An evidence-based approach to national Sustainable Development Goal assessment: The case of Ireland

With less than seven years remaining before the 2030 target date of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Ireland is currently unable to adequately assess national SDG performance. This paper presents an index that has been created to combat this critical research gap. In this respect, an index has been developed for each of the unique SDG indicators (n = 159) identified during the early stages of the indicator selection process where national performance is assessed relative to the best and worst performers in the European Union (EU). Ireland’s performance in individual indicators is then aggregated revealing the country’s performance in several critical dimensions of the SDGs, including society, economy, environment, as well as means-of-implementation (MoI), linkage indicators, and the SDGs as a whole. Further, annual time series data has been collected, allowing for the assessment of the country’s relative performance in 140 SDG indicators from 2015-to-2021. Its extensive indicator framework makes this index the most accurate and comprehensive assessment of Ireland’s SDG performance, to date. Similarly, as illustrated throughout this paper, our unique peer-based approach, and the positive peer-learning environment that it engenders, hold the potential to catalyse the development of efficient and effective national SDG policy. As such, the results from this index should be used to inform future national SDG monitoring, reporting, and policy initiatives, including future voluntary national reviews.Author summary: The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides a UN-endorsed global framework pathway towards achieving a sustainable future for humanity. Despite being at the mid-point for achieving the 2030 Agenda, most national governments do not have a robust evidence-based framework to assess national level progress on SDG indicators, targets, and goals. This study provides such a framework and uses the case of Ireland to demonstrate that national level assessment of SDG progress and performance does not conform to an evidence-based assessment of the nation’s SDG performance. Our research is the first to investigative a nation’s SDG progress or otherwise over time (2015–2021). The results demonstrate that Ireland performs significantly worse in most of the SDG framework in 2021 compared to 2015 suggesting a regression in SDG performance relative to progress being made across the EU-28. Our study provides new insights into how specifically tailored SDG policies can be created through an indicator-based assessment of SDG progress over time. Such micro-level assessment presents opportunities for policymakers to adopted peer policy learning strategies to accelerate SDG progress into the future.