# Mapping national development priorities under the Sustainable Development Goals framework: a systematic analysis

Auriane Meilland, Franck Lecocq

► To cite this version:

Auriane Meilland, Franck Lecocq. Mapping national development priorities under the Sustainable Development Goals framework: a systematic analysis. Sustainability Science, 2024, 19 (1), pp.75-88. 10.1007/s11625-023-01377-2 . hal-04816386

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# Mapping national development priorities under the Sustainable Development Goals framework – a systematic analysis

Authors: Auriane Meilland¹*, Franck Lecocq²,

¹ CIRED, AgroParisTech, CIRAD, CNRS, EHESS, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, Univ Paris-Saclay, UMR 8568. CIRED, 94736 Nogent-sur-Marne

² CIRED, AgroParisTech, CIRAD, CNRS, EHESS, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, Univ Paris-Saclay, UMR 8568. CIRED, 94736 Nogent-sur-Marne

*Corresponding author*: Auriane Meilland, 45 avenue de la Belle Gabrielle 94130 Nogent-sur-Marne meilland.auriane@gmail.com, +33624242693

**Keywords:** National development planning, Sustainable development goals, Development, International cooperation, 2030 Agenda

## Abstract

Since their adoption in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ambitioned to be universal and indivisible, have become a dominant framework to discuss development matters, especially in the international stage. This work aims at bringing information on whether or not the SDGs provide a good mapping of development priorities as expressed by countries. We develop a new analysis of the SDG framework (within the 2030 Agenda) by systematically mapping the national development priorities displayed by 121 countries in their long-term development documents. We thus categorize each priority under its related SDG(s) and create a typology of documents, along with a visualization tool – which displays how SDGs are prioritized across countries. We show that only a few priorities do not fit in - notably some related to defence and population growth. Moreover, some SDGs are largely more prioritized, and there are many documents in which not all SDGs appear. These tool and database might inform many development-related questions – here enabling us to discuss the relevance and aimed universality of the 2030 Agenda in the light of its connections with national development priorities.
# I. Introduction

The 2030 Agenda adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 - the same year as the Paris Agreement on climate change (United Nations 2015) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda for financing development (UN General Assembly 2015b) - aims at completely mainstreaming the concept of sustainable development into development issues (Griggs et al. 2013; Sachs 2012). To this respect, its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets for the year 2030 were designed to create a universal framework for achieving sustainable development (UN General Assembly 2015a; Ki-Moon 2018).<fnref n="1" /> They differ from their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in their bottom-up formulation process as well as in their scope. The SDGs indeed result from a consultative process, apply to all countries, and are presented as “integrated and indivisible” (UN General Assembly 2015a), altogether covering sustainable development in most aspects of society.

Since 2015, this framework has become widely used in international discussions on various subjects, being progressively more highlighted than other related frameworks like the “three pillars of development (economic, social and environmental)”. This rise of interest at the international level is reflected in the academic and grey literature on sustainable development and Sustainable Development Goals, which has expanded.<fnref n="2" /> Documents from the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies (UNDP 2020), international bodies such as the IPCC (P.R. Shukla et al. 2022) or IPBES (Watson et al.

<footnote n="1">¹ As stated in the cited UN resolution “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”: “*The Sustainable Development Goals and targets are integrated and indivisible, global in nature and universally applicable, taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities. Targets are defined as aspirational and global, with each Government setting its own national targets guided by the global level of ambition but taking into account national circumstances. Each Government will also decide how these aspirational and global targets should be incorporated into national planning processes, policies and strategies. It is important to recognize the link between sustainable development and other relevant ongoing processes in the economic, social and environmental field”</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² In the year 2011, before the principle of the SDGs was proposed, 14 653 articles including “sustainable development” in their title, abstract or keywords were newly listed on the platform ScoPus. In 2020, that number had more than doubled - 39 295.</footnote>
2019), international research organizations such as Future Earth (Smith et al. 2018), or international development banks (World Bank 2022) now use the SDGs as a framework to think development priorities.<fnref n="3" />

The SDGs are a collectively agreed set of goals for the year 2030: that they would provide a good mapping of the diversity of development aspirations across countries and regions is not self-evident. Using the SDGs as a guide to describe national development priorities may be tricky if the alignment between these international and national frameworks is limited for some countries, as some national priorities could be mistranslated or simply lost at the international level. The primary objective of this article is thus to carefully test the hypothesis, implicit when using the SDGs to think all development issues, that the SDGs provide an exhaustive mapping of development priorities everywhere.

To do so, we have to discuss which development priorities we intended to observe. Indeed, there are many understandings of this concept and how to observe it, each one of them coming with conceptual difficulties. Stated priorities found in various communication documents and discourses of governments or stakeholders may not reflect adopted policies due to discursive gaps (Czaika and De Haas 2013). Priorities observed in the laws and regulations that are effectively adopted might neither reflect enforced policies due to implementation gaps (Hudson, Hunter, and Peckham 2019) nor capture societal preferences. Some priorities emerge from citizens' preferences (Miller 1992) expressed in votes (Carter 2013), referendums, or in surveys such as the World Value Survey (Haerpfer et al. 2022), but may only provide information on limited sets of decisions. In all cases, the priorities of a country may differ depending on time horizons.

