The Sustainable Development Goals in global perspective

Agenda for International Development (A-id) and the Scuola’s DIRPOLIS Institute will host an international conference exploring various dimensions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) debate.

When the SDGs were adopted in 2015, there was a lot of consternation among global development leaders about the large number of goals (17), targets (169) and the complexity of the framework. The idea of setting such ambitious goals was seen by many as tantamount to making the whole approach a fruitless exercise. With so many objectives, the thinking went, the advocacy community would not be able to focus attention on any of them.

Indeed, the SDGs cover a large number of social and economic development issues including energy, urbanization, water, environment and social justice, but also poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, gender equality. Clearly, a considerable amount of theoretical and practical challenges need to be tackled in order to assist policy- and decision-makers in their effort to translate theory into practice.

At the heart of this conference, there is the belief that, to capture the complexity of the SDGs, there is a need to bridge different academic disciplines, vernacular knowledge and local expertise. In this intellectual milieu, A-id and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna invite practitioners and scholars from development studies, economics, public policy, law, political science, political theory, social policy, and sociology to submit abstracts and articles examining different aspects of the SDGs.

The conference will be held at the premises of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, on 29-30 October 2018.

For more details on the call for papers and on the conference, please visit the conference website, or contact Dr. Emanuele Sommario, Dr. Francesca Spagnuolo or Dr. Chiara Macchi.