Summary

With only a few years left to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Agenda, the half-time reports of 2023 painted a bleak picture. Global progress has been slow and, in some instances, even negative. In this scientific paper, the authors examine synergies and trade-offs in six Swedish municipalities’ work with the 2030 Agenda; Örebro, Luleå, Vellinge, Falköping, Alvesta and Flen.

Key findings

• The study shows how local government representatives understood synergies and positive impacts between goals as constituting an important opportunity to accelerate the progress of their sustainability work.
• A criterion on environmental ranking was implemented, with Örebro and Alvesta scoring higher at 20 and 21, respectively, and Luleå and Flen scoring lower at 141 and 139, respectively.
• SDG localization can indeed have a more strategic impact on governance arrangements, beyond monitoring and reporting local progress on SDGs.

Conclusions

We find that the SDGs provide a platform to organize and communicate local sustainability work but that organizational realities will drive prioritization of goals considered connected and synergistic, such as SDG4, SDG9, and SDG11, which stand in contrast with global assessments of interlinkages. In line with emerging literature on the strategic effect of the SDGs on governance, we argue that the ethos of indivisibility serves as an important heuristic for civil servants and policy makers beyond prioritizing or reporting progress on global goals.

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