Meeting expectations? Response of policy innovation labs to sustainable development goals

Introduced by the United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim at facilitating inclusive sustainable development. Responsiveness to SDGs is considered a key to addressing pressing development problems. The current literature focuses on the responsiveness of varied public organizations to SDGs, whereas SDGs’ responsiveness of policy innovation labs (PILs) is understudied. Aiming to address both persistent and emerging social and environmental problems, PILs are aligned with SDGs. On the other hand, PILs seek innovative ways to generate policy solutions in collaboration with citizens through experimental methods and thus are more committed to the local public rather than international organizations. This paper investigates to what extent and in what way PILs respond to SDGs during policy formulation processes, both implicitly and explicitly. Data draws on a database the authors developed, identifying 211 European PILs. Thematic coding of PILs’ websites reveals that 62.1% of the PILs implicitly promote at least one SDG. Additionally, sustainable cities and communities (SDG11) and good health and well-being (SDG3) are the two SDGs with the highest implicit-response rates, respectively. We apply grounded theory analysis from semi-structured interviews with senior PIL employees of 31 PILs to gauge their explicit views of SDGs. This inductive approach reveals three dimensions to SDGs: levels of responsiveness, different practices, and considerations that guide PILs on whether to comply with SDGs. A better understanding of PILs’ response to SDGs provides a more nuanced portrayal of PILs as organizations aiming to craft innovative policy solutions that align with international frameworks.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as a universal framework to facilitate comprehensive and sustainable development for tackling pressing global issues (Bidarbakhtnia, 2020;Kroll et al., 2019;Spangenberg, 2017).Because SDGs are not legally binding (Janoušková et al., 2018), public organizations are expected to undertake proactive steps for the achievement of the 17 targets presented by SDGs (e.g., Breuer et al., 2023;Paoli & Addeo, 2019).The common expectation for responding to SDGs is reflected in scholarly attention that has been paid to responsiveness to the SDGs, which has been covered across sectors and organizations, including national governments (e.g., Georgeson & Maslin, 2018;Kluza et al., 2021;Paoli & Addeo, 2019), local governments (e.g., Ansell et al., 2022a;L ä hteenoja et al., 2021; Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024 Ríos et al., 2022), universities (e.g., Albareda-Tiana et al., 2018;Alcántara-Rubio et al., 2022), business (e.g., Heras-Saizarbitoria et al., 2022;Mio et al., 2020), and civil society (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2020;Eichler & Schwarz, 2019).We argue that policy innovation labs (PILs) are a potential engine that promotes the SDGs framework by investigating to what extent and in what way they respond to SDGs during policy formulation processes, both implicitly and explicitly.Three motivations guide our focus on PILs' responsiveness to SDGs.First, the worldwide proliferation of PILs reflects governments' priority to search for policy solutions through organizational settings within which decision-making is embedded within scientific laboratory-like structures.PILs provide physical spaces for interaction and knowledge exchange in order to improve public services through innovative tools and design innovative solutions to policy issues (Cele et al., 2020).Second, PILs' agenda and interests align with the main goal of SDGs, that is, addressing persistent and complex social, political, economic, and environmental problems that traditional governmental mechanisms, such as relying on hierarchical, bureaucratic arrangements, have failed to solve (Lewis, 2022).Third, carrying out directives of international organizations is institutionalized in public organizations like national and local governments as well as universities, non-governmental organizations, and private firms.Nevertheless, PILs are characterized by a "bottom-up" stakeholder-focused nature, therefore ought to be more committed to localized issues rather than to guidelines and goals provided by international organizations.
Our analysis of PILs' responsiveness to SDGs suggests that its measurement is neither straightforward nor consistent.Current studies often refer both to responsiveness as reflected in content analysis of websites and formal documents (e.g., Ruiz-Mallén & Heras, 2020), referred here as implicit responsiveness, as well as to data emerging in interviews and reports (e.g., Allen et al., 2018), referred here as explicit responsiveness.To allow for a comprehensive understanding of responsiveness to SDGs, this study considers both implicit and explicit measures of responsiveness.
To set the theoretical background, the following review discusses responsiveness to SDGs among different public organizations and emphasizes the potential role of PILs in promoting SDGs.After describing the methodology, the findings specify two types of responsiveness by PILs to SDGs, both implicit as reflected in the websites of all identified 211 European PILs and then explicit responsiveness as reflected in semi-structured interviews with managers of 31 PILs.The concluding section summarizes the main theoretical and practical contribution of considering responsiveness of PILs to SDGs.

