research work on sustainable development

Search the site

Links to social media channels

Carbon Offset Deals and the Risks of “Green Grabbing”

Governments must ensure land-based investments for carbon removal respect the access and tenure rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is an award-winning independent think tank working to create a world where people and the planet thrive.

Our research and policy work focuses on areas we deem ripe for transformation, where shifts in policy have the potential to change the game and where we have a proven record of making significant gains.

Address the causes of climate change and adapt to its impact.

Support the sustainable management of our natural resources.

Foster fair and sustainable economies.

Flagship Initiatives

IISD Experimental Lakes Area

IISD Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA) is an exceptional natural laboratory comprised of 58 small lakes and their watersheds set aside for scientific research.

NAP Global Network

The NAP Global Network works with partners in the world’s most vulnerable countries to develop and implement climate adaptation plans for a more secure future.

Global Subsidies Initiative

The IISD Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) supports international processes, national governments, and civil society organizations to align subsidies with sustainable development.

The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development

The IGF supports nations committed to leveraging mining for sustainable development to ensure negative impacts are limited and financial benefits are shared.

SDG Knowledge Hub

The SDG Knowledge Hub provides daily information on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Earth Negotiations Bulletin

Earth Negotiations Bulletin provides balanced, timely, and independent reporting on United Nations environment and development negotiations.

Nature-Based Infrastructure Global Resource Centre

The NBI Global Resource Centre aims to establish the business case for nature-based infrastructure, providing data, training, and customized project valuations.

State of Sustainability Initiatives

The State of Sustainability Initiatives examines how voluntary sustainability standards can support environmental and social goals.

New Research

IISD publishes objective, independent, high-quality research on sustainable development issues, including reports, policy briefs, and toolkits.

The Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement: A reader's guide

A subset of World Trade Organization members has finalized the legal text of an Agreement on Investment Facilitation. This Reader's Guide provides an overview of what's in the agreement.

February 6, 2024

Public Engagement on Climate Change Adaptation

This report provides an introduction to public engagement on climate change adaptation for decision-makers involved in leading national adaptation plan (NAP) processes.

October 3, 2023

New Perspectives

Moving Beyond GDP in the Caribbean

Growth in GDP in the Caribbean isn't capturing the full story of natural disasters, climate change, and social disruption—but action is already underway to move beyond GDP.

February 1, 2024

What Is the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, and How Can Countries Move It Forward?

With the introduction of the new framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), COP 28 marked a milestone for adaptation. We unpack key outputs and set out how countries can move forward by strengthening their national monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems.

February 15, 2024

What's Next After COP 28: Food systems

Slated to be a game changer for food systems transformation, COP 28 ended with mixed results. Our expert unpacks the wins and disappointments for food systems and what’s needed next.

December 19, 2023

Stay connected

Be the first to hear what's new in sustainable development. Sign up for our bi-weekly updates to receive a curated selection of our latest reports, articles, projects, and upcoming events.

Fueling Change: The journey to end fossil fuel subsidies in Canada

How Canada became the first country in the world to introduce a framework for ending government subsidies to domestic oil and gas companies.

Success story

October 13, 2023

A Global Deal to Tackle Harmful Fisheries Subsidies: A look behind the scenes

In June 2022, World Trade Organization members reached a historic deal tackling harmful fisheries subsidies. We unpack how a global campaign by environmental non-governmental organizations and technical policy and legal advice from trade experts in Geneva helped make a difference.

December 6, 2022

Envisioning Resilience: Bringing underrepresented women's voices into planning for climate change adaptation

Meaningful participation by women who are on the front lines of climate change is essential for gender-responsive, locally led adaptation. However, in many contexts, women remain underrepresented in decision making, from local to national levels.