Here, we collected and analysed official long-term national development documents and visions, from which we extracted stated national development priorities. This enabled us to get a harmonized way to observe national priorities across countries: although different in format, content and legal status, these documents are sufficiently similar from one country to the next to allow for relevant comparisons. Their

<footnote n="3">³ In the latest example to this date, the IPCC's third working group states that "*The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted under the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development can be used as a basis for evaluating climate action in the context of sustainable development. (high confidence)*"</footnote>
long-term horizon allows one to somewhat abstract from priorities “du jour”. And their
economy-wide breadth provides a sense of comprehensiveness, and increases the
chances that the outcome be internally consistent. The limit of this approach, of course,
is that it rests on stated priorities, which may make it subject to gaps between official
targets influenced by the international context, and effective policies.

The advantage, however, is that development documents and visions are available
in a large number of countries. Economy-wide development planning at the national
scale can be traced back to the early 20th century, mainly in colonial territories such as
the then-called Gold Coast (Guggisberg 1922). Widely used in the 1940s-1960s, this
approach later declined following the collapse of centrally planned economies, and is
now resurfacing as national development plans are becoming a widespread tool to
frame short and long term development goals and strategies (Munro 2020; UN DESA
2015). The number of national development documents has been increasing sharply: a
global inventory of national plans conducted in 2007 (World Bank 2007) identified 62
documents, a number that had more than doubled when the exercise was reiterated in
2018 (Chimhowu, Hulme, and Munro 2019). Resurgence of national planning is
coming from developing countries, and could stem from five distinct causes (Munro
2020): (i) an inheritance from the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and the
associated Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (IMF 2016), (ii) a tool to manage the
risks of globalization, (iii) the promotion of transformative national agendas, (iv) a
convergence with the international framework to integrate sustainable development
issues (which would imply a natural convergence between the SDGs and the stated
priorities featured in the plan) or, on the opposite, (v) a counter-narrative to it.

This last reason was formulated for plans that were contemporary to MDGs, which
were more specific. Although SDGs were designed to ensure global inclusion, counter-
narratives could still exist nowadays as some challenges have been raised on their
declination: the number and lack of precision of targets which leaves much room for
interpretation (Gupta and Vegelin 2016; Stewart 2015; Biermann, Kanie, and Kim
2017), the “silo approach” used to present the goals that hides the strong interlinkages
between them (Nilsson, Griggs, and Visbeck 2016; McGowan et al. 2019; Bogers et al.
2022), and the detailed data needed to monitor the progress (ICSU, ISSC 2015; Lu et
al. 2015).
In this study, we examine the extent to which the SDG framework provides an accurate and exhaustive mapping of development priorities and aspirations.

To discuss the alignment between SDGs and national targets, we test a first hypothesis that derives from the aimed “universality” of the SDGs: it is assumed that most national development goals, such as those detailed in long-term national development documents and visions, enter the scope of one or several SDGs (H1). We check this hypothesis both for “sustainable development plans” that directly refer to the SDGs and for other national development documents that do not strictly stick to this framework –recent or not (Munro 2020).

The other way around, to discuss the alignment of national documents with the international framework, we test a second hypothesis: that all SDGs are pursued, at least to some extent, in each development document (H2). Indeed, although the governance of SDGs implies an adaptation to national contexts, cherry-picking between SDGs would go against the aimed “indivisibility” of the framework.

The literature on national development planning and the SDGs has started to provide tools for analysing development frameworks in the light of SDGs (UNDP 2017; Millenium Institute 2021), but only focuses on specific countries (Morita, Okitasari, and Masuda 2020; Jönsson and Bexell 2021; Horn and Grugel 2018) or regions (CEPAL n.d.). Priorities have been extracted from documents provided to the UN (Forestier and Kim 2020; Janetschek et al. 2020; Iacobuţă et al. 2022), public development banks reports (Jacouton, J, Marodon, R, and Laulanie, A 2022) for a limited number of countries, but it has not yet systematically been checked whether or not national long-term planning documents only contain goals that fit into the SDG framework.

We created a systematic mapping of the national targets displayed in planning documents by fitting each one of them under the SDG(s) tackling the issue, and isolating goals that are not consistent with this global framework. This typology also provided insights on the national prioritization of the global Sustainable Development Goals, thus enabling us to test both hypotheses.

The paper is structured as follows. Section II presents the methodology developed to build the database of existing national development documents and mapping of priorities. Section III provides a first description and analysis of it. We first discuss the countries represented in the analysis, then isolate the national priorities that deviate
from the global framework, and finally comment on the global representation of each
SDG in long-term planning documents. Section IV highlights and discusses the main
findings: **H1** can be confirmed with exceptions such as targets on population growth
and defence that do not fit into the SDG framework, and **H2** is rejected, in that SDGs
are differently prioritized across countries and some of them, such as SDG 5 on
Gender, are not systematically mentioned in all the documents.