Responsiveness to the SDGs
In 2015, the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted a set of 17 SDGs that aimed to address social, economic, and environmental global challenges (United Nations General Assembly, 2015).The 17 SDGs provide the first international framework for governments, organizations, and individuals to work toward sustainable development (Cele et al., 2020;Tichenor et al., 2022).In 2020, the UN stated that achieving the SDGs was not possible until at least 2030 due to the gap between the strategic, economic, and human resource competencies among public institutions to implement the UN's agenda and the UN's high policy standards (Meuleman, 2021).Despite the importance ascribed to SDGs, this framework is not legally binding; nevertheless, public organizations are expected and explicitly called to adopt policies and strategies aiming to achieve the SDGs as part of the central role they are playing in the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda (Bouckaert et al., 2016;Soberón et al., 2020;Whaites, 2016).The literature suggests that responsiveness to SDGs is considered essential for policy coherence and integrated implementation (Breuer et al., 2023) and many public organizations, including businesses, national and local governments, public organizations, universities, and not-forprofit organizations, are now expected to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs by taking part in the global effort to promote sustainability (Domorenok, 2018;Hartley, 2022;Mawonde & Togo, 2019).Evidence indicates that responsiveness to the SDGs is shaped by varied influences, such as strong political leadership in governmental organizations (Breuer et al., 2023) and managerial leadership in private organizations (Rashed & Shah, 2021) as well as monetary resources through investment or financing (Ansell et al., 2022a;Georgeson & Maslin, 2018;Guha & Chakrabarti, 2019).
In many ways, the SDGs, which target central global policy challenges, reflect attempts to address "wicked problems," that is, complex and intractable challenges involving many variables that can be chaotic and unclear (Rittel & Webber, 1973).Because such problems have local, regional, national, and global impacts, it is impossible to deal with them from the perspective of only one public organization or one policy area (Head, 2022;Trischler et al., 2022).Rather, a multi-dimensional array of public organizations from different sectors and with different scopes is necessary to tackle them via innovative approaches and methods (Head, 2019).

