The 2015 Sustainable Development Agenda, signed off at a UN Leaders’ Summit in September 2015, is the outcome of
193 nations and multiple stakeholders working together for three years, organising countless national and thematic
consultations, stakeholder forums, and on-line and door-to-door surveys. Whereas the Millennium goals consisted of mostly
social goals, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) aim to achieve sustainable development by embracing the ‘so-
called triple bottom line approach to human wellbeing’; a combination of economic development, environmental
sustainability, and social inclusion (Sachs, 2012, p. 2206). Goals 1 to 6 fall under the social pillar of the Sustainable
Development Goals; Goals 7 to 12 fall under the economic pillar; and Goals 13, 14, and 15 refer to climate change, oceans
and biodiversity respectively, and are therefore part of the environmental pillar of the SDGs. Among the economic,
environmental and social pillars, environmental sustainability needs to receive prime attention. To assist countries in
implementing the SDGs, the SDSN and Bertelsmann Stiftung jointly produced The SDG Index & Dashboards - a global
report 2017, to help countries ‘track the SDGs over time, to assess progress, identify priorities, determine weak points in
implementation, and to stay on track towards the goals’ (SDSN, 2017). The report concluded that every OECD country
currently faces major challenges in meeting several of the environmental SDGs (SDSN, p. 12). According to the report, the
greatest challenges exist on sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), climate change (SDG 13), clean energy
(SDG 7), and ecosystem conservation (SDGs 14 and 15) (SDSN 2017, p. 12, 14). Despite being placed at number 19 of
the country performance index with an overall score of 77.9, Ireland’s performance on the environmental pillar is
considered poor (SDSN 2017, p. 10). Ireland is marked red, meaning the worse score, on all of the environmental SDGs
except water (SDG 11) (SDSN 2017, p. 103). Although the report’s estimates are restricted to a limited number of the
official UN SDG indicators, the assessment is aligned with current EPA projections on arguably the most important
environmental SDG, the climate change mitigation goal (SDG 13). In a recently released report, Ireland’s Greenhouse Gas
Emission Projections 2017, EPA estimatesthat Irish non-ETS sector emissions will be 4% - 6% below 2005 levels by 2020
and 1% - 3% below 2005 levels by 2030 (EPA 2017). Ireland isthus projected to miss its EU climate emissions obligations
and its UN SDG commitments.
Ireland is in a critical phase of national policy development on sustainable development. There is a clear consensus
nationally and internationally that success in the implementation of the SDGs will be dependent upon strong stakeholders’
engagement, acting and working together in a collaborative partnership with government (NESC 2015; UN 2015a). In
addition, sustainable development requires an integrated approach to decision-making at national and regional levels
(Walsh 2016; UN 2015b, 1992). Spillovers between economic, social and environmental dimensions at home and in our
dealings abroad pose challenges to institutions that were often not designed to work across boundaries (Meuleman &
Niestroy 2015; Walsh 2015; Irish Dept. of Finance 2015; Peters 2013). Ireland has a history of government-led policy
creation, implemented by government and reviewed by government and there is a need to understand how we can adapt
already existing institutions to move sustainable development policy towards government as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) for integrated policy formulation, implementation and review at national and regional levels
(Walsh 2016; UN 2015a). Although the potential benefits of MSPs are well documented, e.g. the potential for better policy
making, legitimacy, governance and implementation especially where sustainable results require cooperation between
different actors, evidence on their effectivenessis mixed (Dodds 2015; UNDP 2006). In particular, there are many practical
issues that need to be addressed before we can be reasonably confident that MSPs can deliver meaningful improvements
in Irish sustainable development policy. For example, what activities will be employed to maximize stakeholder engagement, learning and knowledge exchanges, what feedback mechanisms will be used to improve activities and uncover problems, how will conflicts be resolved and equal distribution of power ensured, how will science-based tools be combined with stakeholder perspectives, how can proposals be assessed in an integrated way, what is the appropriate level, national or regional, to implement MSPs, what are the appropriate decision-making mechanisms, etc.
