Seven Steps to Strategic SDG Sensemaking for Cities

Ville Taajamaa,Minna Joensuu,Luis Bettencourt,Barbara Karanian

doi:10.3390/admsci12010033

Abstract

This practitioner paper is based on the need to make sense of UN Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the city level and in an urban context. We examine the need to explain how to utilise the SDGs in strategic, tactical and operative urban development. We find that there are knowledge and practise gaps in how to localise SDGs in the urban context. This need and the lack of existing tools has led to the development of a strategic sensemaking process, which has been tested and developed with municipal and other practitioners, locally and globally. The paper presents findings from this process of development and from implementation pilots, including an SDG Sensemaking Tool (SST), a step by step iterative procedure to address these gaps. The main focus of this paper is the SDG Sensemaking process, which relies on analysing SDGs in relation to any given phenomena or project within or outside a city. The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to an understanding on the complexity of how SDGs are related to the analysed phenomena, and catalyses the SDG localisation process, which helps make sense of how to navigate and measure progress in such complex environments. More research and applications are, however, needed, so as to further understand how urban governance can meet holistic, sustainable-development needs. Future work will, firstly, comprise further integrating SDGs into city-level strategies with a focus on the local, regional, national, and global impact on sustainable development and the actualisation of SDGs, and secondly, on further developing SST so that it can serve these purposes.

Highlights

What makes a city sustainable and why is this important? These are fundamental questions for which there are well-established answers based on systemic knowledge.Environmental, human-centred and natural sciences all answer these questions from their own general perspectives (Bettencourt 2021; Haarstad 2016; Hassan and Lee 2015; IPCC2021)
The first results in this work-in-progress show that it contributes to an understanding on the complexity of how Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are related to the analysed phenomena, and catalyses the SDG localisation process, which helps make sense of how to navigate and measure progress in such complex environments
The this section, we present the SDG Sensemaking tool, explaining each explicit step separately

Summary

Introduction

What makes a city sustainable and why is this important? These are fundamental questions for which there are well-established answers based on systemic knowledge.Environmental, human-centred and natural sciences all answer these questions from their own general perspectives (Bettencourt 2021; Haarstad 2016; Hassan and Lee 2015; IPCC2021). What makes a city sustainable and why is this important? Environmental, human-centred and natural sciences all answer these questions from their own general perspectives Smart, inclusive, resilient, and prosperous cities in practice is, a context-driven question so that answers must be more than a sum of other approaches. Any local practical approach is replete with complex synergies and trade-offs between different goals and other dimensions of development (see, e.g., Lai 2020; Moyer and Bohl 2019; Pradhan et al 2017). Due to its all-encompassing, systemic and complex nature, specifying the right questions and measurable quantities on sustainable development is at least as important as finding answers (Bettencourt 2013; Hölscher 2019). To navigate complex situations we must first understand the nature of the complexity underlying a given phenomenon, which can only be done in part via science and technology

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Conclusion