PILs as an engine for promoting the SDGs
PILs' responsiveness to SDGs is significant for three main reasons.First, PILs are becoming a prominent stakeholder in the search for policy solutions.A literature review suggests a "trend in addressing the global challenges of the twenty-first century is to 'lab' complex issues" (Lewis, 2022:375).Furthermore, PILs established ways to deal with complex policy issues innovatively and are expected to respond and contribute to the world effort regarding SDGs.PILs indeed champion innovative approaches to address the same broad socioeconomic challenges addressed by SDGs, including education, climate change, and poverty (e.g., Cele et al., 2020;Mhlanga, 2021).Second, similar to SDGs, PILs also aim to address persistent and complex social, political, economic, and environmental problems.Notably, SDGs represent a top-down approach, whereby an international organization sets policy goals and directs public organizations to invest efforts to achieve these goals.Third, there is a consensus that collaboration is critical in addressing wicked problems (Head, 2022).PILs aim to be novel in their design approaches, methods, and practices by involving citizens and placing users at the center of the process (Lewis et al., 2020;Olejniczak et al., 2020;Wellstead et al., 2021).In doing so, PILs facilitate a wide range of methods and design approaches, such as cross-disciplinary work (e.g., McGann et al., 2018;Tõnurist et al., 2017;Whicher, 2021), design thinking methods (e.g., Lewis, 2021;McGann et al., 2018;Trei et al., 2021), ethnography and field research (e.g., Bailey & Lloyd, 2017;Evans & Cheng, 2021;Lewis, 2021), evaluation methods (Ferrarezi et al., 2021;Olejniczak et al., 2020;Wellstead, 2020), experimental approaches to better understand the response of policy targets to alternative policy solutions design (e.g., Evans & Cheng, 2021;Fuller & Lochard, 2016;Wellstead & Howlett, 2022), collaboration with users and stakeholders in service and policy development (e.g., Carstensen & Bason, 2012;Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016;Whicher, 2021), and various technological tools such as artificial intelligence (AI), hackathon events, and big data analysis (e.g., Evans & Cheng, 2021;Kim et al., 2023;Sandoval-Almazan & Millán-Vargas, 2023).
In general, innovative approaches exercised by PILs include experimentation and prototype strategies (Ansell et al., 2022b), the use of AI (Mhlanga, 2021;Moon, 2023), citizen participation (Chen et al., 2020), and the use of design thinking methods (Lewis et al., 2020;Rösch et al., 2023).Specifically, experimentation and prototype creation may serve as an intermediate stage between ideas for policy changes and choosing a more specific solution.These are strategies that also take a top-down approach through experts and professionals in government but are increasingly recognized in the field of sustainability research as applied from the bottom up as "societal" experimentation based on local knowledge of citizens and social groups (Ansell et al., 2022b).
The use of AI for social good, together with a participatory governance approach, constitutes a force multiplier in responding to the SDGs' challenges (Moon, 2023).AI is beginning to provide real value reflected in the collection and analysis of relevant data, calculation capacity, and algorithms that allow, among other things, testing ideas among different populations worldwide regarding intelligent behavior.AI thus serves as an experimental tool and facilitates integration with additional information and data that enables multi-dimensional analysis (Mhlanga, 2021;Taeihagh, 2021).
Citizens' involvement in policy design is a prominent source of innovative solutions to social problems (e.g., Fischer, 1993;Hendriks & Dzur, 2022;Nesti, 2018).More specifically, citizens' potential contribution to sustainable development has been recognized due to their key role in innovation processes, as they are familiar with issues linked to unsustainable practices and can assist with developing solutions that fit the needs and barriers of many in the general population (Fischer, 2000;Trischler et al., 2022).It is essential to value local experiences and recognize the importance of citizen participation in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024 data production to achieve the SDGs (Rocha de Siqueira & Ramalho, 2022).One of the examples of the value of citizen participation in this matter is the "Data Lab" in Brazil, which engages different target groups in a tailor-made platform so they can participate in community involvement to tackle SDGs.Target groups can, for example, draw attention by using a shared WhatsApp number to report problems of sanitation, such as areas with free-running sewage, and also teach older adults how to use these kinds of technological tools so they can participate (Rocha de Siqueira & Ramalho, 2022).
In contrast to the traditional policy design methods that focus on optimizing the existing circumstances, which remain limited in creating the degree of change necessary to achieve sustainability goals, design thinking through human-centered and research-based approaches (Howlett, 2014), together with multiple and broader contextual view cycles of problem framing and collaborative and learning strategies, offer an innovative model for designing policy solutions for sustainability challenges (Buhl et al., 2019;Maher et al., 2018).
The extent and how PILs respond to international policy goals is understudied.Notably, a few studies examine PILs in the context of sustainability development and the SDGs, uncovering the lab's efforts to initiate dialog among stakeholders in an attempt to address escalating water insecurity (Ojha et al., 2021) and successful implementation of the PIL approach for introducing autonomous vehicles (Burden et al., 2021).PILs' contribution to global efforts is further challenged by the local focus of their work, including the needs of local users and addressing correspondingly specific issues.