This project will address data and governance aspects of the Sustainable Development Agenda. It will specifically focus
on the environmental data and public governance approach required to deliver improvements on the Sustainable
Development Goals in Ireland. The SDG Index & Dashboards report is the only one that discusses Ireland on a national
level. Conclusions are drawn from a regional perspective and the SDSN report does not offer any country-specific
suggestions for improvement. The report focuses on the data aspect of the Sustainable Development Agenda and uses
internationally consistent data from international data sources to highlight significant gaps and challenges (SDSN 2017, p.
51-53). Many proposed official SDG indicators are not included in the SDG Index: data are currently widely available
worldwide only for about 1/3 of these indicators. Reporting was particularly weak on environmental SDGs 12-15 and
several important data gaps remain (SDSN 2017, p. 1, 21-22). For example, the report does not consider historical data or
the EU SDG indicator framework’s additional “ready to use” environmental data (European Commission 2017, p. 4, 9-11).
It thus cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of Ireland’s environmental status in relation to the SDGs or how fast
we have been progressing towards achieving the SDGs. The Eurostat report, EU and the Sustainable Development Goals:
a first statistical glance (2016), offers ‘an initial quantitative presentation of the current position of the European Union
and its Member states with respect to the SDGs’ (Eurostat, 2016, p. 2). The indicators in this report are independent from
the UN SDG indicators and are instead obtained from official European Statistical System (ESS) sources. The OECD
report, Measuring distance to the SDGs targets: A pilot assessment of where OECD countries stand (2016), aims to propose
an initial assessment of individual progress and as well as countries’ global contributions for a number of OECD countries;
Ireland’s global position with regards to the SDGs was not discussed. This project will thus conduct research into the
availability of environmental data for Ireland on the official UN SDG indicator set to provide a more comprehensive view
of Ireland’s environmental status in relation to the SDGs. The project will construct a national environmental SDG index
in line with international best practice to assess progress and to help identify SDG priority areas.
Official UN SDG indicators: data availability and gaps
The UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group (IAEG) has designed a set of 232 global indicators to measure the full
implementation and achievement of the SDG targets and goals. (Statistical Commission, 2015, p. 15-39). The global
indicators of the IAEG are divided into three tiers based on methodological development and data availability: tier I is
assigned to indicators for which a methodology exists and data are widely available; tier II is assigned to indicators for
which a methodology has been established but for which data are not easily available as of yet; the final tier, tier III, is
assigned to indicators in need of an internationally agreed methodology (Statistical Commission, 2015, p. 9). The UN
Metadata service, provided for national use to specify the exact data needs of the IAEG indicators, provides information
about possible data holders and data availability (United Nations Statistical Commission, 2016). This project will adopt the
tier system created by the IAEG to indicate availability of environmental data for the SDGs for Ireland. A selection of the
232 IAEG indicators will be made for data collection and to identify crucial data gaps for indicators that have 1) a primary
or secondary link to the environment, and 2) are of particular significance to Ireland.
Selection of indicators and integrated assessment:
The global indicators cut across the three pillars of sustainable development and a selection must be made to identify
economic-environmental, social-environmental and environmental indicators. This selection is necessary to achieve an
integrated approach to the environmental SDGs and it is important for assessing whether Ireland is making enough progress towards adopting the desired integrated approach (UN, 2015). It is also important for evaluating the economic,
environmental and social co-impacts of environmental policies (OECD 2015). Many of these co-impacts are non-monetary
and difficult to capture in standard Cost-Benefit Analysis, although current research on climate change, energy and
infrastructure is interested in efforts to do so (cf. Day et al. 2015; IEA 2015; NESC 2017). Whereas the goals fall under
their own individual pillar, all goals have a social, economic and environmental dimension. For example, the achievement
of the “zero hunger” goal (SDG2) requires food security to be realised which is dependent on climate change mitigation
and sustainability agriculture. Yet, these do not guarantee a high quality of food and food with high nutritional value is
needed for health and wellbeing (Nilson, Griggs & Visbeck 2016). Expectations are that data availability is higher for
economic-environmental indicators than for the social-environmental or environmental indicators. Klaver (2016) has
demonstrated for Ireland in a sample of IAEG indicators that the majority of data gaps fall under the environmental pillar
while the economic and social indicators have larger environmental data availability. This suggests that Ireland has not yet
fully embraced the desired integrated approach towards data collection. A recent Directorate established in the Irish Central
Statistics Office (CSO) in early 2017 aims to co-ordinate such data collection across government departments.