October 28, 2022

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the academic research agenda. A scientometric analysis

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Research Institute on Policies for Social Transformation, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Public Policy Observatory, Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Santiago, Chile

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Finance and Accounting, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Social Matters Research Group, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain

• Antonio Sianes, 
• Alejandro Vega-Muñoz, 
• Pilar Tirado-Valencia, 
• Antonio Ariza-Montes

• Published: March 17, 2022
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Today, global challenges such as poverty, inequality, and sustainability are at the core of the academic debate. This centrality has only increased since the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose scope is to shift the world on to a path of resilience focused on promoting sustainable development. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a critical yet comprehensive scientometric analysis of the global academic production on the SDGs, from its approval in 2015 to 2020, conducted using Web of Science (WoS) database. Despite it being a relatively short period of time, scholars have published more than five thousand research papers in the matter, mainly in the fields of green and sustainable sciences. The attained results show how prolific authors and schools of knowledge are emerging, as key topics such as climate change, health and the burden diseases, or the global governance of these issues. However, deeper analyses also show how research gaps exist, persist and, in some cases, are widening. Greater understanding of this body of research is needed, to further strengthen evidence-based policies able to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the achievement of the SDGs.

Citation: Sianes A, Vega-Muñoz A, Tirado-Valencia P, Ariza-Montes A (2022) Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the academic research agenda. A scientometric analysis. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0265409. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409

Editor: Stefano Ghinoi, University of Greenwich, UNITED KINGDOM

Received: September 10, 2021; Accepted: March 1, 2022; Published: March 17, 2022

Copyright: © 2022 Sianes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

1.1. from the millennium agenda to the 2030 agenda and the sustainable development goals (sdgs).

To track the origins of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we must recall the Millennium Agenda, which was the first global plan focused on fighting poverty and its more extreme consequences [ 1 ]. Approved in 2000, its guiding principle was that northern countries should contribute to the development of southern states via Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows. The commitment was to reach 0.7% of donors’ gross domestic product [ 2 ] to reduce poverty by half by 2015. The relative failure to reach this goal and the consolidation of a discourse of segregation between northern and southern countries [ 3 ] opened the door to strong criticism of the Millennium Agenda. Therefore, as 2015 approached, there were widespread calls for a profound reformulation of the system [ 4 ].

The world in 2015 was very different from that in the early 2000s. Globalization had reached every corner of the world, generating development convergence between countries but increasing inequalities within countries [ 5 , 6 ]. Increasing interest in the environmental crisis and other global challenges, such as the relocation of work and migration flows, consolidated a new approach to development and the need of a more encompassed agenda [ 7 ]. This new agenda was conceived after an integrating process that involved representatives from governments, cooperation agencies, nongovernmental organisations, global business, and academia. The willingness of the 2030 Agenda to ‘leave no one behind’ relies on this unprecedented global commitment by the international community [ 8 ].

As a result of this process, in 2015, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the document “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” [ 9 ], later known as the 2030 Agenda. This new global agenda is an all-comprising strategy that seeks to inform and orient public policies and private interventions in an extensive range of fields, from climate change to smart cities and from labour markets to birth mortality, among many others.

The declared scope of the Agenda is to shift the world on to a path of resilience focused on promoting sustainable development. To do so, the 2030 Agenda operates under the guidance of five principles, formally known as the ‘5 Ps’: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnerships [ 10 ]. With these pivotal concepts in mind, the Agenda has established a total of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 specific targets to be pursued in a 15-year period, which reflects the scale and profound ambition of this new Agenda.

The SDGs do not only address what rich countries should do for the poor but rather what all countries should do together for the global well-being of this and future generations [ 4 ]. Thus, the SDGs cover a much broader range of issues than their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals [ 11 ], and are intended to be universal on the guidance towards a new paradigm of sustainable development that the international community has been demanding since the 1992 Earth Summit [ 7 , 12 , 13 ].

Despite this potential, some criticise their vagueness, weakness, and unambitious character. Fukuda-Parr [ 14 ], see weaknesses on the simplicity of the SDGs, which can lead to a very narrow conception that reduces the integral concept of development. The issue of measurement is also problematic; for some researchers, the quantification of objectives not only reduces their complexity, but leads to them being carried out without considering the interdependencies between the objectives [ 12 , 13 ]. Other authors have identified difficulties associated with specifying some of the less visible, intangible aspects of their qualitative nature such as inclusive development and green growth [ 14 , 15 ]. Finally, Stafford-Smith et al. [ 16 ] state that their successful implementation also requires paying greater attention to the links across sectors, across societal actors and between and among low-, medium-, and high-income countries.