Data and methods
We adopted a two-part strategy to investigate how European-based PILs respond to SDGs during policy formulation processes.First, from a broad perspective, we assessed how PILs implicitly address their commitment to the SDGs through website content analysis.Second, an in-depth examination through key informant interviews of PILs' practices and considerations focused on whether and how SDGs are promoted and affect the lab's daily work.
Implicit responsiveness is examined through thematic coding of 211 European labs' websites, which includes all European PILs identified between December 2019 and July 2020.To assess the websites, we consulted a catalog of these PILs.All 211 websites were reviewed, and their content was saved and coded (see AUTHORS).For each lab, the following characteristics were identified: declared vision, policy innovation approaches, methodologies, major projects, parent entity, funding sources, and its alignment with the UN's SDGs call-to-action.Each lab's affiliation (e.g., governmental, municipal, multi-sectorial, academic, non-profit, or private sector affiliation) was also identified.Thematic coding of the data collected from the websites allowed for identifying the alignment of each lab with the UN's 17 SDGs (see Table 1).The quantitative data were coded onto an Excel file and then imported into SPSS (ver.28), a statistical software.
Explicit responsiveness, which reflects both considerations that guide responding to SDGs and practices through which responsiveness is carried out, was examined by drawing on in-depth, semistructured interviews with senior managers from 31 PILs.The research project received ethics approval from the Hebrew University Committee for the Use of Human Subjects in Research (2020).Interview participants were randomly chosen from the database of the 211 European PILs.Table 2 compares the location of the interviewees by the type of PIL they were employed by with the distribution of all 211 labs by their type.Furthermore, the analysis of the interviews reached saturation, which points to theoretical stability (Morse, 2007).Therefore, we were confident that the responses could be inferred to a larger population.The interviews, which lasted 45-60 minutes, were remotely conducted between March 2023 and April 2024 using Zoom, which provided an automatic transcript.
The interview questions included general questions about the lab and its day-to-day work, as well as specific questions about SDGs, including, "Regarding the SDGs, in what way does the lab relate to them?" and "In what way do SDGs affect the labs' work?Can you share some examples?".Most interviewees explained without further questions; however, clarification questions were sometimes added.Grounded theory analysis was employed, through which inductive data analysis is conducted as part of a dynamic and iterative process of data accumulation through moving between data and emerging schemes (Ritchie et al., 2013) and a series of "constant comparisons" of the recurrence of findings (Glaser & Strauss, 2017;Strauss & Corbin, 1994).Following Strauss and Corbin (1994) to decide which belonged together.For example, statements that reflected different levels of responsiveness to the SDGs, such as, "The SDGs are the anchor points… our entire work is oriented to this"; "We never took on the SDGs directly, but I think our approach was a very SDG-friendly"; and, "Implementation of the SDGs was not a primary objective of the lab" were labeled as "responsiveness levels."Statements such as, "If I would have more resources" and "It's probably because there are elections" were named "causes for SDGs' responsiveness."Following the transcription of the interviews, axial coding was undertaken.This involves grouping discrete codes into conceptual categories that reflect similarities between the different codes.According to Strauss and Corbin (1994), this demonstrates the idea of grouping open sources around certain "axes" or linked points.For example, professional and political factors and other sub-categories representing the different causes and factors that influence the responsiveness approach of the PILs to the SDGs were grouped into a category of "causes for SDGs' responsiveness."The analysis identified three distinct categories that comprise labs' explicit responsiveness to SDGs.Specifically, the level of responsiveness reflects the extent to which a lab complies with SDGs, how labs respond to SDGs, and guiding considerations, i.e., why labs invest efforts in responsiveness to SDGs.