National environmental SDG index
The standard approach to measuring development is to combine normalized indicators in different dimensions into a single
composite index. Prominent examples of this approach include the Human Development Index, Multi-dimensional Poverty
Index and the SDG Index (Deaton 2011; Alkire, Ballon & Foster et al. 2015; SDSN 2016). To aggregate the indicators into
a single composite index requires a weighting of different dimensions that implicitly allows for trade-offs between these
dimensions (Alkire, Ballon & Foster et al. 2015, Hertliz & Horan 2017a). The standard approach here is to ascribe equal
weight to each dimension and to then apply a linear aggregation function (cf. Sachs et al. 2016; Prakash et al. 2017; OECD
2016). Similar to GDP, the single value that such an aggregation yields may be used to ordinally rank outcomes and
countries and as a value for optimization by policy makers. The closest example to a national SDG Index thatsynthesizes data from the IAEG’s global indicator framework is presented in the SDSN report Achieving a Sustainable Urban America 2017. It develops a US Cities SDG Index to provide a snapshot of where American cities stand on overall SDG implementation and to provide a framework for action that can be used by policy makers and stakeholders to address implementation challenges across US cities. The index is used to rank findings by goals, indicator and city from best to worst, to present regional snapshots and to identify emerging trends. The adaption of this index to assess Ireland’s progress on the environmental SDGs would allow for a more holistic and comprehensive assessment of our SDG challenges.
SDG interactions and the selection of weights
A key issue for environmental sustainability, and a long-standing debate in the environmental management literature, is the
relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) suggests
that environmental degradation increases up to a point as economies grow but then ‘decreases as income exceeds a threshold level’. However, critics disagree about the possibility of economic growth as a solution to environmental degradation; not only are we in danger of exceeding planetary boundaries, unrestrained growth is in fact the source, more than the solution, of environmental degradation and unsustainability (Conrad and Cassar, 2014, p. 6730). Put differently, is human capital a substitute or complement for natural capital. This relationship has some serious implications for the selection of weights in a national environmental SDG index and thus the assessment of progress on the environmental SDGs (Herlitz & Horan 2017a). It determines whether and what trade-offs can be made between the three pillars (Adams, 2006, p. 3-4). A distinction has been made between strong and weak sustainability, which dictates whether such trade-offs are or are not allowed. SDG Index & Dashboards report accommodates these perspectives by presenting both a composite SDG index for overall country rankings (with equal weights) and a dashboard approach that uses a concept known as “limited substitutability”, in which being weak on one goal’s target does not substitute for being strong on another (SDSN 2016). These relationships are likely to be complex and non-marginal. To help map more nuanced interactions between SDGs. Nilson, Griggs & Visbeck (2016) recently developed a way of rating relationships between targets that goes beyond simple trade-off or synergy characterisations to help highlight priorities for integrated policy.
Governance for the SDGs
While the vision for the Sustainable Development Goals was negotiated at the global level, the responsibility for
implementation has been given to multi-stakeholder partnerships, led by governments of nation states (UN General
Assembly 2015). The 2030 Agenda does not prescribe an institutional model for public governance at the national or
regional level, but outlines principles that such institutions should strive to achieve, such as “effectiveness, inclusiveness,
and accountability” (SDG 16), “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” (target
16.7) and “policy coherence” (target 17.14) (GSDR 2016). International research on the relationship between knowledge,
expertise and policy indicates that as the degree of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity in a policy domain increases it
becomes less feasible for central department and other authorities to formulate expert advice in isolation from stakeholders, practitioners and political actors (Bijker et al., 2009). Environmental problems tend to have such characteristics. The NESC Report Ireland and the Climate Change Challenge: From How Much to How To (2012) concludes that “transition to a carbon-neutral economy and society must engage actors at all levels and in all sectors, through a governance system that animates, learns from and pushes networks of firms, public organisations and communities to ever-greater decarbonisation”. Although MSPs are not new, their recipe for success, however, is not known. There have been successes and failures with this approach, and it is therefore important to learn from previous initiatives and understand the practical issues involved in their effective design.