## II. Materials and methods

To conduct this analysis, we first collected national development documents based
on a set of criteria that is detailed in section 2.1. We then created a database by
systematically mapping the national development targets displayed, using the SDGs
as a basis, such as detailed in section 2.2.

### 1. Collecting national development documents and visions

National development planning documents and visions are not harmonized at the
global level. A national development document outlines a country's planning vision,
targets and policies for a given time period. It is specific to each country situation and
governance system, and can take various forms, such as long-term broad national
visions, while others are short-term action plans or sectoral plans.

The documents featured in the database were thus selected based on a set of
detailed criteria, as the results might depend on the type of documents that were
chosen. We collected the documents as inspired by previous studies (Chimhowu,
Hulme, and Munro 2019; World Bank 2007) with criteria adapted to the targeted
analysis as detailed in this section and summarized in Table 1.

Based on these criteria, we conducted an exhaustive web search for long-term
documents and visions for each country listed as a United Nations Member State.
Documents were collected until December 2022, with the help of the FAOlex database
of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO n.d.), the World Bank website (World
Bank n.d.), the Planipolis database of the United Nations Education, Science and
Culture Organization (UNESCO n.d.), plan repositories from the UN Economic
Commissions for Latin America (CEPAL n.d.) and for Western Asia (UNESCWA n.d.)
or more often directly on governmental websites. The documents collected are listed with their source in Appendix I.

<table><caption>**Table 1. Summary of the criteria used to collect national long-term development documents to build the database.** The documents featured in the final database are listed in Appendix I with their source and language</caption><thead><tr><td>Category</td><td>Criterion</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Format</td><td>Single file</td></tr><tr><td>Language</td><td>All languages (english, french, german, spanish prioritized)</td></tr><tr><td>Time coverage</td><td>Covering at least 9 years, still running in 2020</td></tr><tr><td>Scale</td><td>National, economy-wide</td></tr><tr><td>Nature</td><td>Diverse, but VNRs are excluded</td></tr><tr><td>Origin</td><td>State ministry or institution, ideally related to economy or planning</td></tr><tr><td>Duplicates</td><td>Included</td></tr></tbody></table>

### a. Format

There is no unique format to a national development document. Although most of them are structured documents, some countries produce so-called plans that are displayed on websites (as is the case for Kuwait), or mentioned in speeches (as is the case for Algeria). For the purpose of this analysis, we only kept plans and visions that are detailed in a document so that all the priorities and targets are set in a unique file – and can be read through without missing some elements.

### b. Language

Some countries only issue their development document in their official administrative language, whereas others also propose translations. To limit the need for an automatic translator, the documents were collected in French, English, Spanish or German when available in these languages, otherwise in the original language. The languages in which each document was collected are listed in Appendix I.

### c. Time coverage
Our main target is to observe the extent to which SDGs form a good mapping of development aspirations across countries. In order to avoid collecting one-time priorities that could be unstable in time, long-term development plans, documents and visions were selected, as most short-term development plans contain targets that might rapidly change or be prioritized over others. Indeed, not all targets can be pursued or achieved in the short term. In that, there is a higher chance that all development aspirations of a country are encapsulated in longer-term documents than for 5-year development plans. Observing long-term development goals is then a way to roughly align with the temporal framework of the SDGs, adding to the relevance of the mapping. We arbitrarily set the limit at 9 year-long documents, and excluded shorter-term development plans, except when they explicitly included a longer-term vision that wasn't detailed in a specific document. For example, we included the 5-year plans of China or Fiji as a longer-term vision that was unreleased elsewhere was included in the documents, whereas for Cambodia, we kept the long-term vision document setting global priorities but not the short-term action plans directly applying the vision. We finally collected documents for which the expiration date was 2020 or later.

### d. Scale

In order to correctly check for **H2**, the documents and visions selected have to be national and cover most aspects of society. Regional plans, and plans of states within countries with a federal governance (as is the case for the United Arab Emirates where Abu Dhabi has a plan) were not included in the database. Moreover, in a sectoral plan, it is natural that not all SDGs are represented and that **H2** is invalidated – to accurately map the country's national targets in such a case, we would need to collect and analyse all its sectoral plans. We thus ruled out documents that only cover specific sectors, as well as spatial development plans with no other dimension, and kept documents that are national and at least economy-wide.

### e. Nature

To cover the diversity of governance systems in terms of development and planning, our definition of “national long-term planning document” includes so-called
long-term development plans with quantitative, specific targets, as well as broader,
less detailed development visions and strategies.