Implicit responsiveness of PILs to the SDGs
Thematic coding of the 211 PILs operating in Europe identified implicit responsiveness among 62.1% of the labs, which were working to promote at least one issue included in the SDGs.In contrast, 37.9% of the labs did not mention the SDGs as an issue they were tackling.As shown in Figure 1, three notable SDGs were addressed by the European PILs; they were SDG 11 ("Sustainable Cities and Communities"), to which 29.3% of the labs responded, followed by SDG 3 ("Good Health and Well-being") (23.7%), and SDG 12 ("Responsible Consumption and Production") (18.4%).
In Table 3, we calculated four clusters, categorizing the number of SDGs implicitly addressed by each lab.Just over half (50.2%) addressed three or fewer SDGs, while over a third (37.9%) addressed no SDGs.Only 11.9% of European PILs addressed more than four SDGs.Only 15 PILs addressed all of the SDGs.
We undertook a crosstabulation analysis comparing the PILs' type PIL (national government, regional government, not-for-profit, etc.) and focus (international, national, regional municipal) with the number of SDGs addressed.There was no statistically significant relationship with the focus but a modest Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024  relationship when the type of lab was taken into consideration (Phi coefficient = 0.325).Most notably, PILs with a national focus were more likely not to address any SDGs but were overrepresented when addressing one to three SDGs.The thematic coding of the websites' content identified only a few direct references to the SDGs found on the European PILs' websites during the research period, from nine labs representing only 4.3%.For six PILs, reference to the SDGs was part of the lab's vision or in the lab's approach to public innovation.For the remaining three labs that explicitly referred to SDGs, the reference was in a description of the lab's areas of interest or a description of a specific project.Most PILs (202, representing 95.7% of the labs identified) did not explicitly mention the SDGs on their website.Instead, the coding identified that the projects the labs are involved in coincide with a specific SDG.A detailed overview of the implicit responsiveness of PILs to the SDGs is provided in Appendix.

Explicit responsiveness patterns of PILs to the SDGs
The above findings required us to examine whether and in what way PILs respond to the UN's call to implement the SDGs in an additional, complementary, qualitative approach through in-depth interviews.Three dimensions emerged as comprising explicit responsiveness of PILs to SDGs: the level of responsiveness with SDGs, practices through which responsiveness is carried out in the daily work of the lab, and the considerations that guide the decision of the lab to respond to the SDGs.First, three levels of responsiveness to SDGs emerged: compliance with SDGs, SDG-friendly, and disregarding the SDGs.Second, responsiveness is reflected in three practices: an assessment framework, an orientation tool, and evidence-based policy making.Third, three prominent considerations of PILs' responsiveness emerged: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024

Response level Examples of policy innovation labs' (PILs') managers' comments
Compliance "For us completely, the SDGs are the anchor points… this is a project in service of the SDGs.""Yeah, and more.On the behavioral side, we're becoming very deeply embedded, and in government departments to support them around the public messaging to do with sustainability green growth, as we call it.""Any activity, any project should be aligned with the SDGs, and should contribute to implementation of those SDGs."Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-friendly "To be honest, when we were working, we never took on the SDGs directly, but I think our approach was very SDG-friendly… For us the SDGs are more of a framework, a reminder of how different sets of issues are highly interconnected.""Although we do not see most of our work through this lens, there is actually a lot of overlap between what we do and many objectives."Disregarding SDGs "We haven't worked with them ourselves specifically.""Implementation of the SDGs is not a primary objective of the lab." "We do not specifically target them… We're doing things differently within the same system that's still based on unlimited growth." professional motivations, political interests, and instrumental considerations.In the following, each of the three dimensions is elaborated.