MSPs: examples of institutional structures
Useful lessons for strengthening institutions to advance sustainable development can be learned from the efforts made to
implement the outcomes of the first Conference of Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, the
World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 and the Conference on Sustainable
Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2012. Firstly, one example that is put forward in the Agenda is a National
Council for Sustainable Development (NCSD). After the Earth Summit the number of NCSDs globally reached over 100.
However, they have had mixed levels of success over the past two decades De Vries (2015). A key finding is that the more
the NCSD is dominated by the government, the more it turns out to be a ‘communication platform’, used to communicate
government policy to a range of stakeholders. Conversely, more independent NCSDs often tend to play a more advisory
role in the decision-making process (GRSD 2016).
Another example, as employed in the UN High-level Political Forums (HLPF), is to build partnerships into parliamentary
committee work on agenda setting, implementation and review policies(Walsh 2016). Such structures give all stakeholders
an ex-ante formal role in policy formation, implementation and review (Walsh 2016). All stakeholders can promote and
protect their interest, without harming other interest groups. The UN 2030 Agenda also acknowledges “the essential role
of national parliaments through their enactment of legislation and adoption of budgets and their role in ensuring
accountability for the effective implementation of our commitments”, but also in inclusiveness, in drawing “on
contributions from indigenous peoples, civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders”. Such a hybrid committee
structure could also help deliver medium- to long-term planning for current and future generations that is independent of
political cycles and vested interest. Although Ireland already has some examples of multi-stakeholder partnerships in its
institutional committee structures on aspects of sustainable development, e.g. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and
Security (2015-18), such MSPs are not however mainstream (Walsh 2016).A third example is given by the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER) which brokered the Dutch Energy Agreement for Sustainable Growth (Energieakoord) that engaged multiple Dutch stakeholders in a complex process of analysis and dialogue. A comparable case is the Danish DK Energy Agreement of 2012 (covering goals and policies to 2020) which was adopted by parties that represent almost all of the seats in parliament. Although such an approach has proved useful for agenda setting, it effectiveness for implementation and review is however unclear.
Inter-governmental oversight of MSPs and inter-departmental cooperation on SDs:
There is a need to integrate economic, social and environmental policies at home and in our dealings abroad. This will
require inter-governmental oversight of MSPs and more departmental integration on sustainable development. Firstly,
whereas some environmental problems are “local” (e.g. access to wastewater treatment, rates of biodiversity loss), other
problems involve spillovers across countries (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable consumption and production),
and this raises important questions regarding what level, national or regional, to implement MSPs in SDG priority areas.
Secondly, government departments tend to work vertically on policy analysis and to not have access to linked social,
economic and environmental data that could help them support an inclusive and integrated approach to sustainable
development policy. Ireland, up to 2015, did have an Inter-Departmental Committee on Development (IDCD), which
facilitated discussion between departments on coherence between policies, in particular trade and aid, in Ireland’s
governmental approach to development in program countries, and explored opportunities for using expertise and skills
across government departments to support the objectives of the Irish Aid ODA programme. For such an approach to work
effectively for sustainable development, new integrated data will be required from our statistical offices. The previously
mentioned new directorate at the CSO is a step in this direction.
MSPs: issues and recommendations
In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development concluded that MSPs must meet seven key criteria: i) they should
be voluntary and based on shared responsibility, ii) they must complement, rather than substitute, sustainable development
strategies, iii) they must consist of a range of multi-level stakeholders, preferably within a given area of work and have
clear objectives, iv) they must ensure transparency and accountability, v) they must have specific targets and time-frames
for their achievement and produce tangible results, vi) the partnership must be new, and adequate funding must be available, and vii) a follow-up process must be developed. It is important to involve stakeholders early in the process, to encourage participation and a sense of ownership of the outcome, and to link their efforts to policy design. There is a need to ensure inclusiveness, so that stakeholder groups truly participate and not just rubber-stamp decisions (UNEP 2006).
