Towards a Sound Measure of Government Efforts and Commitments for the SDGs?
Unlike other great transformations of the past, sustainable development requires long‐term directed change. This working paper discusses and compares methods and tools that can be used to track policies related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the principle of Leave-No-One-Behind (LNOB). Due to time lags in international statistics, outcomes-based assessments – such as the SDG Index produced by the SDSN – often provide a snapshot of SDG performance as of two or three years ago (and sometimes more). The extrapolation of past growth rates to predict whether countries are on-track or off-track may not provide a fair representation of ambitious policies and investments instituted by countries, especially when there is a change of government. As such, tracking policy commitments, ambitions and actions are effective ways to complement outcomes-based assessment and provide timelier, more accurate evaluations of government efforts on the SDGs. However, the conceptual and technical work required to build sound policy trackers requires extensive thematic and geographic expertise which makes the development of sound and robust policy trackers challenging. Many fail to estimate the gap between rhetoric and action. This Working Paper (WP) provides examples of best practices in policy tracking from various sources, discusses tools that can help analyse large policy documents and tries to identify future priorities for making governments accountable for adopting and implementing sound, ambitious SDG policies and investment frameworks. It also calls for greater linkages between government efforts for the SDGs and access to financing, especially in Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
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