Working Papers

How has the focus of the UN General Assembly changed over time and how well is the global agenda expressed in these documents? This paper presents a proof-of-concept classifier to examine the evolution of the global agenda expressed and observed in words of the UN General Assembly resolutions. Using natural language processing to identify four categories of resolutions — Sustainable Development, Justice and Law, Human Rights, and Peace and Security — the analysis of 3,765 UN GA resolutions from 2007 to 2019 reveals the changing areas of focus of the Member States and, as a result, of the UN Secretariat. Sustainable Development is slowly gaining importance in the language in UN…

Research suggests that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can open up market opportunities worth USD 12 trillion in the four largest sectors that represent 60 per cent of real economy – food and agriculture; cities; energy and materials; and health and well-being. While the concept of the SDGs creating a win-win situation for all is growing increasingly trendy, further evidence needs to be accumulated to better chart the important discourse on the private sector’s engagement with the SDGs. To this end, this paper aims to shed light on three questions: (i) How is the private sector currently engaging with the SGDs in these sectors?; (ii) What are the key areas of…

While migration and population displacement has always been part of the human experience, the context within which it occurs today has materially changed. Migration has become an important part of economic globalization and closely related to countries´ development process. Conflicts, poverty, natural disasters and climate events are also forcing people to migrate in an ever-increasing number. For many low-income countries with large number of internally-displaced people, on the other hand, the high economic costs are making it more difficult for them to invest in SDG implementation. Developing countries also host most of the externally-displaced people at high economic costs, which…

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) have started to audit the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While there is no one single audit model or approach to audit SDG implementation, audits should incorporate a few core methodological features related to the principles of the 2030 Agenda. Four methodological and practical challenges associated with conducting performance audits of SDG implementation, as they differ from traditional audits, are discussed in this paper: 1) problem definition, including the level of investigation in the SDG hierarchy of goals and targets and the audit scope; 2) conceptual challenges inherent in going from the level of individual entities…