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UN DESA Policy Brief No. 175: The important contribution of Supreme Audit Institutions to SDG implementation, follow up and review
Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) play a key role in support of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. As established domestic accountability institutions, they contribute to improving government performance by informing national monitoring and evaluation systems with independent evaluations of the effectiveness of policies and programmes related to the SDGs, and increasingly by assessing government’s performance on national SDG targets. Both at the national and international level, there is scope for better leveraging the information produced by SAIs on SDG implementation.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 174: Leveraging strategic foresight to mitigate artificial intelligence (AI) risk in public sectors
By leveraging collective intelligence and scenario planning, strategic foresight exercises can help ensure that AI technologies are developed and deployed responsibly, thereby increasing the likelihood of their positive contribution to sustainable and inclusive growth. Such forward-thinking methodologies are critical to mitigating risks and harnessing AI’s transformative power in advancing the SDGs.
UN DESA Policy Brief No. 170 (Special Issue): Reimagining financing for the SDGs - from filling gaps to shaping finance
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are dangerously off track. The prevailing “gap-filling” approach to SDG financing has proven inadequate, failing to deliver the scale, impact or equity required. Global efforts remain fixated on mobilizing additional financing rather than embedding the SDGs at the core of economic and financial systems. Blended finance, often heralded as a silver bullet, has fallen short: public resources dominate blended deals, often de-risking private initiative in lower-risk, lower-impact projects. To redirect this trajectory, the international financing architecture must be reshaped around the SDGs.