ESDN Policy Briefs are synthesis documents from the ESDN Conferences, Workshops, and Peer Learning Platforms and Visits. Policy Briefs are not only based on presentations given by keynote speakers, but also on the outputs generated by interactive group work between policymakers and experts in sustainable development during these events, which culminate in jointly made recommendations with respect to the topic of the specific ESDN event.
The need for transformations to achieve sustainable development is a fundamental part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Having passed the halfway point of implementing the 2030 Agenda, progress towards achieving the SDGs is still too slow and transformations have not been fully realized in practice. The recent polycrisis (e.g. climate change, armed conflicts, energy crisis, high living costs, etc.) has slowed progress in SDG implementation even further, frequently leading towards stagnation or even regression. The Europe Sustainable Development Report 2023/24 estimates that “the EU has achieved or is on track to achieve a little over two-thirds of the SDG target” and detects that “SDG progress in Europe has stalled since 2020”. Therefore, the Report concludes that “overall progress is too slow to achieve all of the SDGs by 2030”.
This was the backdrop and focus of the ESDN over the first 6 months of 2024. To that effect, the ESDN dedicated three different events to the topic of policy transformations for sustainable development and the SDGs. The following ESDN Policy Notes, which can be found below, are the result of the ESDN Workshop that took place in March in Budva, Montenegro on "Governance Transformations for More Effective SDG Implementation", the ESDN Young Civil Servants Workshop that took place in April in Vienna, Austria on "Transformative Policy – Addressing Intergenerational Equity", and the ESDN Conference 2024 that took place in June in Brussels, Belgium on "Upgrading Europe: Building Transformative Policies to Reach the Sustainable Development Goals".