As briefly mentioned in the introduction, development documents may have
different legal statuses depending on countries, but all display stated priorities.
Although the redaction of all development documents produced after 2015 might have
been influenced the SDGs, excluding official communications documents to the UN
enabled us to reduce the risk of having an extended gap between stated priorities
produced for international cooperation and enforced policies. Although a few of them
mention development aspirations, we thus excluded the "Voluntary National Reviews",
that are voluntary documents produced for the High-Level Political Forum of the United
Nations in the context of the SDGs' implementation, as they mostly report on the
current state of achievement of the SDGs for a given country.

f. Institution

We collected development documents or visions issued by a government or
state institution, in order to ensure that they reflect the State's ambition in terms of
development. Depending on the country, such documents are usually produced by the
Ministry of economy and finance, the Ministry of planning and development, or a
dedicated state institution such as a National Planning Commission. We excluded
documents produced by think-tanks, companies, NGOs and other non-state
institutions.

As long as they emanate from the States, we did not operate a selection based
on how the documents were constructed. We did not discriminate between documents
resulting from a "top-down" process (established by experts with prospective economic
modelling as a basis), a more "bottom-up" process (based on concertation) or all
intermediates (Chimhowu, Hulme, and Munro 2019).

g. Duplicates

Some countries have several development plans and documents that run for a
given time period, for example a plan that runs from 2000 to 2020, and a vision that
runs from 2005 to 2050. In this case, we did not choose between documents and
analysed both.
This resulted in a repository of 132 documents from 121 countries satisfying all the criteria. The list of documents included is significantly different from those presented in previous articles, which feature many shorter plans as well as plans that ended before 2020. Compared to the latest one (Chimhowu, Hulme, and Munro 2019), only 19 documents are common to both databases.

## 2. *Typology of the documents*

The study was then conducted on a repository of 132 documents from 121 countries satisfying all the detailed criteria. The mapping is included in a database that was built by collecting in a table, for each document, information on 55 entries listed in Appendix II, and grouped in four categories: general information on the document and country, information on the content and elaboration of the document, mapping of the targets, information on the data.

### a. *General information on the document and country*

This category concerns broad information on the document and country, that was collected automatically. The entries are the official name of the document, its year of publication, the language in which it was collected for the analysis, the country to which it refers, a small justification as to why the document fits the criteria detailed in section 2.1, and country characteristics including its 2020 population, belonging to OECD countries, LDCs or countries listed in the Annex I of the UNFCCC, and finally whether the country has produced a Nationally Determined Contribution within the Paris Agreement or not.

### b. *Content and affiliation*

This category regroups information on the nature of the document, for which we qualified whether it was branded as a detailed strategy (with several quantified targets), a large vision (more broad with only one or two quantified targets) or a so-called “sustainable development plan” (including these words). Entries also include the official horizon year and emanating institution or body, whether the consultation of stakeholders and civil society was mentioned or not (as this gives information on whether the document was more built on collective concertation or on top-down expert-
led studies), whether there is any reference to the 2030 Agenda or not, all information
collected automatically through a screening of the document.

c. Mapping

This category of entries was thought and organized to guide the checking for
both hypotheses **H1** and **H2**. To check for **H1**, all the main development targets
featured in the document were extracted and listed, then connected to the SDG(s) that
would include them. In doing so, the priorities that do not fit into the framework were
highlighted. In order to check for **H2**, we then qualified the level of priority given to the
targets entering the scope of each SDG. The SDG(s) that are not covered in the
document then stood out.

For the first step, the national priorities had to be collected manually in the
documents, using Google Translate for some languages. Indeed, both the diversity of
languages and heterogeneity of formats of the documents – some have explicitly listed
priorities, in others priorities are summed up in a paragraph - did not allow us to apply
advanced text mining techniques in a relevant way.

Language processing techniques were also ineffective in associating relevant
SDGs to each listed target, for translation reasons but also because the lexicons
associated to some SDGs often overlap with others. National development targets are
also rarely formulated in the exact same way as their corresponding SDG, except for a
few countries that fully adopted the framework to detail a development document (for
example Indonesia). Ultimately, the association was also done manually for all the
targets and documents, which proved helpful in the discussion and analysis as it
provided a deeper understanding of the narratives that were developed in the long-term
plans and visions. Attention was however given to a few methodological details in order
to ensure robustness of the results. First, each national target was associated with
related SDG targets based on the formulation but also, when in doubt, on the indicator
associated. The mapping of national targets was thus done by Sustainable
Development Goal but looking at the SDG target level, as only taking into account the
text of the Goal would have led to a more indecisive result. When a single national
target referred to different SDG targets or SDGs, it was put under both categories.
When national targets were in the spirit of SDG targets but too specific or too broad to
be explicitly formulated in the same way, or did only partially match it, they were still
associated with that SDG. Indeed, as the aim of this mapping was to check for **H1**,
these methods enabled us to robustly isolate national targets that did not fit under the
SDG framework.

For the second step, a priority level accorded to each SDG in the document was
attributed manually out of four levels:

* "Priority" refers to SDGs covered in one of the few key and highlighted targets or indicators of the document – this means that in documents where no target stands out, there is no SDG with the "Priority" level.

* "Mentioned" refers to SDGs that are covered by at least a target of the document,

* "Barely mentioned" refers to SDGs that are only covered by one or a few sub-targets of the document.

