The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations

Abstract

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system’s ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. The need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators poses an additional methodological challenge – especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations across neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the extent to which the SDG indicators’ representativeness could be affected by inequalities. It does so by proposing a conceptual framing for understanding the relation between inequalities and SDG monitoring, which is then applied to analyse the current methodological proposals for the indicator framework of the “urban SDG”, Goal 11. The outcome is a call for 1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, 2) the development of a methodological approach to “recalibrate” the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and 3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices.

Sustainable and inclusive – Evaluating urban sustainability indicators’ suitability for measuring progress towards SDG-11

“…This challenge is especially true in developing countries, where institutional capacity and poor transportation and information technology infrastructure, among other factors, limit data collection (Simon et al., 2015). Spatially-explicit, disaggregated data will be particularly critical to locate spatial patterns and inequalities and identify policy priorities that can be more effective in targeting specific areas and social groups (Pfeffer et al., 2019; Ulbrich et al., 2019).…”

“…Another challenge facing urban indicators, and in particular SDG-11, is with respect to their generalizability or comparability across, at times, vastly different contexts. While all SDGs face monitoring challenges, SDG-11’s subnational and spatial focus adds complexity because residents’ experience of SDG-11 indicators can vary significantly within the city, and are often shaped by neighborhood-specific socio-spatial factors (Ulbrich et al., 2019). Many cities that do attempt to collect data for the SDGs, by leveraging their existing monitoring systems or applying SDG indicators to local contexts, capture the information most relevant to local priorities and politics, which does not necessarily allow for comparability across cities (Pfeffer et al., 2019).…”

Climate-Environmental Governance in the Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area: Assessing Local Institutional Capacities in the Face of Current and Future Urban Metabolic Dynamics

“…Trends in urban inflows and outflows can indeed change if measures are effectively taken. Those include: (i) long-term urban planning and design for sustainability, health, and resilience [55][56][57][58]; (ii) technological and non-technological measures for decreasing natural resource extraction, improving urban efficiency, and closing urban flows cycles [47,59,60]; (iii) introduction of nature-based solutions for reducing climate risk and promoting biodiversity and habitat conservation [61][62][63]; (iv) addressing social inclusion while reducing inequalities of all kind [64][65][66][67]; (v) enhancing urban participatory governance, hand in hand with local institutional capacity building, science-policy interface promotion, and finance innovation [68][69][70][71]; and undoubtedly, (vi) climate-environmental education for everyday practices and behavioral change [72,73].…”

Global Informal Settlements and Urban Slums in Cities and the Coverage

“…Such modules/tools can be also utilized by academic institutions and NGOs to monitor and report on slums informal settlements and inadequate housing. For reporting on SDG 11.1.1, a diverse set of data should be adopted including: As far as the tools are concerned, this can be obtained from https://unhabitat.org/tools-and-guides/, where these tools have been reviewed and agreed upon by international and local stakeholders [66,67].…”