193 nations and multiple stakeholders working together for three years, organising countless national and thematic
consultations, stakeholder forums, and on-line and door-to-door surveys. Whereas the Millennium goals consisted of mostly
social goals, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) aim to achieve sustainable development by embracing the ‘so-
called triple bottom line approach to human wellbeing’; a combination of economic development, environmental
sustainability, and social inclusion (Sachs, 2012, p. 2206). Goals 1 to 6 fall under the social pillar of the Sustainable
Development Goals; Goals 7 to 12 fall under the economic pillar; and Goals 13, 14, and 15 refer to climate change, oceans
and biodiversity respectively, and are therefore part of the environmental pillar of the SDGs. Among the economic,
environmental and social pillars, environmental sustainability needs to receive prime attention. To assist countries in
implementing the SDGs, the SDSN and Bertelsmann Stiftung jointly produced The SDG Index & Dashboards - a global
report 2017, to help countries ‘track the SDGs over time, to assess progress, identify priorities, determine weak points in
implementation, and to stay on track towards the goals’ (SDSN, 2017). The report concluded that every OECD country
currently faces major challenges in meeting several of the environmental SDGs (SDSN, p. 12). According to the report, the
greatest challenges exist on sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), climate change (SDG 13), clean energy
(SDG 7), and ecosystem conservation (SDGs 14 and 15) (SDSN 2017, p. 12, 14). Despite being placed at number 19 of
the country performance index with an overall score of 77.9, Ireland’s performance on the environmental pillar is
considered poor (SDSN 2017, p. 10). Ireland is marked red, meaning the worse score, on all of the environmental SDGs
except water (SDG 11) (SDSN 2017, p. 103). Although the report’s estimates are restricted to a limited number of the
official UN SDG indicators, the assessment is aligned with current EPA projections on arguably the most important
environmental SDG, the climate change mitigation goal (SDG 13). In a recently released report, Ireland’s Greenhouse Gas
Emission Projections 2017, EPA estimatesthat Irish non-ETS sector emissions will be 4% - 6% below 2005 levels by 2020
and 1% - 3% below 2005 levels by 2030 (EPA 2017). Ireland isthus projected to miss its EU climate emissions obligations
and its UN SDG commitments.
Ireland is in a critical phase of national policy development on sustainable development. There is a clear consensus
nationally and internationally that success in the implementation of the SDGs will be dependent upon strong stakeholders’
engagement, acting and working together in a collaborative partnership with government (NESC 2015; UN 2015a). In
addition, sustainable development requires an integrated approach to decision-making at national and regional levels
(Walsh 2016; UN 2015b, 1992). Spillovers between economic, social and environmental dimensions at home and in our
dealings abroad pose challenges to institutions that were often not designed to work across boundaries (Meuleman &
Niestroy 2015; Walsh 2015; Irish Dept. of Finance 2015; Peters 2013). Ireland has a history of government-led policy
creation, implemented by government and reviewed by government and there is a need to understand how we can adapt
already existing institutions to move sustainable development policy towards government as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) for integrated policy formulation, implementation and review at national and regional levels
(Walsh 2016; UN 2015a). Although the potential benefits of MSPs are well documented, e.g. the potential for better policy
making, legitimacy, governance and implementation especially where sustainable results require cooperation between
different actors, evidence on their effectivenessis mixed (Dodds 2015; UNDP 2006). In particular, there are many practical
issues that need to be addressed before we can be reasonably confident that MSPs can deliver meaningful improvements
in Irish sustainable development policy. For example, what activities will be employed to maximize stakeholder engagement, learning and knowledge exchanges, what feedback mechanisms will be used to improve activities and uncover problems, how will conflicts be resolved and equal distribution of power ensured, how will science-based tools be combined with stakeholder perspectives, how can proposals be assessed in an integrated way, what is the appropriate level, national or regional, to implement MSPs, what are the appropriate decision-making mechanisms, etc.