* "Absent" refers to SDGs that are not covered in any target or sub-target of the document, even when briefly mentioned.

To sum up, in the final database, there are two entries for each of the 17 SDGs:

- First, a column listing all the key targets and goals of the development document that did fit under said SDG.

- Second, a column categorizing the level of priority given to said SDG in the document, with 4 different categories: Priority, Mentioned, Barely mentioned, or Absent.

In an additional 35th entry, targets that did not fit under any SDG were isolated,
providing elements to discuss **H1**.

d. *Nature of the data:*

This category aims at qualifying the targets and data proposed in the document. For
each document, we determined whether it was based on mentioned quantitative data
or not and we qualified the data (describing whether it was of institutional sources or
not, based on modelling or not, etc). We then noted whether the targets were quantified
or not.

After a brief description of the collected documents and information, next section uses
a first description of the database to discuss the main hypotheses.
### III. Results

#### 1. Description of the documents collected

The resulting database regroups a total of 132 documents, in 12 languages, covering 121 countries displayed in a map in Figure 1.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

**Figure 1. Map of the countries that are featured in the database.** In pink, countries with documents that are represented in the database. Some countries are noticeably absent, including countries that are known for their planning tradition, for example Russia and India. These cases are often explained by the fact that development plans exist, but were not long-term enough to be featured in the database – in the case of India however, no more formal plans are made for the economy.

Although there is a large number and diversity of countries covered, it is noticeable that most non-OECD countries have a long-term development plan, document or vision.

Moreover, the national documents are branded “sustainable development plans” in 25% of the cases (and visions in 52% of the cases), but this proportion is much higher (more than 70%) when considering OECD countries. This observation on long-term development documents would be in line with the presence of a link between the increase in the use of planning for developed countries and the integration of sustainability considerations into the international framework in the form of SDGs (Munro 2020; UN General Assembly 2015a).
## 2. Length and horizon of the development documents

Figure 2 shows the distributions of national development documents collected, depending on their date of publication, horizon year, and length. Figure 2.a shows that most documents (more than half) have 2030 as a horizon, which would be consistent with the time framework of the SDGs and in line with an increase in the number of development plans as a response to the international context – 12 documents (10% of the total documents) use the SDGs as a base for their structure and 45 more (36%) mention the framework in their text. However, we also observe in Figure 2.b that more than 40% of the documents existed before the year the 2030 Agenda was published.

In Figure 2.c, the distribution of the durations of documents is shown, and broken down by horizon year. From this figure, three main types of documents can be distinguished:

* First, 20% of the documents were published around 2015 with a 2030 horizon (as is the case for Egypt or Germany). Although these documents are in line with the international context (more than 85% of them mention the SDGs), we cannot directly conclude on whether they all are a direct consequence of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda – some documents could simply replace a previously existing document that expired in 2015.

* Second, there are longer-term documents (covering a period longer than 25 years). Most of them are “visions”, sometimes complemented by shorter-term documents that were not included in our database (as is the case for example for Cambodia).

* Finally, around 20% of the documents cover a period of around 20 years and were published before 2010 (as is the case for example for Tanzania). None of these documents refer to the 2030 Agenda and their analysis will be particularly helpful in informing H1 – checking whether previously established development goals all fit into the framework or not. Indeed, because of the time framework, we can rule out a natural alignment of the stated priorities with the SDGs as a displayed effort to fit to the framework.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2.** Distributions of national development documents collected depending on their date of publication (a), horizon year (b) and length (c). In fig2.c, the distribution of horizon years is also displayed for each length</figcaption></figure>
### 3. Typology of the development documents

Our analysis with regards to **H1** and **H2** leads us to two main observations, detailed hereafter.

**Main observation 1: Most national targets in development documents fit into the SDG Framework**

Overall, the development goals displayed in the national documents tend to fit into the SDG framework and can usually be linked to one or several SDGs, which would tend to confirm hypothesis **H1** ("All the development goals that can be found in countries' national long-term development documents fit under one or several SDG(s)").

*Targets in development documents sometimes simultaneously fit into several SDG categories.* Indeed, because SDGs were designed as "integrated and indivisible" (UN General Assembly 2015a), two different SDGs can feature targets that are close or identical. It is then relatively easy for a development goal to not be specific enough to enter under one SDG but not the other. Two theoretical illustrations of this observation are detailed hereafter:

* A development goal entitled "ensure reliable access to internet and telecommunication services" can be linked with at least two indicators of the SDG Framework – the fixed internet broadband for 100 inhabitants, and the proportion of population covered by a mobile network by technology. However, these two indicators are associated with two different SDGs. The former is associated with SDG17 ("Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development") under its target 6⁴. The latter is associated with SDG 9 ("Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation") under its target c<fnref n="5" />. Discriminating between the two categories would call for a level of

<footnote n="4">⁴ SDG 17.6: "Enhance North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation and enhance knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms, including through improved coordination among existing mechanisms, in particular at the United Nations level, and through a global technology facilitation mechanism"</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ SDG 9.c: "Significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020"</footnote>
detail and specification that is often not present in a country's development
document, leading to this goal fitting under both SDGs.

