Ranking the sustainable development goals: perceived sustainability priorities in small island states

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to elicit global mobilization to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and are increasingly used in support of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Previous studies have highlighted interdependencies between SDGs, with potential interactions between four Sustainability Domains: Economy, Governance, Planet and Society. This study aimed to assess whether people’s perception of the relative importance of the SDGs reflects recognition of the need to prioritize efforts across Domains, or whether this perception is based on different valuations of the Sustainability Domains themselves. We designed an interactive online tool in which participants used the Q-sort technique to rank the SDGs according to their subjective valuation of importance. We analyzed the rankings of 108 participants, all learners at universities in three Small Island States (SIS): Aruba, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Analysis of the correlation structure among participants’ Q-sorts showed that higher perceived importance of the Society- and Economy-related SDGs 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 traded off with lower perceived importance of the Planet-related SDGs 13, 14 and 15. Furthermore, SDG rankings of learners from Aruba occurred furthest toward the Planet-based part of this trade-off axis. For ESD programs, our method provides a novel tool to identify key interactions between SDGs that may not yet be recognized by program participants. In this way, communicating the need for simultaneous action and policy development across Sustainability Domains could be specifically tailored to the local context. Such connections may increase the effectiveness of ESD in addressing the substantial sustainability challenges facing SIS.

The Q approach to consensus building: integrating diverse perspectives to guide decision-making

“…In addition to the social network analysis we conducted, a more detailed analysis of the parties sharing a perspective can be done using cluster analysis (Vogel & Lowham 2007;Eppinga, Mijts & Santos 2022), and this could be a future extension to the Q approach. While the ranking of goals or statements might be intellectually challenging and thus needs adequate time (Barry & Proops 1999;Watts & Stenner 2005;Mukherjee et al 2018), we think that the intensive reflection on the goals or statements and their relative ranking can itself contribute to a better understanding of divergent perspectives and support compromises in consensus building.…”

“…This allows comparing the position of statements in the factors, evaluating the stability of group perspectives, and provides bootstrapped factor scores for the validation of the consensus priority scores. A similar bootstrapping was used for validation by Eppinga, Mijts and Santos (2022). The validation of the group perspectives and the consensus priority scores is done in three ways, each complementing the others but the third to be considered most robust:…”

“…To start, all 17 SDGs are taken as statements and ranked in a gradient ranging from -3 to +3 (-3, -2, -2, -1, -1, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3). The same distribution was used by Eppinga, Mijts and Santos (2022). For the analysis of more or fewer than 17 statements, different distributions may be needed and/or useful.…”

Disentangling the SDGs agenda in the GCC region: Priority targets and core areas for environmental action

“…Studies examining national policies have developed several specific SDG priorities, such as high-income countries prioritizing SDGs related to economic development (e.g., SDGs 1 and 8) (Forestier and Kim, 2020). Similarly, small-island states tend to give more weight to economic and societal SDGs; e.g., SDGs 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 (Eppinga et al, 2022). There are also several studies that suggest normative SDG prioritizations based on general development needs or the relevance of particular concepts for a certain region.…”

“…Forestier and Kim (2020) offered a prioritization exercise for 19 countries at varying economic levels (and from different regions) using both VNR declarations and quantitative indicators related to aid flows. There are SDG mappings on more coherent regions such as the SDG ranking in small-island states using students' surveys by Eppinga et al (2022).…”