Patterns of sustainability and policy coherence: some lessons learned from Sweden and global SDG follow-up

How can society find paths to sustainability? The experience from the follow-up of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on a national basis shows distinct patterns of policies that seem to create a good basis for development. For most goals, countries have policies that address at least some of the issues. Depending on how general or narrow the chosen policies are in a country, the resulting outcome in the form of the size of vulnerable groups or environmental damage will vary. A further complicating factor is that some policies have side effects that are unintended but still make it very hard to reach other goals in the SDG framework. Therefore, both generality of policies and policy coherence are central to the SDG outcomes. Among all of the goals, some issues can be said to be common for all countries. The situation for vulnerable groups and the need to adapt the economy and society to decrease the effects of the climate crisis stand out as crucial in all countries, rich or poor. Improvements in these areas would make a huge difference in the possibility of reaching the targets. Policy design can depend on historical set-up and local possibilities. In this chapter, we will categorize policy choices with a model of the generality of values, which looks at individual, hierarchical, egalitarian or fatalistic values, and discuss if these may explain some of the differences between the policies chosen. The data set created by the SDG follow-up can be used to understand how the countries’ choices have led to different outcomes.