* A development goal entitled “achieve sustainable land management” can similarly be linked with at least three indicators – the proportion of land that is degraded over total land area (SDG15)<fnref n="6" />, the ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate (SDG 11)<fnref n="7" /> and the proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture (SDG 2)<fnref n="8" />.

Similar examples can be found for development targets revolving around transportation, or decentralization, and national development documents are not usually specific enough for each target to fit under a single SDG category. Even if so, when it comes to indicators, some of them are common to two SDGs – for example the material footprint per GDP which belongs to both SDGs 12 and 8, or the number of death attributed to disasters which belongs to both SDGs 1 and 11. Still, the main result is that the vast majority of national targets is englobed by at least one SDG.

Three types of development goals, however, do not fit under any SDG and were reported in a separate column of the typology. An analysis of these development goals shows that they can be classified into three broad categories.

First, 23 development documents mention individual values, behaviours and religion – as is for example the case for the Philippines, targeting work-life balance and time with friends, South Sudan, targeting strong religious values for their citizens, or Tuvalu with targets on sharing and reciprocity. These can be considered as out of the range of SDGs 11 on cultural heritage or 4 on education, and tend to not fit under any SDG category – although it can be noted that they are not among priorities in the mentioned development documents.

The second category revolves around national security and defence budgets, in 26 documents such as the ones of Kyrgyzstan or Mali. Such targets are not covered by SDG 16 (“Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development,

<footnote n="6">⁶ SDG 15 under the target “By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world”</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ SDG 11 under the target “By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries”</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ SDG 12 under the target “By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality”</footnote>
provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels") and are thus left out of the framework.

The third type of targets that do not fit into the framework are those explicitly mentioning the limiting of population growth, In 15 development documents such as the ones of Niger or Bangladesh. Indeed, even though the means of implementation of these targets such as family planning are a part of the framework (in SDG 3: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”), the very finality of population growth is not mentioned.

Apart from these exceptions that are never priorities but feature in 45 documents, all the development targets encountered can fit under at least one SDG. This tends to validate our first hypothesis **H1**, and the SDGs as a framework that englobes most development priorities formulated both before and after its adoption.

The documents which are explicitly based on the 2030 Agenda and follow the structure of SDGs do not mention any target that would not fit into the framework, which could either mean a natural alignment between both, or an omission of stated priorities that would not fit into the SDG framework. In this light, it is still important to note that most development documents that were published after 2015 and explicitly refer to the SDGs, as is the case for Afghanistan or France, do not follow the structure of the 17 SDGs – they are mentioned and referred to, but the targets are usually structured in a different way. This could be related to hypothesis **H2** and how development goals are prioritized by countries.

**Main observation 2: Some SDGs receive greater emphasis than others in the development documents.**
By mapping the development goals of countries on the basis of SDGs, insights were also given on the level of prioritization of each SDG in a given document, and then globally. In order to discuss hypothesis H2 (each country pursues in its national long-term development document, to some extent but simultaneously, every SDG), we observed the distributions of priority levels associated with each SDG globally, then for specific groups of countries.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3.** Global distributions of the levels of priority given to each SDG. For each SDG, the horizontal bar represents the proportion of documents where the priority level is Absent, Barely mentioned, Mentioned or a Priority.</figcaption></figure>

Figure 3 represents how SDGs are prioritized at the global scale, over all the planning documents featured in the database. Here, it is quite obvious that *not all SDGs are pursued with the same priority level in the development documents*.

The most prioritized SDGs are SDG 8 (Work and economy), SDG 9 (Industry, Infrastructure, Innovation) and SDG 16 (Peace and institutions) with respectively around 70%, 60% and 64% of the development documents mentioning them as a priority. These are not only prioritised, but also very rarely omitted – they are all absent in less than 5% of the documents. SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for global development) are also often a priority – in respectively 37% and 38% of the documents – and equally, rarely omitted.

SDG 1 (Poverty reduction), SDG 2 (Food and agriculture), SDG 3 (Health), SDG 4 (Education), SDG 10 (Inequalities) and SDG 12 (Responsible production and consumption) tend not to be as much prioritized, in less than 25% of the documents, but they are also absent in less than 13% of the documents – they are almost always mentioned, but with a varying degree in their priority level.
SDG 5 (Gender), SDG 6 (Water and sanitation), SDG 7 (Energy), SDG 13 (Climate change), SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land) are all prioritized in less than 10% of the development documents. Moreover, SDG 5, 13, 14 and 15 are all omitted in more than 15% of the documents. This invalidates **H2**, in that not all SDGs are simultaneously pursued by countries at least to some extent, even in the more recent development documents – in total, only 33 documents of the database feature all 17 SDGs.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 4.** Distributions of the levels of priority given to each SDG, for least developed countries (fig 4.A) and OECD countries (fig 4.B). For each SDG, the horizontal bar represents the proportion of documents where the priority level is Absent, Barely mentioned, Mentioned or a Priority. In red, the proportions for LDCs (based on the UNCTAD list). In blue, the proportions for OECD countries.</figcaption></figure>

This result calls for a closer look at which countries prioritize which SDGs.
Figure 4 breaks down how SDGs are prioritized for Least Developed Countries and for
OECD countries in the database. The results displayed show that *depending on their development level, countries do not tend to prioritize the same SDGs*.

