Localizing the Sustainable Development Goals through Digitally Visible Initiatives: An Exploratory Study in Brazil

Community-based and other sustainability-oriented initiatives across Brazil address problems central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), yet their contributions may be less visible within formal SDG monitoring because they are distributed across numerous small actors and often expressed in local rather than SDG terminology. This study frames the challenge of making the contributions of such initiatives legible within SDG localization as a knowledge-translation problem and develops an exploratory digital mapping and classification procedure for identifying and interpreting digitally visible sustainability-oriented initiatives in relation to nationalized SDG targets. An iterative snowball mapping procedure on Instagram identified 2,328 publicly visible profiles, from which 256 sustainability-oriented initiatives were classified in relation to nationalized SDG targets (230 assigned a primary SDG). A documented subset of 50 initiatives, including 47 examined using additional public sources, was analyzed in depth. Coding followed a transparent codebook, and an independent second coder recoded the documented subset, yielding moderate intercoder reliability (Cohen's κ = 0.57), followed by negotiated adjudication of disagreements. The findings indicate that many initiatives address SDG-relevant problems without using SDG terminology, that assigning a single primary SDG entails interpretive loss when representing multidimensional local practices, and that fewer than one quarter of the initiatives in the in-depth subset are directly recognized in Brazil's official civil society registry. The study introduces a transparent and auditable mapping-and-classification procedure grounded in this framing and provides empirical insights into both the analytical potential and the interpretive limits of translating situated local narratives into classifications aligned with nationalized SDG targets.