Proposal Description

Ever since their inception, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become a way of understanding an ever-changing world that puts humans at the centre of development.
Within the delivery of the SDGs, the use of data is essential to developing understandings, assessments, and consequent policy interventions and activities. The choice of data impacts problem definitions and implementation and is therefore essential for framing political problems and action. Data codify abstract concepts and phenomena, and offer approximations to reality. Making something measurable therefore means making it visible and creating social reality for it.
The same holds for the SDGs. In data-driven policy-making for the SDGs, statistics and indicators are thus the key tools to quantify, qualify and compare complex processes, structures and performances to define meaning and political action.
This insight is also essential when data is selected for reporting on country or programme progress under the SDGs. The UN Common Country Analysis (UN CCA) for the SDGs and the Global Indicator Framework (GIF) reflect this logic by making the SDG targets and indicators the default monitoring framework for progress towards the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Data use is therefore at the centre of the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (‘Cooperation Framework’). Under the Framework, the UN CCA represents a link between data use for policy-making and politics. It provides a core analytical function to the ‘Cooperation Framework’ that focuses on monitoring country progress towards the SDG in ‘real time’. At the same time, it is meant to support the UN’s normative function in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, guide the full programme cycle and should be nationally owned and anchored in national development priorities. Here, the topics presented in the proposed IPS, that is localised indicators, citizen participation, and innovations in Earth observation, together offer pivotal new approaches to contextualised and sustainable progress on the SDGs.
While Official Statistics offer trust-worthy and reliable data for well-established domains of human activities and interactions, complex and rapidly evolving transformations require a huge openness to new data sources and innovative approaches to measuring societal progress. Such approaches ought to portray reality to a largest extent possible, while avoiding a self-reflexive measurement culture that deviates from and distorts it. New data approaches and statistics communities are hence essential drivers for measuring progress towards the SDGs. This is especially needed as, according to the UN SDG 2023 Report, countries’ performance in achieving SDG targets thus far has been underwhelming to say the least.
The speakers of this IPS present insights into such innovative aspects of data and indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals deriving from their contributions to The Elgar Companion to Data and Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (forthcoming in late 2024/early 2025). The volume, edited by the IPS chair, brings together key experts in the field of measuring progress towards the SDGs from international institutions and academia to critically analyse innovation potential for statistics usage for the public good and the SDG agenda.