This project will address data and governance aspects of the Sustainable Development Agenda. It will specifically focus
on the environmental data and public governance approach required to deliver improvements on the Sustainable
Development Goals in Ireland. The SDG Index & Dashboards report is the only one that discusses Ireland on a national
level. Conclusions are drawn from a regional perspective and the SDSN report does not offer any country-specific
suggestions for improvement. The report focuses on the data aspect of the Sustainable Development Agenda and uses
internationally consistent data from international data sources to highlight significant gaps and challenges (SDSN 2017, p.
51-53). Many proposed official SDG indicators are not included in the SDG Index: data are currently widely available
worldwide only for about 1/3 of these indicators. Reporting was particularly weak on environmental SDGs 12-15 and
several important data gaps remain (SDSN 2017, p. 1, 21-22). For example, the report does not consider historical data or
the EU SDG indicator framework’s additional “ready to use” environmental data (European Commission 2017, p. 4, 9-11).
It thus cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of Ireland’s environmental status in relation to the SDGs or how fast
we have been progressing towards achieving the SDGs. The Eurostat report, EU and the Sustainable Development Goals:
a first statistical glance (2016), offers ‘an initial quantitative presentation of the current position of the European Union
and its Member states with respect to the SDGs’ (Eurostat, 2016, p. 2). The indicators in this report are independent from
the UN SDG indicators and are instead obtained from official European Statistical System (ESS) sources. The OECD
report, Measuring distance to the SDGs targets: A pilot assessment of where OECD countries stand (2016), aims to propose
an initial assessment of individual progress and as well as countries’ global contributions for a number of OECD countries;
Ireland’s global position with regards to the SDGs was not discussed. This project will thus conduct research into the
availability of environmental data for Ireland on the official UN SDG indicator set to provide a more comprehensive view
of Ireland’s environmental status in relation to the SDGs. The project will construct a national environmental SDG index
in line with international best practice to assess progress and to help identify SDG priority areas.
Official UN SDG indicators: data availability and gaps
The UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group (IAEG) has designed a set of 232 global indicators to measure the full
implementation and achievement of the SDG targets and goals. (Statistical Commission, 2015, p. 15-39). The global
indicators of the IAEG are divided into three tiers based on methodological development and data availability: tier I is
assigned to indicators for which a methodology exists and data are widely available; tier II is assigned to indicators for
which a methodology has been established but for which data are not easily available as of yet; the final tier, tier III, is
assigned to indicators in need of an internationally agreed methodology (Statistical Commission, 2015, p. 9). The UN
Metadata service, provided for national use to specify the exact data needs of the IAEG indicators, provides information
about possible data holders and data availability (United Nations Statistical Commission, 2016). This project will adopt the
tier system created by the IAEG to indicate availability of environmental data for the SDGs for Ireland. A selection of the
232 IAEG indicators will be made for data collection and to identify crucial data gaps for indicators that have 1) a primary
or secondary link to the environment, and 2) are of particular significance to Ireland.
Selection of indicators and integrated assessment:
The global indicators cut across the three pillars of sustainable development and a selection must be made to identify
economic-environmental, social-environmental and environmental indicators. This selection is necessary to achieve an
integrated approach to the environmental SDGs and it is important for assessing whether Ireland is making enough progress towards adopting the desired integrated approach (UN, 2015). It is also important for evaluating the economic,
environmental and social co-impacts of environmental policies (OECD 2015). Many of these co-impacts are non-monetary
and difficult to capture in standard Cost-Benefit Analysis, although current research on climate change, energy and
infrastructure is interested in efforts to do so (cf. Day et al. 2015; IEA 2015; NESC 2017). Whereas the goals fall under
their own individual pillar, all goals have a social, economic and environmental dimension. For example, the achievement
of the “zero hunger” goal (SDG2) requires food security to be realised which is dependent on climate change mitigation
and sustainability agriculture. Yet, these do not guarantee a high quality of food and food with high nutritional value is
needed for health and wellbeing (Nilson, Griggs & Visbeck 2016). Expectations are that data availability is higher for
economic-environmental indicators than for the social-environmental or environmental indicators. Klaver (2016) has
demonstrated for Ireland in a sample of IAEG indicators that the majority of data gaps fall under the environmental pillar
while the economic and social indicators have larger environmental data availability. This suggests that Ireland has not yet
fully embraced the desired integrated approach towards data collection. A recent Directorate established in the Irish Central
Statistics Office (CSO) in early 2017 aims to co-ordinate such data collection across government departments.
