Paper short abstract:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. We present the first comprehensive review of the linkages between goals, targets, indicators and the datasets identified to measure progress towards the SDGs.

Paper long abstract:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. To measure progress, the Statistical Commission of the UN's Economic and Social Council has proposed a series of 230 indicators that have now mostly been agreed upon by the UN's inter-agency Expert Group. These include measures of policy implementation as well as specific metrics to assess policy outcomes and effectiveness. We present the first comprehensive review of the linkages between goals, targets, indicators and the datasets identified to measure progress towards the SDGs. As part of our systematic analysis we identified three relationships between target indicators and the datasets selected to measure them. These include (1) instances in which the identified datasets are appropriate for the rigorous evaluation of SDG-related policy and interventions; (2) indicators for which the available datasets are inappropriate to rigorously evaluate policy and intervention outcomes (e.g., because the data are not available at sufficiently fine spatial or temporal resolutions); and (3) instances in which data are simply not available to measure the identified indicators. We compare these to the indicators and data used for the Millennium Development Goals, and argue that governments, international organizations and other implementing agencies should put particular efforts in instances where datasets are inappropriate or are not available, investing in better monitoring and evaluation protocols that might include new original data collection initiatives. In such cases, it is also paramount to establish a coordinated approach to indicator development to enable national and international comparisons across space and time.