Despite these criticisms, the SDGs have undoubtedly become the framework for what the Brundtland report defined as our common future. Unlike conventional development agendas that focus on a restricted set of dimensions, the SDGs provide a holistic and multidimensional view of development [ 17 ]. In this line, Le Blanc [ 12 ] concludes that the SDGs constitute a system with a global perspective; because they consider the synergies and trade-offs between the different issues involved in sustainable development, and favour comprehensive thinking and policies.

1.2. Towards a categorization of the SDGs

There is an underlying lack of unanimity in the interpretation of the SDGs, which has given rise to alternative approaches that allow categorizing the issues involved in their achievement without losing sight of the integral vision of sustainable development [ 15 , 18 – 23 ]. However, such categorization of the SDGs makes it possible to approach them in a more holistic and integrated way, focusing on the issues that underlie sustainable development and on trying to elucidate their connections.

Among the many systematization proposals, and following the contributions of Hajer et al. [ 19 ], four connected perspectives can strengthen the universal relevance of the SDGs: a) ‘planetary boundaries’ that emphasize the urgency of addressing environmental concerns and calling on governments to take responsibility for global public goods; b) ‘The safe and just operating space’ to highlight the interconnectedness of social and environmental issues and their consequences for the redistribution of wealth and human well-being; c) ‘The energetic society’ that avoids the plundering of energy resources; and d) ‘green competition’ to stimulate innovation and new business practices that limit the consumption of resources.

Planetary boundaries demand international policies that coordinate efforts to avoid overexploitation of the planet [ 24 ]. Issues such as land degradation, deforestation, biodiversity loss and natural resource overexploitation exacerbate poverty and deepen inequalities [ 21 , 25 – 27 ]. These problems are further compounded by the increasing impacts of climate change with clear ramifications for natural systems and societies around the globe [ 21 , 28 ].

A safe and just operating space implies social inclusivity that ensures equity principles for sharing opportunities for development [ 15 , 29 ]. Furthermore, it requires providing equitable access to effective and high-quality preventive and curative care that reduces global health inequalities [ 30 , 31 ] and promotes human well-being. Studies such as that of Kruk et al. [ 32 ] analyse the reforms needed in health systems to reduce mortality and the systemic changes necessary for high-quality care.

An energetic society demands global, regional and local production and consumption patterns as demands for energy and natural resources continue to increase, providing challenges and opportunities for poverty reduction, economic development, sustainability and social cohesion [ 21 ].

Finally, green competition establishes limits to the consumption of resources, engaging both consumers and companies [ 22 ] and redefining the relationship between firms and their suppliers in the supply chain [ 33 ]. These limits must also be introduced into life in cities, fostering a new urban agenda [ 34 , 35 ]. Poor access to opportunities and services offered by urban centres (a function of distance, transport infrastructure and spatial distribution) is a major barrier to improved livelihoods and overall development [ 36 ].

The diversification of development issues has opened the door to a wide range of new realities that must be studied under the guiding principles of the SDGs, which involve scholars from all disciplines. As Saric et al. [ 37 ] claimed, a shift in academic research is needed to contribute to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. The identification of critical pathways to success based on sound research is needed to inform a whole new set of policies and interventions aimed at rendering the SDGs both possible and feasible [ 38 ].

1.3. The relevance and impact of the SDGs on academic research

In the barely five years since their approval, the SDGs have proven the ability to mobilize the scientific community and offer an opportunity for researchers to bring interdisciplinary knowledge to facilitate the successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda [ 21 ]. The holistic vision of development considered in the SDGs has impacted very diverse fields of knowledge, such as land degradation processes [ 25 , 26 ], health [ 39 ], energy [ 40 ] and tourism [ 41 ], as well as a priori further disciplines such as earth observation [ 42 ] and neurosurgery [ 43 ]. However, more importantly, the inevitable interdependencies, conflicts and linkages between the different SDGs have also emerged in the analyses, highlighting ideas such as the need for systemic thinking that considers the spatial and temporal connectivity of the SDGs, which calls for multidisciplinary knowledge. According to Le Blanc [ 12 ], the identification of the systemic links between the objectives can be a valuable undertaking for the scientific community in the coming years and sustainable development.