National environmental SDG index
The standard approach to measuring development is to combine normalized indicators in different dimensions into a single
composite index. Prominent examples of this approach include the Human Development Index, Multi-dimensional Poverty
Index and the SDG Index (Deaton 2011; Alkire, Ballon & Foster et al. 2015; SDSN 2016). To aggregate the indicators into
a single composite index requires a weighting of different dimensions that implicitly allows for trade-offs between these
dimensions (Alkire, Ballon & Foster et al. 2015, Hertliz & Horan 2017a). The standard approach here is to ascribe equal
weight to each dimension and to then apply a linear aggregation function (cf. Sachs et al. 2016; Prakash et al. 2017; OECD
2016). Similar to GDP, the single value that such an aggregation yields may be used to ordinally rank outcomes and
countries and as a value for optimization by policy makers. The closest example to a national SDG Index thatsynthesizes data from the IAEG’s global indicator framework is presented in the SDSN report Achieving a Sustainable Urban America 2017. It develops a US Cities SDG Index to provide a snapshot of where American cities stand on overall SDG implementation and to provide a framework for action that can be used by policy makers and stakeholders to address implementation challenges across US cities. The index is used to rank findings by goals, indicator and city from best to worst, to present regional snapshots and to identify emerging trends. The adaption of this index to assess Ireland’s progress on the environmental SDGs would allow for a more holistic and comprehensive assessment of our SDG challenges.
SDG interactions and the selection of weights
A key issue for environmental sustainability, and a long-standing debate in the environmental management literature, is the
relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) suggests
that environmental degradation increases up to a point as economies grow but then ‘decreases as income exceeds a threshold level’. However, critics disagree about the possibility of economic growth as a solution to environmental degradation; not only are we in danger of exceeding planetary boundaries, unrestrained growth is in fact the source, more than the solution, of environmental degradation and unsustainability (Conrad and Cassar, 2014, p. 6730). Put differently, is human capital a substitute or complement for natural capital. This relationship has some serious implications for the selection of weights in a national environmental SDG index and thus the assessment of progress on the environmental SDGs (Herlitz & Horan 2017a). It determines whether and what trade-offs can be made between the three pillars (Adams, 2006, p. 3-4). A distinction has been made between strong and weak sustainability, which dictates whether such trade-offs are or are not allowed. SDG Index & Dashboards report accommodates these perspectives by presenting both a composite SDG index for overall country rankings (with equal weights) and a dashboard approach that uses a concept known as “limited substitutability”, in which being weak on one goal’s target does not substitute for being strong on another (SDSN 2016). These relationships are likely to be complex and non-marginal. To help map more nuanced interactions between SDGs. Nilson, Griggs & Visbeck (2016) recently developed a way of rating relationships between targets that goes beyond simple trade-off or synergy characterisations to help highlight priorities for integrated policy.
Governance for the SDGs
While the vision for the Sustainable Development Goals was negotiated at the global level, the responsibility for
implementation has been given to multi-stakeholder partnerships, led by governments of nation states (UN General
Assembly 2015). The 2030 Agenda does not prescribe an institutional model for public governance at the national or
regional level, but outlines principles that such institutions should strive to achieve, such as “effectiveness, inclusiveness,
and accountability” (SDG 16), “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels” (target
16.7) and “policy coherence” (target 17.14) (GSDR 2016). International research on the relationship between knowledge,
expertise and policy indicates that as the degree of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity in a policy domain increases it
becomes less feasible for central department and other authorities to formulate expert advice in isolation from stakeholders, practitioners and political actors (Bijker et al., 2009). Environmental problems tend to have such characteristics. The NESC Report Ireland and the Climate Change Challenge: From How Much to How To (2012) concludes that “transition to a carbon-neutral economy and society must engage actors at all levels and in all sectors, through a governance system that animates, learns from and pushes networks of firms, public organisations and communities to ever-greater decarbonisation”. Although MSPs are not new, their recipe for success, however, is not known. There have been successes and failures with this approach, and it is therefore important to learn from previous initiatives and understand the practical issues involved in their effective design.
