Tracing the SDG Deliberation Process: A Focus on Health, Cities and Data

Abstract

Scholarship from policy studies and political science provides insights into how different communities coalesce around issues, attempt to communicate their evidence and arguments, and the potential institutional aides and barriers to this. But applying this literature to a process as broad and diverse as the SDG negotiations, within an institutional setting as large as the UNGA, is very hard. Thousands of people provided input, in one way or another, to the post-2015 deliberations and each goal area (as well as the many topics that did not become goals) enjoyed lengthy debates both inside of and outside of the formal deliberation chambers, suggesting there is not one objective evidence to policy process which needs to be understood but instead a wide range of processes across different sectors and scales. To help focus this analysis and to provide an inter-sectoral perspective on these processes, Part 3 focuses on three very diverse themes of the debate; health, urban sustainability, and data. I trace the key conceptual issues that were under discussion within each, noting the topics under debate and the supporters and adversaries of each. This kind of detailed thematic analysis is essential to understand the nuances of negotiations and how broad issues are translated into given words, phrases and ideas eventually featured in outcome documents. It also helps identify what, if any, where the key entry points for scientists and academics to provide their evidence. Finally, mapping the transmission of ideas and concepts also enables the identification of consensus-building processes that helped actors in each epistemic community to coalesce around priority themes and to forge political consensus on the eventual wording.