Indeed, SDG 5, 13, 14 and 15, which were omitted in more than 15% of the total documents, are prioritized in less than 10% of the least developed countries' documents or visions. SDG 5 is often mentioned or at least barely mentioned (in more than 87% of the LDCs' documents), which shows that gender is taken into account but not displayed as a priority. However, SDGs 13, 14, and 15 are not as mentioned: in more than 50% of the LDCs' documents, they are barely mentioned or absent, which shows that environmental considerations are rarely prioritized and often not included in national development documents from Least Developed Countries.

Symmetrically, OECD countries never prioritize SDGs 2, 5 and 6, but more than 10% omit SDGs 8, 9 or 16, that are the most mentioned globally. In comparison to the global proportions, they tend to mention the environmental SDGs more.

To get a better sense of how specific countries prioritize SDGs in their development document, and navigate through the database, we created a visualisation tool<fnref n="9" /> displaying, for a chosen country, the level of priority given to all the SDGs, the development goals associated with each one of them, and targets that did not fit into the framework. Figures 5 and 6 show how the prioritization of SDGs is displayed, on the examples of the Kiribati and Ireland. Here, Ireland puts the emphasis on SDGs 11 and 9, and SDGs 1 and 16 are absent in its plan. The Kiribati's national development document prioritizes SDGs 8,9, 16 and 17 and SDGs 12 and 15 are absent.

<footnote n="9">⁹ The tool can be accessed to using the following link: https://sdg-explorer.onrender.com/</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 5.** Level of priority given to each SDG in Ireland's national long-term development document (National development plan 2018-2027) SDGs are represented in the position they occupy in the SDG logo and the size of the bar indicates the level of priority accorded to a given SDG in the document according to our analysis – Absent (no bar), Barely mentioned (small bar), Mentioned (medium bar) and Priority (large bar).</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6.** Level of priority given to each SDG in Kiribati's national long-term development document (20-year vision 2016-2036) SDGs are represented in the position they occupy in the SDG logo and the size of the bar indicates the level of priority accorded to a given SDG in the document according to our analysis – Absent (no bar), Barely mentioned (small bar), Mentioned (medium bar) and Priority (large bar).</figcaption></figure>
#### IV. Conclusion - discussion

In this analysis, we created an innovative typology by mapping national development documents (and their stated targets) using the SDGs as a basis, along with a visualisation tool. This enabled us to comment on the alignment between the international development context - SDGs – and national development goals, and complement a still emerging literature on the subject. In doing so, we checked for two hypotheses:

* All the development goals that can be found in countries' national long-term development documents fit under one or several SDG(s) (H1)

* Each country pursues in its national long-term development document, to some extent but simultaneously, every SDG (H2)

Our results show that **H1** can be confirmed with a few exceptions, and **H2** is not confirmed, in that SDGs are differently prioritized across countries and some are not mentioned in all development documents.

Most national targets in development documents do fit into the SDG framework, under one or several SDGs, with marginal exceptions. The first exception concerns goals that could fit into the framework but focus on individual values, which tend to deviate from the global spirit of the SDG framework. The second exception concerns measures revolving around the increase in defence and military budgets. As is confirmed in the summary of discussions of expert meetings on the subject (OECD Expert meeting 2019), these goals were not a part of the elaboration of the SDG framework. Among the reasons explaining this absence, a risk of distrust provoked by a securitized global development framework if such goals were to figure along cooperation and partnership goals. The third exception concerns documents targeting a limit to population growth (Pongiglione 2015). The absence of such targets in the SDG framework could be explained by the difficulty of elaborating a target on what a “sustainable population growth” should be, given that some countries target an increase in order to maintain a sustainable population pyramid, and others target a decrease in that matter. Overall, these exceptions are present in documents originated both before and after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda.
This main result tends to validate **H1** and strengthen the idea of a universal SDG framework that provides an almost exhaustive mapping of the stated development priorities across the globe.

