Prioritizing among the Sustainable Development Goals

By Eevee🔹 @ 2020-02-07T05:05 (+8)

This is a linkpost to https://oecd-development-matters.org/2017/07/20/where-to-start-with-the-sdgs/

Back in 2017, Scott, Leitner, and Hynes of New America and the OECD asked 85 experts what they believed were the most important Sustainable Development Goal targets. The top 20 picks were:

  1. Promote rule of law and access to justice (8.9)
  2. Eliminate the most extreme poverty (8.4)
  3. Ensure access to safe, effective and affordable health care, medicine and vaccines (6.6)
  4. Ensure women’s rights to economic opportunity, property ownership and inheritance (6.5)
  5. Ensure government accountability and transparency (6.5)
  6. Ensure all children graduate from primary and secondary schools (5.6)
  7. End discrimination against women and girls (5.3)
  8. Expand access to safe drinking water (5.3)
  9. Promote social, economic and political inclusion (5.2)
  10. End corruption and bribery (4.9)
  11. Expand access to affordable, reliable, modern energy (4.6)
  12. End preventable deaths of infants and children under 5 years of age (4.3)
  13. Ensure literacy and numeracy for youth and adults (4.2)
  14. Ensure equal opportunity in economic and public life (4.2)
  15. Ensure equal access to legal rights, economic rights and natural resources (4.0)
  16. Reduce all poverty by half (4.0)
  17. End violence against women and girls (3.9)
  18. Ensure safe, accessible sanitation and hygiene (3.8)
  19. End human trafficking, harsh labor, forced marriage and genital mutilation (3.6)
  20. Improve domestic capacity for tax and revenue collection (3.6)

You can see the full ranking of targets and the recoupled ranking of SDGs on the SDGs in Order website.

RomeoStevens @ 2020-02-07T19:05 (+4)

EA is well positioned for moonshot funding (though to date has mostly attracted risk averse donors AFAICT). It seems like an interesting generator to ask what moonshots look like for these categories.

evelynciara @ 2020-02-08T05:30 (+2)

Well, for starters, I think any kind of policy work is a moonshot. Lobbying for pro-growth/globalist policies would have a small chance of boosting econ growth by a lot, which would in turn affect a lot of the other SDG targets.

Aaron Gertler @ 2020-02-12T21:45 (+3)

Thanks for sharing this! I appreciate seeing perspectives on cause prioritization from people who know the global development space well, even if the models/principles they use to set priorities differ from those most commonly used in EA. (See also the Copenhagen Consensus.)

Are you aware of any detailed responses from individual experts on how they actually chose their priority rankings?

evelynciara @ 2020-02-13T01:44 (+3)

Thank you!

Yes; although they don't seem to have published the entire dataset of responses, they published a few here:

  • "The most important criterion in determining the order of the SDGs should be how to expand the capability set of the least advantaged members of society"
  • "Extent to which a target focuses on a system and not individual people"
  • "Looked at specific macro issues that would benefit people who could then play a more effective role in society, thus helping with the other goals"
  • "Start with the most basic human needs (food, water), then education and then the natural environment, where government has a strong role to play (including to address negative externalities)"
EdoArad @ 2020-02-07T05:37 (+2)

From the FAQ:

Q: What exactly did you ask the experts? A: We presented the experts with 117 options - which we had distilled from the 169 official SDG targets - and asked them to identify the first 20 that should be tackled in a multi-year effort to fulfill all of the SDGs. We then asked them to put the 20 they selected into the proper sequence, such that doing each facilitated the tackling of subsequent options.

Regarding the criteria the experts used, it has been free for them to choose. The experts where then asked for how they came up with the ranking. Their answers where coded with individualistic vs institutional perspective (about 2:1 ratio), and process vs urgency (1:1). Link.

evelynciara @ 2020-02-07T16:44 (+1)

I wonder what the experts believed the appropriate tradeoffs between individual vs. institutions and urgency vs. process were.