Assessing SDGs: A Methodology to Measure Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainable development is not a univocal concept and, subsequently, there is not a widespread-shared vision in the scientific community. From a general point of view, sustainable development could be considered as an attempt to combine growing concerns about environmental issues with socio-economic issues. Above all, sustainable development inspired the UN to build a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) program based on a set of indicators suggesting policies and actions to be implemented by Countries. Our paper deals with the concept of sustainable development at the basis of SDGs in order to clarify the SDGs conceptual framework, to establish a reliable research methodology for assessing such goals and to derive a composite SDG index. Using the latest national cross-country data available with multivariate statistics analysis, the study builds several composite indexes to assess European Member States performance on SDGs. The results show that the operational definition of the SDGs should be refined in order to improve its reliability. Thus, our paper could be seen as a starting point of what can be done to strengthen the scientific underpinning of sustainability indicators. Moreover, the study could be helpful to identify priorities and gaps that must be closed in order to achieve the SDGs. Results demonstrate that the SDGs are an action agenda for both high-income and low-income countries. Generally, the area where greater progress is required is gender equality, unemployment and sustainable agricultural systems.