MSPs: examples of institutional structures
Useful lessons for strengthening institutions to advance sustainable development can be learned from the efforts made to
implement the outcomes of the first Conference of Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, the
World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 and the Conference on Sustainable
Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2012. Firstly, one example that is put forward in the Agenda is a National
Council for Sustainable Development (NCSD). After the Earth Summit the number of NCSDs globally reached over 100.
However, they have had mixed levels of success over the past two decades De Vries (2015). A key finding is that the more
the NCSD is dominated by the government, the more it turns out to be a ‘communication platform’, used to communicate
government policy to a range of stakeholders. Conversely, more independent NCSDs often tend to play a more advisory
role in the decision-making process (GRSD 2016).
Another example, as employed in the UN High-level Political Forums (HLPF), is to build partnerships into parliamentary
committee work on agenda setting, implementation and review policies(Walsh 2016). Such structures give all stakeholders
an ex-ante formal role in policy formation, implementation and review (Walsh 2016). All stakeholders can promote and
protect their interest, without harming other interest groups. The UN 2030 Agenda also acknowledges “the essential role
of national parliaments through their enactment of legislation and adoption of budgets and their role in ensuring
accountability for the effective implementation of our commitments”, but also in inclusiveness, in drawing “on
contributions from indigenous peoples, civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders”. Such a hybrid committee
structure could also help deliver medium- to long-term planning for current and future generations that is independent of
political cycles and vested interest. Although Ireland already has some examples of multi-stakeholder partnerships in its
institutional committee structures on aspects of sustainable development, e.g. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and
Security (2015-18), such MSPs are not however mainstream (Walsh 2016).A third example is given by the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER) which brokered the Dutch Energy Agreement for Sustainable Growth (Energieakoord) that engaged multiple Dutch stakeholders in a complex process of analysis and dialogue. A comparable case is the Danish DK Energy Agreement of 2012 (covering goals and policies to 2020) which was adopted by parties that represent almost all of the seats in parliament. Although such an approach has proved useful for agenda setting, it effectiveness for implementation and review is however unclear.
Inter-governmental oversight of MSPs and inter-departmental cooperation on SDs:
There is a need to integrate economic, social and environmental policies at home and in our dealings abroad. This will
require inter-governmental oversight of MSPs and more departmental integration on sustainable development. Firstly,
whereas some environmental problems are “local” (e.g. access to wastewater treatment, rates of biodiversity loss), other
problems involve spillovers across countries (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable consumption and production),
and this raises important questions regarding what level, national or regional, to implement MSPs in SDG priority areas.
Secondly, government departments tend to work vertically on policy analysis and to not have access to linked social,
economic and environmental data that could help them support an inclusive and integrated approach to sustainable
development policy. Ireland, up to 2015, did have an Inter-Departmental Committee on Development (IDCD), which
facilitated discussion between departments on coherence between policies, in particular trade and aid, in Ireland’s
governmental approach to development in program countries, and explored opportunities for using expertise and skills
across government departments to support the objectives of the Irish Aid ODA programme. For such an approach to work
effectively for sustainable development, new integrated data will be required from our statistical offices. The previously
mentioned new directorate at the CSO is a step in this direction.
MSPs: issues and recommendations
In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development concluded that MSPs must meet seven key criteria: i) they should
be voluntary and based on shared responsibility, ii) they must complement, rather than substitute, sustainable development
strategies, iii) they must consist of a range of multi-level stakeholders, preferably within a given area of work and have
clear objectives, iv) they must ensure transparency and accountability, v) they must have specific targets and time-frames
for their achievement and produce tangible results, vi) the partnership must be new, and adequate funding must be available, and vii) a follow-up process must be developed. It is important to involve stakeholders early in the process, to encourage participation and a sense of ownership of the outcome, and to link their efforts to policy design. There is a need to ensure inclusiveness, so that stakeholder groups truly participate and not just rubber-stamp decisions (UNEP 2006).