UCLG, 2019) This is confirmed by the cases of India, Colombia and South Africa under review here. The city understood that access to real-time data is important, but insufficient to confront this challenge, so it relied on monitoring and prediction, for instance through the collection of data with an online platform called Medellín me cuida (Medellin takes care of me) (see CODATA, 2020) Such predictive models have been crucial to raise alarms and inform public health policy and economic responses. Community health workers and volunteers have played an important role in community testing and screening (David and Mash, 2020)
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