The application of soft systems thinking in SDG interaction studies: a comparison between SDG interactions at national and subnational levels in Colombia

Abstract

Since the approval of the Agenda 2030, researchers and policy makers have pointed out the need to understand interactions among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—suggesting that progress or the lack of progress toward one goal will affect other goals through systemic interactions, producing synergies and trade-offs. However, most of the methods used to account for these interactions rely on hard systems thinking approaches, which are limited by the absence of needed data below national levels. Moreover, a general lack of data also constrains the scope of analysis to the 17 Goals, ignoring their 169 underlying targets. Given these challenges, we report on an experiment using an example of a soft systems thinking methodology: the SDG Synergies approach, which is based not only on available information but also on the elicitation of stakeholder and expert opinions. Thus, the approach allows for analysis of target-to-target interactions at subnational scales. The study, the first of its kind, assessed interactions at two scales: the national level in Colombia and the subnational level in the department of Antioquia. The results reveal profound differences between the two scales, suggesting that national-scale analysis of SDG interlinkages is not certain to capture local-level realities. The findings raise important issues for understanding and managing cross-scale interactions. Our work suggests that soft systems thinking is more appropriate for assessing SDG interactions because such an approach lends itself to conducting target-level analysis at various scales in the face of limited data availability.

Barriers to institutional social sustainability

“…Following the guidelines of the UN SDGs (UN 2015 ), the concept of sustainability has been widely discussed in the literature through three interdependent dimensions: economic, social, and environmental (Khan et al 2018a ). Under the systems thinking perspective, however, some studies suggest that practitioners and researchers are expected to be careful in simply categorising single SDGs since the literature highlights the inherent complexity and correlation with other goals (Reynolds et al 2018 ; Hernández-Orozco et al 2021 ). Despite this discussion, from the companies’ viewpoint, the SDGs need to be balanced to guarantee corporate sustainability and help to “meet the needs of a firm’s direct and indirect stakeholders without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders as well” (Dyllick and Hockerts 2002 , p. 131).…”

Biosphere‐based sustainability in local governments: Sustainable development goal interactions and indicators for policymaking

“…They found both similarities and differences in the SDG pairs of relevance to this study (SDG 11 to SDG 13, 14 and 15). Hernández‐Orozco et al (2021) state that many authors argue that the nature of SDG interactions will vary significantly based on local contexts and realities. Thus, our local level findings must be interpreted in light of their context, and generalization of findings should be done with caution.…”

“…The Nilsson et al (2016) framework has been implemented in several studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and has been proven to be suited for supporting various objectives (Breu et al, 2021; Hernández‐Orozco et al, 2021; International Council for Science, 2017; McCollum et al, 2018; Nilsen, 2020; Nilsson et al, 2018; Pham‐Truffert et al, 2020; Weitz et al, 2018). The framework consists of a seven‐point typology and scoring scale.…”

Sustainable Development Goal interactions through a climate lens: a global analysis

“…We then used the SDG Synergies tool (Hernández-Orozco et al, 2022), also developed by SEI, to assess target interactions. This semi-quantitative tool facilitates systemic analysis of interactions between sets of policy targets and goals.…”

“…This paper identifies the most important synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs and the Paris Agreement climate goals at the global level. It provides theoretical groundwork for future empirical analysis that can explore the most interesting points of interactions through, for example, a correlation-based indicator analysis (Kroll et al, 2019;Pradhan et al, 2017;Warchold et al, 2021), as well as national, regional or comparative case study analysis (Hernández-Orozco et al, 2022), to assess whether and how key synergies and trade-offs identified at the global level are manifesting on the ground in different country contexts.…”