Beatriz González López-Valcárcel
Professor of Quantitative Methods in Economics at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
This is an important article, the result of a collaborative effort of dozens of people who in a larger project have reviewed more than 3,000 articles and documents. The detailed results of the project (SDG Impact Assessment) will be published this year.
Through a meta-analysis, the authors explore the actual impact of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals between 2015 and 2021. The article shows that the transformative impact has been low, rather discursive, has barely been translated into regulatory and institutional changes, and has been used by some governments to legitimise their own previous policies.
However, they also find grounds for optimism. For example, the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development [the UN platform for the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development] is working to learn from the good practices of other governments.