Prioritisation of SDGs: National Trends, International Assistance, and Global Governance Implications

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals are regarded as a globally-endorsed agenda that will guide sustainable development until 2030. National governments are primarily responsible for their implementation, with international organisations – and especially the United Nations – expected to provide some degree of guidance. If guidance is insufficient, countries may cherry-pick certain goals based on pre-existing or short-term concerns. If guidance is sufficient but inadequate, international actors may also promote a selective implementation of the goals. At the global level, the aggregate prioritisation of a limited number of goals could have negative consequences for overall progress on sustainable development, which makes prioritisation trends and processes important to investigate. So far, no study has sought to investigate which goals are prioritised by which national governments nor the role that international organisations have had both throughout the prioritisation process and in assisting countries to design related policies. Consequently, potential global-level governance implications are also unknown. This study investigates these topics by mapping prioritisation trends in nineteen countries and exploring the relationship between international organisations’ assistance and national-level prioritisation processes by undertaking a quantitative analysis coupled with the analysis of two case studies: Bhutan and Viet Nam. Results point to the significant prioritisation of goals 1 and 8 compared to others, although no development pillar appears overtly favoured. Conversely, past policy trends show large variations across all goals, with no outlier goal but with infrastructure-related goals scoring better than others. The case studies reveal multiple reasons for prioritisation – with both domestic- and international-oriented motives – and shed light on how explicit and implicit prioritisation are expected to be linked. International organisations can influence explicit prioritisation by assisting in the creation of development plans, which outline sustainable development priorities, and can do so for implicit prioritisation by selectively allocating assistance to ‘on-the-ground’ activities, that is to design policies, upgrade governance arrangements, and implementing projects. This points to the importance of international coordination mechanisms in ensuring coherence across development partners’ activities. Findings warrant the investigation of future prioritisation trends to further assess the success – or lack thereof – of the Sustainable Development Goals framework in promoting progress on all its goals, as well as more research on processes of prioritisation and international organisations’ assistance to complement preliminary findings from Bhutan and Viet Nam.