Some SDGs are largely more covered than others in the development documents, and there are many documents in which not all SDGs tend to appear, which invalidates hypothesis **H2**. Less developed countries tend to prioritize goals targeting the economy or the governance more, whereas the most developed countries tend to prioritize and mention environmental goals more. This might be explained by the fact that most of the development documents for developed countries were produced after 2015 and the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. Before that, sustainable development was not integrated as deeply into the framework, which did not aim at being universal in terms of sectors covered or countries concerned – unlike the SDG framework. As for gender issues, older documents might not mention environmental issues as much, as these may have been treated separately in sectoral plans at the time because they had yet to be mainstreamed across various development issues. It is also relatively surprising to see that the Goals 6 or 7 (water, sanitation, and energy) are not widely prioritized and covered, which might also be explained by the existence of separate comprehensive sectoral plans as these issues have been widely identified and isolated as crucial for development (Smajgl, Ward, and Pluschke 2016) and for a long time. Further analyses including the publication year of the document and looking at sectoral plans could be completed in order to check for these hypotheses. Still, hypothesis **H2** is rejected even for documents that were produced after 2015, mention the 2030 Agenda or are explicitly based on it. This result shows that countries might tend to cherry-pick between goals by excluding some of them, which goes against the aimed indivisibility of the framework. We interpret this as a result to the silo approach used to present SDGs that omits interlinkages between goals, but goes against the spirit of their “indivisible” nature.

Limits of our study were highlighted in the introduction and methods.

First, because of the importance of long-term development documents for international cooperation on development issues, development priorities presented in the national development documents of countries might show a natural alignment with the international context. This limit is mitigated by the facts that many documents
featured in the database pre-date the adoption of the SDGs, and that SDGs were proposed in a bottom-up process. The fact that 25 documents produced after 2015 feature exceptions to the framework shows that the more recent documents do not necessarily align with the new framework. It could be further investigated by additional analyses on the elaboration processes of the documents of a few countries.

A few methods were presented to isolate development priorities of countries, each of them with limits, but using other sources than development documents might show very different results. Interesting next steps to enhance the robustness of these results might include comparing the mapping done for a few national development documents with priorities isolated in other contexts (laws, votes, sectoral plans, budget) in order to limit the possible effect of policy implementation gaps.

Finally, in order to build a database that could be as exhaustive as possible and include documents in other languages than English and with different structures, the mapping was done manually. The results are then sensitive to the criteria kept to attribute each national target to one or several SDG(s), and to determine the priority level associated with each SDG. To ensure their robustness, the criteria used were carefully reviewed and for a few documents the mappings done by different sources were compared and showed consistent results. Further strengthening these methods would imply a detailed analysis on each country, the purpose of this particular study being to provide broad results on an extended set of countries.

Our conclusions provide interesting insights on the use of SDGs as a framework to think all development issues, thus proving of particular policy relevance as our literature review shows it is used in a growing number of contexts.

Indeed, this study shows that in using the SDGs, most existing development targets would effectively be included in the framework. National targets in terms of defence and population, however, should be kept in mind as they might go unnoticed at the international level: as they do not fit into the framework, they might not appear in documents following its structure, which does not mean that these targets don't exist. This phenomenon could be identified by comparing the development priorities featured in national documents with exceptions to the ones displayed in the VNR communicated to the UN. It would indeed enable us to check whether these existing goals appear or not in a document with SDGs as an imposed framework. This result can also be kept in mind when setting the post-2030 agenda: although the current agenda provides a
relevant mapping of development targets, better including these exceptions along with
others that might appear until 2030 (e.g. targets on animal well-being), could be a
future refinement.

Moreover, documents produced within the framework are relatively harmonized,
with a set of indicators which may prove convenient in comparative work at the
international level. However, in relation to the silo approach used to present SDGs,
using it as a strict framework has an impact on how national targets appear to be
prioritized. Indeed, when based on the SDGs structure (listing targets SDG by SDG),
the national documents tended to mention all the SDGs without reflecting any effective
priority. However, most development documents that were published after 2015 and
mention the 2030 Agenda do not explicitly follow the structure of the 17 SDGs. The
targets are usually structured in a different way, with a narrative which leads to a
prioritization of some goals compared to others. We do not argue for an exclusive use
of SDGs as a way to structure such documents, as the current documents provide a
clearer view on the national downscaling of the framework. It is however interesting to
highlight that these narratives might result in the absence of given SDGs in the
document. Yet, as an example, targets that involve the development of industrial or
energy sectors without any mention to environmental sustainability technically fit into
the industry-related SDGs, as the environmental indicators are in separate SDGs. This
needs to be kept in mind as cherry-picking between goals has an impact on the
overarching goal of the SDG framework. To easily identify and avoid this problem, a
simple solution could be to encourage countries - as some already do - to add, in their
development documents, a paragraph detailing how their development goals and
narratives translate in terms of SDGs.

In addition to enabling us to discuss the relevance and universality of the SDG
framework in the light of its connections with national priorities, this work provides a
database that may prove useful to inform further academic work in economic
modelling, institutional economy, political science or environmental studies, both on
international cooperation and on development planning. A visualization tool was
additionally designed and linked to the study to facilitate the exploration of national
priorities mapped within the SDG framework, for a high number of countries.
**Conflicts of interests**

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

**Acknowledgements**

We warmly thank three anonymous reviewers, Christophe Cassen, Louis-Gaëtan Giraudet, Luc Elie, Harald Winkler and all participants at the French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists and International Energy Workshop 2022 conferences as well as the CIRED, IEDES and CEE-M seminars for useful feedback and comments.
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