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Abstract:
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"Countries around the world have committed to achieve 17 SDGs. Increasing
inequality has become an urgent issue across both developed and developing economies and it
has been considered one of the defining challenges of our time. A number of the so-called
‘planetary boundaries’ has been crossed, putting the planet at risk of detrimental environmental
change. Managing SDGs is complex for policy-makers. The challenge is to know how SDGs
interact, and which policy tools would be most effective to simultaneously meet the SDGs of the
Agenda 2030. This session will examine SDGs synergies and tradeoffs, the role of inequalities
therein, as well as examples of how to replicate and scale up or scale down emerging and
innovative policy solutions to meet SDG challenges. We ask: How does inequality impact the
achievement of SDGs at different scales? Which countries, if any, are simultaneously “prosperous,
equal, and green”, and why? Does there exist a ‘trilemma’ inhibiting the simultaneous achievement
of the three goals (the “triple bottom line”), and therefore sustainable development? If so, what are
the respective tradeoffs, and how might these evolve over time? The concepts of “prosperous,
equal, and green” encompass virtually SDGs 10, 2, 13, 14 and 15 (Reducing Inequality, Climate
Action, Life Below Water and Life on Land), while considering SDGs 8, 9 (Decent Work and
Economic Growth; Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure). While inequality is often considered as
a statistical pattern in the distribution of observables, such as income or wealth at the national
scale, perception of inequality and fairness tend to act at much lower scales (e.g. community). Yet,
it remains unclear at which scales tradeoffs between inequality and other SDGs will emerge or
need to be accounted for when dealing with, for example, problems of common-pool resource
management."
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