December 2018: The Dag Hammarkjold Foundation published a paper in its ‘Development Dialogue’ series describing Colombia’s process of localizing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its SDGs. The authors aim to facilitate experience-sharing among governments and other stakeholders looking for practical and successful ways to establish structures for SDG implementation.

The paper titled, ‘Localising the 2030 Agenda in Colombia,’ describes steps taken to mainstream and implement the Agenda, and follow up and communicate progress towards achieving the SDGs. The paper describes the Colombian Foreign Ministry’s leading role in the process of developing and adopting the Agenda and Goals. It also identifies lessons learned from the process leading up to the SDGs, including:

• The importance of dialogue and the collective formulation of a proposal;
• The importance of training and knowledge-sharing, and providing the space for learning based on differing views and degrees of understanding of what sustainable development means and the significance of a new development agenda; and
• The need for an internal coordination mechanism for implementation.

Colombia was the first country to establish such a mechanism bringing together national government institutions to facilitate coordination and enable the drafting of a roadmap toward achieving the SDGs. Colombia established an SDG Commission and adopted a strategy for SDG implementation based on four policy guidelines: monitoring and reporting; strengthening statistical capacities; creating territorial strategies; and building partnerships and promoting dialogue with non-governmental actors. The SDG Commission in Colombia also examined the degree of alignment between the SDGs and their targets and the country’s other priority agendas, including: the National Development Plan; accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); the Green Growth Strategy; and the Peace Agreement.

The paper also describes lessons learned from sub-regional processes related to:

• Mechanisms to gather and use robust and reliable information and data to enable citizens to monitor and oversee results in the levels of development where they live;
• The utility of sub-regional toolkits for ensuring localization of the SDGs and the scope of responsibilities, capacities and resources of each municipality, to enable prioritization of investments; and
• The promotion of collective sustainable development at the local level, especially between neighboring municipalities.

In addition, the paper emphasizes the contribution of science, technology and innovation for social mobilization to ensure that all of society takes ownership of and responsibility for achieving the SDGs. It identifies challenges to and reasons for gaps in statistics, and describes the National Statistics Plan for 2017-2022, which outlines efforts needed to overcome these challenges and fill information gaps related to the SDGs.

The authors also acknowledge the need to develop tools and strategies to facilitate citizens’ understanding and use of data, and to enable citizens to participate and hold government accountable. It describes Colombia’s efforts to improve communication on policies and progress related to the SDGs, including through an online platform for the dissemination of SDG-related data. The user-friendly, open source platform displays Colombia’s 2030 Agenda process and tracks progress for each indicator, including baselines and national targets for 2018 and 2030, and shows data gaps and data disaggregated for gender, age and geographic location. [Publication Landing Page] [Publication: Localising the 2030 Agenda in Colombia]