Each Goal influences many or even all of the others. For example, investing in health has benefits for education and employment opportunities. Relatedly, government policies in different sectors can create positive feedbacks and synergies, but they can also have unintended, negative consequences that cut across different sectors and even extend beyond national boundaries. To address this, the OECD has formulated a set of eight principles aiming at enhancing “policy coherence for sustainable development”.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets out 17 Sustainable Development Goals, with concrete targets like ending child marriage everywhere, or ensuring everyone has access to affordable and reliable electricity. These goals are universal, meaning that all countries have committed to strive towards them. They aim to improve people’s lives all over the world, foster prosperity and protect the planet. To support this global endeavor, the OECD helps countries devise strategies, strengthen governance frameworks and measure progress towards achieving the Goals.
Key messages
A decade after the international community pledged in Addis Ababa to ramp up development finance, the gulf between the amounts mobilised by developing and emerging economies and the trillions they need to meet their development goals has been steadily growing. Without significant reform, the gap is set to swell to USD 6.4 trillion by 2030, the target year for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The OECD calls for a major overhaul of the global system to mobilise resources to build a sustainable future for all.
We are only few years away from 2030, the SDGs target year, but OECD and other economies still have some way to go to meet their SDG commitments. Objectively identifying what has been achieved and what remains to be done can help to focus thinking and guide decisions on the most effective courses of action. The OECD has developed a tool to enable its members to measure the distance to the SDG targets. It reveals mixed results: the OECD area as a whole is close to securing basic needs, but implementing the SDGs in a coherent way to achieve social and environmental goals remains a major challenge for most countries.
Moving forward on the SDGs requires a whole-of-society approach, with citizens and stakeholders supporting SDG policies and participating in their achievement. Good communications can help build trust in institutions working to achieve the Goals. It can increase awareness and mobilise action, for example by promoting climate-friendly behaviours, positive attitudes to gender equality and increasing investments into sustainable development. The OECD Development Communication Network (DevCom) promotes peer learning on how to engage citizens and stakeholders for the SDGs.
Context
Obstacles to implementing policy coherence
Implementing change on the scale required by the SDGs demands both the capacity and the institutional structures to enable complex decision-making and drive the whole government towards holistic solutions. In other words, to achieve the SDGs, we need coherent policies that help us make progress in multiple areas.
Addressing this presents both technical and political challenges. OECD research suggests that key obstacles to improving policy coherence for sustainable development (PCSD) include the limited enforceability of measures for coherence and insufficient technical capacity on the topic. Making progress in these areas will require strengthening data and methodologies for impact assessment and improving the communication of the benefits of policy coherence and the costs of incoherent policies.
OECD countries have achieved 6 of the 114 SDG targets for which distance can be measured
While some goals are within reach, most targets remain at a medium or large distance from being achieved. Distance is on average shortest for Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7), No Poverty (SDG 1) and Good Health and Well-being (SDG 3) goals. By contrast, large gaps remain for Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (SDG 16). For many areas that shape people’s everyday lives, like education, cities and climate, most targets are in the middle ground where sustained efforts are needed to turn partial progress into achievement by 2030.