Responsiveness levels of PILs to the SDGs
Analysis of the interviews identified three different levels of PILs' responsiveness to the SDGs, that is, "Compliance," "SDG-friendly," and "Disregarding SDGs" (Table 6).Specifically, the three levels of response are: 1. Compliance, which distinguishes PILs specifically targeting SDGs and acts to implement or advance them, whether tackling specific goals or fully promoting all the SDGs.In some cases, the primary function of the PIL is to promote a sustainable world through the SDGs; in others, it is part of the PIL's working process, and the SDGs are more of an agenda that the PIL adopts.2. The second level is SDG-friendly in that PILs are not specifically targeting SDGs in their daily work but have some other aspect that relates to these goals, such as reporting to organizations that are working with them or seeing the SDGs as an inspiration and more of a general framework to consider.3. Finally, at the third level, there is Disregarding SDGs, where PILs do not see the SDGs as part of their goals or mission and do not target them in their work practices.This refers specifically to the SDGs and not to sustainability policy, which some labs promote via different approaches.
Each level reflects a different approach the PILs took in response to the UN's call to implement the SDGs (Table 4).The PILs' responsiveness approach can be related to the PIL itself.Still, for PILs in the public sector, it is also associated with the agenda of the national and municipal government regarding the SDGs.For example, two interviewees explain that in Spain, it is mandatory to adopt Agenda 2030 domestically, meaning every municipal government in Spain is required to promote the SDGs, so the PILs working at that level need to respond accordingly: "The closest relationship between these goals and the lab is, as I told you, the Agenda 2030 because the Agenda 2030 also uses these goals now as an umbrella to create actions… They will use our method and our context, our lab, to tackle some missions and actions of this agenda.The urban agenda is related to the 2030 Agenda in Spain, which is related to the SDGs.So, every municipality must create its own urban agenda to fulfill it."Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024

PILs' practices Examples of PILs' managers' comments
Assessing framework "We have an online tool, a database basically which compiles data on impact on projects all over the world, over 250 projects… one of the ways that we describe the projects is how they relate to the sustainable development goals… and we would also be able to map those outcomes against the sustainable development goals… for example, how many children were educated, and what grade did they get?" "We also have a quality management process for our members, and the SDGs are a very explicit part of this quality management as well… We also included them in our own impact measurement and to see to which SDGs are our members contributing."Orientation tool "It's like a framework, or like an orientation tool.""SDGs serve as guiding stars for us… There are projects which are very closely linked with the SDGs' implementation, like the SDGs' alignment of policy documents and the budgets of the government.""They [SDGs] were super important to… create a kind of… north star, in terms of giving us direction where to move to."Evidence-based policy making "We kept trying to push the topic because it's evidence-based policy making -this is for me the Holy Grail."

Responsiveness to SDGs through PILs' practices
Three practices emerged as routines associated with responding to SDGs in their daily work, that is, Assessing Framework, Orientation Tool, and Evidence-based Policy Making (see Table 5): 1. Assessing Framework, meaning PILs use the SDGs as a benchmark to evaluate their policy and services design projects.More specifically, it refers to periodic reporting, results measurement, and quality processes.2. Orientation Tool, used to define principles to direct the project planning the focus areas, and to direct resources according to needs in compliance with the SDGs.In other words, PILs use SDGs as a north star to guide them and direct their work.3. Evidence-based Policy Making refers to using SDGs that will provide clear objectives and indicators as well as overcoming ambiguity in the policy making process by providing a framing strategy (Cairney et al., 2016).

PIL's guiding considerations in responding to SDGs
Three types of guiding considerations emerge from the interviews as motivating PILs' decisions on whether to comply with the SDGs: professional, political, and instrumental: 1. Professional considerations refer to professional beliefs about whether the SDGs can promote global sustainability.Professional considerations often reflected a critique, saying SDGs are inconsistent with public innovation.Moreover, innovation is multidisciplinary, while SDGs explicitly distinguish policy domains.2. Political justification, which emphasizes the need for PILs to act consistent with the political sphere in which they are embedded, national or local.Indeed, to engage and communicate with decisionmakers, stakeholders, and the public, PILs adopt the sustainability discourse, which is prominent in the political sphere.3. Instrumental motivations reveal the need for PILs to receive financial and other resources to support their operations.Similarly, PILs' motivation to respond to SDGs follows the understanding that SDGs serve as a collaboration accelerator that creates opportunities for connections between different organizations promoting a joint mission.Notably, political and instrumental considerations are much more prominent in the justification of why to comply.In contrast, professional considerations are similarly prominent as a justification for whether to comply.Furthermore, why to respond was more pronounced than why not to comply (Table 6).

