Evaluating governmental policies for the sustainable development goals using hierarchical clustering

Abstract

Governments play a crucial role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet many countries fall short in implementing transformative policies to attain them. A significant knowledge gap exists in understanding whether national policies support or hinder sustainable development outcomes. To address this gap, this paper aims to develop an empirical method for evaluating the effectiveness of governmental policies in achieving the SDGs. First, it identifies 84 indicators that directly or indirectly measure the policy effectiveness for each of the 17 SDGs, along with specified evaluation methods for each indicator. Second, it analyzes countries’ performance on these indicators using BIRCH (Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies) to assign scores that reflect the quality of governmental policies for each SDG. Finally, each country is awarded a total score, indicative of its overall policy-effectiveness for the SDG agenda. The analysis suggests that around one in five countries have policies conducive to SDG progress, while half implement policies that hinder progress, and a third maintain neutral policy. Socio-economic SDGs often receive stronger policy support, whereas goals related to environmental preservation, climate change mitigation, and institutional improvement face significant policy challenges. Policymakers are encouraged to adopt a nexus approach to the SDGs that pursues synergies and avoids trade-offs between the goals; systematically collect globally comparable data to monitor policy-effectiveness for the SDGs; while sustainable investors can use the insights from this study to allocate financing to countries with supportive policies for sustainable development and thereby contribute to closing the SDG financing gap.

Topics & Concepts