LIST OF PANELS

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Their main aim was to provide a universal set of policy goals to address the global challenges until the 2030s. In a sense, SDGs were designed to provide a general blueprint or universal language on how various initiatives and actors could communicate with each other and better coordinate their efforts. 

SDGs succeeded an earlier set of goals – Millennium Development Goals, MDGs – which directed sustainable development efforts between 2000 and 2015. Though with the previous set of goals some progress was acknowledged in certain areas, SDGs were meant to improve upon the earlier iteration and to answer some of the most persisting criticisms. Biggest among them was the lack of clarity, concreteness, and measurably. For this reason, a set of targets and indicators were adopted alongside each SDG for monitoring its achievement at the country level. Differently to its predecessor, all countries, no matter their level of development, need to be involved in this effort.  

Nonetheless, the reaction to SDGs was also mixed, though strongly supported by the majority of the development community, they still received various criticisms from being too ambitious in some areas to being too modest in others. The five – year anniversary of SDGs represents a great opportunity to discuss various aspects of the SDGs and the SDG-related research. 

First, it is important to assess to what extent have the SDGs succeeded to become the “shared blueprint” they were designed to be. Considering there is a lot of ambiguity in the description of the goals, there is a lack of consensus in their interpretation. In addition, the understanding varies by different sectors, organizations, and communities. Hence, it is also important to analyse  to what extent they represent a “shared understanding” among these different actors.

Second, measuring the progress made towards these goals over the last 5 years. This encompasses all aspects related to measurement, from data acquisition issues to results at national, regional or global level. In this regard, it is crucial to look at different sources to effectively capture efforts towards SDGs. Additionally, given the recent methodological advances in machine-learning and Big-Data analysis, it is also extremely valuable to see how these improvements can be used to advance sustainability research.  

Finally, issues related to measuring commitment to sustainable development are also crucial. Even though the main responsibility for achieving these goals lies in the countries, various other actors at different levels (from international organizations such as the EU or OECD to Universities and publishing houses) try to monitor how much they have contributed. This has given rise to various initiatives to “map” the contribution of documents, policies, and research toward SDGs. However, there is a lack of consensus on the “right” way how this should be done and consequently, the current iteration of these mapping exercises heavily depends on the context and the methodological approaches used. Part of this flux is of course caused by the radical methodological innovations that are sweeping the field including the Big-Data analysis, machine-learning, and AI.

This panel provides a forum to discuss all aspects of SDGs and SDG related research. First, various aspects related to the conceptualization, diffusion and the interpretation of SDGs. Over the last 5 years, SDGs have entered the vocabularies of various actors and organizations worldwide. However, this begs the question to what extent the meanings behind each SDG are shared by the diverse stakeholders and to what extent they differ. How the links and relationships between the SDGs are established in the UN documents and among the other actors. Additionally, this panel invites to reflect on various quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches to measure these aspects related to SDG interpretation among the various stakeholder groups. 

Second, we invite contributions related to the measurement of progress towards the attainment of the SDGs. These can range from the critical assessment of the targets and indicators of the SDG framework to the various issues related to data availability, quality and reliability. Furthermore, we welcome various methodological contributions which explore diverse approaches to measure the progress made towards the goals as well as sub-SDG targets. 

Third, we welcome contributions related to measuring the contribution or commitment to SDGs. This involves various initiatives to link diverse content such as the news items, policy documents and research papers to the SDG by employing various text classification or knowledge discovery techniques like ontology building, machine-learning or text-mining.  

The panel offers a forum to critically evaluate the conceptualization and interpretation of the SDGs as well as methodologies for its measurement and commitment towards SDGs. This panel welcomes all SDG related research and is not limited to any methodological approach. Case studies, qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analyses are welcome. In addition to more established research methods, contributions from the fields of natural language processing, bibliometrics, and machine learning are also welcome.