Implications and conclusion
Introduced as a global framework to address varied pressing worldwide problems, SDGs are not legally binding and, therefore, depend on the responsiveness of public organizations in implementing them.PILs are well-documented as a prominent phenomenon in advancing policy solutions across a diverse range of orientations, as suggested by Petek et al. (2021), who emphasize that policy goals are the normative part of policy because they define collective action and legitimize political action.While innovation tools and stakeholder co-design are critical aspects of PILs' work and hold significant potential for promoting global sustainability, little is known about their policy goal-setting ambitions.Often, PILs work Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puae023/7702541 by guest on 06 July 2024 independently of government agencies and have the flexibility to use different policy goal benchmarking approaches, particularly the UN SDGs.Our study investigated the intake of SDGs by European PILs, which offers several contributions to both the SDG and PIL scholarship.
First, the findings of this study suggest a more nuanced approach to the responsiveness of internationally oriented benchmarking and compliance.Specifically, our analysis further emphasizes the need for a combined measure of responsiveness by distinguishing the implicit and explicit as two complementary aspects of responsiveness to adopting SDGs.The rich information produced by PILs allowed us to gauge how PILs implicitly adopt SDGs whereas in-depth, semi-structured key informant interviews with senior managers allowed us to address PILs' explicit responsiveness to SDGs.Focusing on explicit responsiveness allowed identifying three distinct levels of PILs' SDG engagement-full compliance, SDGs-friendly, and SDG avoidance.By uncovering three levels of responsiveness, our findings emphasize the need to shift from the current tendency to consider compliance as a binary measure (Gofen, 2015;Gofen et al., 2014;Weaver, 2015).
Second, the responsiveness to SDGs provides a deeper understanding of how PILs function.Despite the variety of tools and methods available to PILs, SDGs proved to be an essential catalyst to help them engage in three broad critical policy analysis approaches: assessment, planning, and evidence-based policymaking.Specifically, we found that the three types of PIL orientation (professional, political, and instrumental) to SDGs reflect PILs' divergent organizational goals and illustrate that they encounter political and resource-related challenges.Notably, PILs are mostly committed to close-to-the-field stakeholders; they pay attention to SDGs as a benchmark directed by an international organization.
Lastly, PILs have the potential to serve as vehicles of change.In general, the implementation of SDGs by European PILs reflects the diffusion of the SDGs concept by an epistemic community and the influence of international policy coordination (Haas, 1992).Regardless of whether PILs actively engage and employed SDGs in their day-to-day activities or they actively avoided them, all were aware of these goals.Nevertheless, PILs' responsiveness is not straightforward.Rather, the evidence reflects a divergent response among European PILs to SDGs' implementation.While a substantial portion of PILs concentrate on promoting specific SDGs, other PILs avoided implementing SDGs for two main reasons.One reason was PIL's efforts to focus on local challenges while overlooking international guidance.Another reason for avoidance was the fragmentation of goals within the SDGs' framework, which hindered more inter-disciplinary approaches.Avoidance was also ascribed to the need of the lab for open-ended and flexible orientation which was limited when responding to benchmarking dictated by international organizations.
Our findings also raise several avenues for future research.The 211 identified European PILs tend to prioritize several specific goals: sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11) and good health and well-being (Goal 3).However, this assessment was based on their publicly reported documents.A comprehensive survey would be better equipped to determine what SDGs PILs address.A survey would identify other important variables and permit an analysis of causal relationships around the employment of SDGs by PILs.Notably, variables could be operationalized from the three major themes identified through the key informant interviews.In addition, this research should serve as motivation to examine the growing number of PILs in the Global South and their relationship with SDGs.The research findings raise a question that aligns with prior studies examining the limitations faced by PILs (Lewis, 2021;Tõnurist et al., 2017).Specifically, the question arises as to what extent PILs, which have emerged as a central pillar of public innovation over the past two decades, possess the capacity to exert influence and the degree to which they transcend local actions.
