Sustainable Development Goals Perspectives

This paper contributes to goal 4 by calling for a careful assessment of the politics of education reform, particularly teacher policy reforms. It identifies three special challenges linked to these reforms: they are generally contentious, often threatening the institutional interests of well-organized and politically powerful teacher unions; their implementation is opaque, as impact depends on classroom-level change that is difficult for reformers to monitor; and benefits are long-term, usually well beyond the political tenure of reform champions.

The number of countries with a national development plan has more than doubled, from about 62 in 2006 to 134 in 2018. This paper analyses the resurgence of national development planning, identifies the types and content of the plans, and their implications and interactions with the SDGs and the global development agenda.

This paper contributes to the debate on the agency of the South in shaping global norms by focusing on the adoption of sustainable development as the consensus framework for the SDGs. Based on documentary and archival research, interviews with stakeholders, and direct participant observation of the SDG negotiations and consultations, the paper chronicles the ideas originating from the South in the emergence and subsequent evolution of the sustainable development concept and the adoption of the SDG.

In 2017, the UN adopted a global SDG indicator framework, calling for complementary national and regional indicators to be collected by member countries, while the UN Habitat developed an indicator action framework specifically for cities. This paper examined the extent to which using UN Sustainable Development Goal indicators framework will help cities evaluate their efforts to deliver sustainability and health outcomes. It identified inconsistencies between the two two frameworks. Many of the SDG indicators assessed outcomes, rather than the ‘upstream’ policies and interventions required to deliver outcomes on-the-ground. Conversely, the UN Habitat framework incorporated intervention indicators, but excluded health outcome indicators. We proposed a more comprehensive approach to benchmarking, monitoring and evaluating policies designed to achieve healthy and sustainable cities and assessing spatial inequities.