Perceived Adequacy of Policy Instruments Reveals Weak Targets in the Sustainable Development Goals

During our policy-oriented projects, we realised that most impact evaluation studies assumed that relevant policy instruments exist. From our experience of talking to hundreds of policymakers and analysing highly disaggregate data on government programmes, it was clear that this is an often untested assumption. In fact, a global picture of the existence or adequacy of policy instruments across policy issues dis no exist. Hence, we ran a worldwide expert survey and gathered more than 130,000 responses on the existence and adequacy of policy instruments in the Sustainable Development Goals, creating the first large-scale dataset in this topic.

We report the results of a novel worldwide survey on how adequate are existing policy instruments (if any) across the 169 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. A large-scale picture of the existence and adequacy of policy instruments is missing in the SDG literature since much of the related work focuses on case studies. This survey provides the first dataset depicting the current state of the world according to how well prepared (in terms of instruments) are countries and regions to tackle the challenges posed by the 2030 Agenda. We combine these data with the official UN SDG indicators and identify targets that systematically exhibit weaknesses in their historical performance and the adequacy of the available policy-instrument, revealing key policy issues that need to be prioritised through interventions that go beyond the allocation of financial resources.