Appendix: Implicit Responsiveness of PILs to the SDGs As mentioned above, thematic coding of the 211 PILs operating in Europe identified implicit responsiveness among 62.1% of the labs, which were working to promote at least one issue included in the SDGs.In contrast, 37.9% of the labs did not mention the SDGs as an issue they were tackling.On their websites, 50.2% of PILs declare they promote between one and three SDGs as policy issues, while only 7.1% tackle all the SDGs (Table A1).That means that most labs either ignore SDGs or respond to very few policy issues reflected in the SDGs.Of the 131 PILs implicitly responding to the SDGs, 37.4% are Public Sector Innovation Labs (PSIL) working at the national or municipal government level, and the second dominant group is not for profit organizations with 28.2% (see Table A2).Of the 80 PILs that do not respond to any of the SDGs, which constitute 37.9% of all labs, about half are national and local public sector innovation labs (PSIL) (46.2%), and the rest are divided between non-profit organizations, research institutions, private organizations, and others (see Table A3).
Governmental PILs constitute half of the labs in all three groups: PILs that did not mention any SDGs, PILs that were targeting 1-3 SDGs, and PILS that mentioned all 17 SDGs.Among the European national government PILs (N = 42), 59.5% do not indicate specific policy issues reflecting implicit responsiveness to the SDGs, while 40.5% do.The three most common SDGs focused on by national government PILs (N = 42) are decent work and economic growth (SDG8) (21.4% of laboratories), health (SDG3), and responsible consumption and production (SDG12) (both 19%).In contrast, local government PILs (regional or municipal) mainly do indicate specific policy issues (72.7%), while out of these PILs (N = 44), 61.3% respond to cities (SDG11), and health (SDG3) is the second most common, with 13.6% of the local government PILs responding to it.Also, PILs at research institutions mainly state which policy issue they are promoting (63.3% of 30 PILs).A third of these PILs work to promote health (SDG3).Responsible consumption and production (SDG12) and climate action (SDG13) are promoted by nearly a third of PILs in academia and research institutions.Among PILs belonging to non-profit organizations, 67.2% indicate which policy issues they focus on, whereas between these 55 labs, 27.2% focus on health (SDG3), and the next two most common SDGs among these labs are work and economic growth (SDG8) (23.6%) and quality education (SDG4) (21.8%).Of the PILs that focus only on one policy issue, the goal that receives exceptional prominence is sustainable cities (SDG11), primarily among municipal government PILs.Eight of the goals are mentioned in some of the labs, and eight are not referred to at all, for example, no poverty (SDG1) and zero hunger (SDG2).Among the PILs that respond to two goals, the three prominent objectives are consumption and production (SDG12), climate action (SDG13), and education (SDG4).Among the group of PILs that respond to the three SDGs, the most prominent goals are consumption and production (SDG12), followed by health (SDG3).Also, in this group, several goals were excluded, such as no poverty (SDG1), zero hunger (SDG2), and reduced inequality (SDG10).
Notably, the thematic coding of the websites' content identified only a few direct references to the SDGs found on the European PILs' websites during the research period, from nine labs representing only 4.3%.For six PILs, reference to the SDGs was part of the lab's vision or in the lab's approach to public innovation.For the remaining three labs that explicitly referred to SDGs, the reference was in a description of the lab's areas of interest or a description of a specific project.Most PILs (202, representing 95.7% of the labs identified) did not explicitly mention the SDGs on their website.Instead, the coding identified that the projects the labs are involved in coincide with a specific SDG.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Percentage of policy innovation labs (PILs) promoting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by specific goals.

Table 2 .
Type of European policy innovation labs (PILs) interviewee compared all European PILs.

Table 3 .
Number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addressed by European policy innovation labs (PILs).

Table 4 .
Response levels with testimonies.

Table 6 .
Guiding considerations of policy innovation labs (PILs) compliance with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Table A1 .
Scope of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to which policy innovation labs (PILs) implicitly respond to.

Table A2 .
Policy innovation labs (PILs) implicitly responding to specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by sector.