Following this line, several scientific studies have tried to model the relationships between the SDGs in an attempt to clarify the synergies between the objectives, demonstrating their holistic nature [ 12 , 17 , 20 , 44 , 45 ]. This knowledge of interdependencies can bring out difficulties and risks, or conversely the drivers, in the implementation of the SDGs, which will facilitate their achievement [ 22 ]. In addition, it will allow proposing more transformative strategies to implement the SDG agenda, since it favours an overall vision that is opposed to the false illusion that global problems can be approached in isolation [ 19 ].

The lack of prioritisation of the SDGs has been one of the issues raised regarding their weakness, which should also be addressed by academics. For example, Gupta and Vegelin [ 15 ] analyse the dangers of inclusive development prioritising economic issues, relegating social or ecological inclusivity to the background, or the relational aspects of inclusivity that guarantee the existence of laws, policies and global rules that favour equal opportunities. Holden et al. [ 46 ] suggest that this prioritisation should be established according to three moral criteria: the satisfaction of human needs, social equity and respect for environmental limits. These principles must be based on ethical values that, according to Burford et al. [ 47 ], constitute the missing pillar of sustainability. In this way, the ethical imperatives of the SDGs and the values implicit in the discourses on sustainable development open up new possibilities for transdisciplinary research in the social sciences [ 46 , 47 ].

Research on SDG indicators has also been relevant in the academic world, as they offer an opportunity to replace conventional progress metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) with other metrics more consistent with the current paradigm of development and social welfare that takes into account such aspects as gender equality, urban resilience and governance [ 20 , 48 ].

The study of the role of certain development agents, including companies, universities or supranational organisations, also opens up new areas of investigation for researchers. Some studies have shown the enthusiastic acceptance of the SDGs by companies [ 22 , 49 ]. For Bebbington and Unerman [ 50 ], the study of the role of organisations in achieving the SDGs should be centred around three issues: challenging definitions of entity boundaries to understand their full impacts, introducing new conceptual frameworks for analysis of the context within which organisations operate and re-examining the conceptual basis of justice, responsibility and accountability. On the other hand, the academic community has recognized that knowledge and education are two basic pillars for the transition towards sustainable development, so it may also be relevant to study the responsibility of higher education in achieving the SDGs [ 47 , 50 ]. Institutional sustainability and governance processes are issues that should be addressed in greater depth through research [ 47 ].

Finally, some authors have highlighted the role of information technologies (ICT) in achieving the SDGs [ 23 ] and their role in addressing inequality or vulnerability to processes such as financial exclusion [ 51 ], which opens up new avenues for research.

Despite this huge impact of the SDGs on academic research, to the best of our knowledge, an overall analysis of such an impact to understand its profoundness and capillarity is missing in the literature. To date, reviews have focused on the implementation of specific SDGs [ 52 – 61 ], on specific topics and collectives [ 62 – 70 ], on traditional fields of knowledge, now reconsidered in light of the SDGs [ 71 – 73 ] and on contributions from specific regions or countries [ 74 , 75 ]. By relying on scientometric techniques and data mining analyses, this paper collects and analyses the more than 5,000 papers published on the SDGs to pursue this challenging goal and fill this knowledge gap.

This article aims to provide a critical review of the scientific research on SDGs, a concept that has emerged based on multiple streams of thinking and has begun to be consolidated as of 2015. As such, global references on this topic are identified and highlighted to manage pre-existing knowledge to understand relationships among researchers and with SDG dimensions to enhance the presently dispersed understanding of this subject and its areas of further development. A scientometric meta-analysis of publications on SDGs is conducted to achieve this objective. Mainstream journals from the Web of Science (WoS) are used to identify current topics, the most involved journals, the most prolific authors, and the thematic areas around which the current academic SDG debate revolves.

Once Section 1 has revised on the related literature to accomplish the main objective, Section 2 presents the research methodology. Section 3 presents the main results obtained, and Section 4 critically discusses these results. The conclusion and the main limitations of the study are presented in Section 5.

2. Materials and methods

In methodological terms, this research applies scientometrics as a meta-analytical means to study the evolution of documented scientific knowledge on the Sustainable Development Goals [ 76 – 81 ], taking as a secondary source of information academic contributions (i.e. articles, reviews, editorials, etc.) indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). To ensure that only peer-reviewed contributions authored by individual researchers are retrieved and that such publications have a worldwide prestige assessment, all of them should be published on journals indexed in the Journal Citation Report (JCR), either as part of the Sciences Citation Index Expanded or the Social Sciences Citation Index [ 82 – 84 ].

