19 December 2016
Eye on Earth Alliance Showcases Montenegro’s Process for SDG Implementation
Photo by IISD/ENB | Kiara Worth
story highlights

The Eye on Earth Alliance hosted a webinar on ‘Implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the National level: Montenegro’s National Strategy for Sustainable Development (NSSD) until 2030'.

The webinar shared Montenegro’s process for developing the NSSD and a monitoring and reporting framework.

Montenegro will have over 42% of the SDG indicators in its national monitoring and reporting system by 2018 and 75% by 2024.

1 December 2016: The Eye on Earth Alliance hosted a webinar titled, ‘Implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the National level: Montenegro’s National Strategy for Sustainable Development (NSSD) until 2030.’ The webinar shared Montenegro’s process for developing the NSSD and a monitoring and reporting framework with the aim of helping other countries to implement the SDGs and operationalize them within their national contexts.

The NSSD is Montenegro’s long-term strategy to support national implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and was presented at the 2016 session of the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). Jelena Knezevic, Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism, Montenegro, outlined Montenegro’s process of revising its NSSD, which includes consultations with citizens on their priorities. The Strategy is organized around six areas: human resources, social resources, natural resources, economic resources, governance for sustainable development and financing for sustainable development.

On monitoring and reporting, Montenegro will have over 42% of the SDG indicators in its national monitoring and reporting system by 2018 and 75% by 2024.

On monitoring and reporting, Knezevic said Montenegro will have over 42% of the SDG indicators in its national monitoring and reporting system by 2018, and 75% of the indicators by 2024. She informed that Montenegro will produce its first report on implementation of its NSSD strategy in 2019, and will report on progress every two years. Montenegro will also revise its action plan every five years, in 2020 and 2025.

In a second presentation, Alessandro Galli, Global Footprint Network, discussed the development of a system for monitoring Montenegro’s progress towards its NSSD and the SDGs. He reported that a consultation with national data-reporting systems sought to identify whether the institutions were tracking the SDGs, fully or partially, and whether the institutions were planning to track the SDGs by 2018 or later. He highlighted that SDG monitoring is a government-wide exercise, involving a large number of ministries and bodies in a country. He also noted the difference between institutions that are official producers of statistics and have legal authority to communicate national statistical data, and other bodies that are administrative producers of statistics and lack authority to report data internationally. He said Montenegro’s greatest statistical coverage is on human and economic resource issues, while it has a very limited capacity to track governance and financing for development indicators.

Participants asked several questions on stakeholder involvement in Montenegro’s NSSD development process, including on whether members of the general public will be able to measure their own progress towards the SDGs, and the process for communicating the NSSD. In response to a question on how has Montenegro aligned its framework with its budget, Knezevic said the government analyzed existing structures and made recommendations to strengthen strategic alignments, such as establishing an ecofund, implementing green economic instruments and eliminating harmful subsidies.

The Eye on Earth Alliance is comprised of several institutions, including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP, or UN Environment), the World Resources Institute (WRI), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations, the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) and the Environmental Agency of Abu Dhabi. [EoE Website] [IISD Sources]

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