Measuring Progress Towards Sustainable Development Goals

Building on an initiative led by Colombia and Guatemala,1 governments represented at the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development provided a mandate for launching an intergovernmental process to identify sustainable development goals (SDGs). The process to develop the SDGs will run over a period of three years and conclude by 2015, the end of the implementation period for the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With the end of the MDG implementation period approaching, the question of how much progress has or hasn’t been achieved is bound to feature prominently in political and scienti c discourse.

Immediately following the agreement on the SDG mandate, most of the discussion focused on the approach to developing the goals themselves and how the SDG process could be integrated with the ongoing process to de ne the broader post-2015 development agenda. This paper argues that SDG process planning should also pay speci c attention to the development of the evidence base— particularly sustainable development goal indicators (SDGIs).

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