16 July 2019
Paper Evaluates Impact of Research Method on Global Assessment Results
story highlights

The paper evaluates the three “most prominent methods” to measure SDG performance at country level.

The authors indicate that it should be up to “each State to define country specific targets and, then, the choice of the most suited indicators”.

July 2019: As the 2019 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) considers how close countries are to achieving the SDGs, a new research paper explores the impact that the research method has on assessments of countries’ relative positions.

The article titled, ‘Measuring Sustainable Development Goals Performance: How to Monitor Policy Action in the 2030 Agenda Implementation?’ was authored by Apollonia Miola and Fritz Schiltz. Published in Ecological Economics, the paper evaluates the three “most prominent methods” to measure SDG performance at country level. These methods are the Sustainable Development Goals Index, developed by Bertelsmann Stiftung, and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) distance measure, and the progress measures based on Eurostat’s report. The authors find that the selection of method and indicators can influence the country’s relative position.

Lead author Apollonia Miola highlights that the debate is open with regard to the most suitable indicators to capture the peculiarities of individual countries, and that the absence of quantitative targets for almost all the official UN indicators is one of the elements that make this question difficult to solve.

The authors also conclude that, while they are of the opinion that “ranking countries is not a suited approach to the 2030 Agenda since the search for the best performer is not the purpose of the 2030 Agenda,” SDG performance analysis offers a tool informing how much effort is needed to achieve the SDGs at country level. They indicate that it should be up to “each State to define country specific targets and, then, the choice of the most suited indicators.” [Open Access to the Paper]

Full citation: Miola, A. , Schiltz, F. (2019) “Measuring sustainable development goals performance: How to monitor policy action in the 2030 Agenda implementation?” Ecological Economics 164 (2019) 106373

related posts