Unveiling complementarities between national sustainable development strategies through network analysis.

Abstract

<p>The 2030 agenda of the United Nations provides a framework of 17 <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/sustainable-development-goals" title="Learn more about Sustainable Development Goals from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">Sustainable Development Goals</a> (SDGs) and 232 indicators for its members to fulfill. The overall achievement critically depends on how nations understand the interactions between these SDGs and set priorities for development pathways. This study provides a comprehensive <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/electric-network-analysis" title="Learn more about network analysis from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">network analysis</a> of global SDG complementarities, measured by the co-occurrences of SDG pairs' comparative advantages in the same region by adopting the ‘product space’ concept from economics. We construct the ‘SDG space’ at goal and indicator levels with the most recently available data and then validate its robustness by comparing it to the commonly used correlation network and confirm its predictive power using historical data. Network analysis reveals a strongly connected socioeconomic-related core and an environmental-related periphery, with ‘bridge’ indicators connecting different clusters. The goal-level space identifies the ‘bridge’ goals as SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 15 (Life on Hand) in the environmental-related cluster, while identifying SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 6 (Clean water and Sanitation), and SDG 16 (Justice and Strong Institutions) in the socioeconomic cluster. The indicator-level space provides details to explain how they act as ‘bridges’ in the network. In particular, 16–9: Free Press Index is the ‘bridge’ indicator with the highest betweenness centrality value and acts as the bottleneck indicator in China for its overall sustainable development. Improving it can enhance connected indicators' performance, leading to positive <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/cascading-effect" title="Learn more about cascading effects from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">cascading effects</a> on different aspects of sustainability.<br></p>