Adapting the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda to the city level: Initial reflections from a comparative research project
Journal article, 2019

The Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda recognise the role of cities in achieving sustainable development. However, these agendas were agreed and signed by national governments and thus implementing them at the local level requires a process of adaptation or localisation. In this paper, we analyse five aspects that practitioners and researchers need to consider when localising them: (1) delimitation of the urban boundary; (2) integrated governance; (3) actors; (4) synergies and trade-offs and (5) indicators. These considerations are interrelated, and while not exhaustive, provide an important initial step for reflection on the challenges and opportunities of working with these global agendas at the local level. The paper draws on the inception phase of an international comparative transdisciplinary research project in seven cities on four continents: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa), Gothenburg (Sweden), Kisumu (Kenya), Malmö (Sweden), Sheffield (UK) and Shimla (India).

New Urban Agenda

Sustainable Development Goals

cities

SDGs

transdisciplinary research

urban rights

knowledge co-production

urban SDG

SDG 11

SDGs localisation

Author

Sandra Valencia

Mistra Urban Futures

David Simon

Royal Holloway University of London

Mistra Urban Futures

Sylvia Croese

University of Cape Town

Joakim Nordqvist

Malmö university

Michael Oloko

Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science & Technology

Tarun Sharma

Nagrika

Nick Taylor Buck

University of Sheffield

Ileana Versace

Universidad de Buenos Aires

International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development

1946-3138 (ISSN) 1946-3146 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 1 4-23

Subject Categories

Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Environmental Management

Human Geography

DOI

10.1080/19463138.2019.1573172

More information

Latest update

8/22/2019