Estimating networks of sustainable development goals

As we dived in the field of sustainable development, we became aware of the central concepts of synergies and trade-offs, often represented as networks between indicators. To our surprise, the field seemed quite precarious in the use of adequate quantitative methods to estimate such networks. The purpose of this paper was to introduce the sustainable development community to a plethora of network estimation methods (from different disciplines) that are usable with existing indicator datasets.

An increasing number of researchers and practitioners advocate for a systemic understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through interdependency networks. Ironically, the burgeoning network-estimation literature seems neglected by this community. We provide an introduction to the most suitable estimation methods for SDG networks. Building a dataset with 87 development indicators in four countries over 20 years, we perform a comparative study of these methods. We find important differences in the estimated network structures as well as in synergies and trade-offs between SDGs. Finally, we provide some guidelines on the potentials and limitations of estimating SDG networks for policy advice.