Following the recommendations of previous studies [ 85 ], it was decided to apply the next search vector from 2015 to 2020 to achieve the research objectives TS = (Sustainable NEAR/0 Development NEAR/0 Goals), which allows the extraction of data with 67 fields for each article registered in WoS.

As the first step, to give meaning to subsequent analyses, we tested the presence of exponential growth in the production of documented knowledge that allows a continuous renewal of knowledge [ 76 , 86 ].

As a second action, given the recent nature of the subject studied, it is of interest to map the playing field [ 87 ] using VOSviewer software version 1.6.16 [ 88 ], to know which topics are most addressed in the matter of SDGs. This analysis seeks an approach, both through the concentration of Keyword Plus® [ 89 ] and by analysing the references used as input in the production of knowledge, which can be treated as cocitations, coupling-citations and cross-citations [ 90 ], using the h-index, in citation terms, as discriminant criteria in the selection of articles [ 91 – 93 ]. This methodology will allow us to establish production, impact and relationship metrics [ 80 , 85 , 87 , 94 , 95 ].

Finally, it is of interest to explore the possible concentrations that may arise. Using Lotka’s Law, we estimated the possible prolific authors and their areas of work in SDGs, and using Bradford’s Law, we conducted a search of a possible adjustment to a geometric series of the concentration zones of journals and therefore a potential nucleus where a profuse discussion on SDGs is taking place [ 96 – 100 ].

3.1. Configuration of the academic production on SDGs

The results present a total of 5,281 articles for a period of six years (2015–2020) in 1,135 journals, with over 60% of these documents published in the last two years. The total of articles is distributed among authors affiliated with 7,418 organisations from 181 countries/regions, giving thematic coverage to 183 categories of the Journal Citation Report-Web of Science (JCR-WoS). Table 1 shows the distribution among the top ten JCR-WoS categories, highlighting the prevalence of journals indexed in green and environmental sciences and, thus, in the Science Index-Expanded.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t001

3.2. Existence of research critical mass

Fig 1 shows the regression model for the period 2015–2020, the last year with complete records consolidated in the Web of Science. The results obtained show significant growth in the number of studies on SDGs, with an R 2 adjustment greater than 96%. The exponential nature of the model shows that a ‘critical mass’ is consolidating around the research on this topic, as proposed by the Law of Exponential Growth of Science over Time [ 76 ], which in some way gives meaning to this research and to obtaining derived results.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.g001

3.3. Establishment of concentrations

In accordance with Lotka’s Law, 22,336 authors were identified of the 5,281 articles under study. From this author set, 136 (≈sqrt (22,336)) are considered prolific authors with a contribution to nine or more works. However, a second restriction, even more demanding, is to identify those prolific authors who are also prolific in contemporary terms. Although SDG studies are recent, the growth production rates are extremely high. As previously shown, for the period 2015–2020, 64% of the publications are concentrated between 2019–2020. Based on this second restriction, for 3,400 articles of the 5,281 articles published in 2019 and 2020, and a total of 15,120 authors, only eight prolific authors manage to sustain a publication number that equals or exceeds nine articles. These authors are listed and characterized in Table 2 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t002

The analysis shown in Table 2 highlights the University of Washington’s participation in health issues with Murray and Hay (coauthors of eight articles in the period 2019–2020), who are also important in the area of health for the prolific authors Yaya and Bhutta. The environmental SDGs mark a strong presence with Abhilash, Leal-Filho and Kalin. The affiliation of Abhilsash (Banaras Hindu University) is novel, as it is not part of the classic world core in knowledge production that is largely concentrated in the United States and Europe. It is worth noting that other prolific authors belong to nonmainstream knowledge production world areas, such as Russia or Pakistan. Professor Alola also deserves mention; not only is he the only contemporary prolific author producing in the area of economics, but he is also producing knowledge in Turkey.

In the same way, at the journal level, the potential establishment of concentration areas and determination of a deep discussion nucleus are analysed using Bradford’s law.

With a percentage error of 0.6%, between the total journal number and the total journal number estimated by the Bradford series, the database shows a core of 18 journals (2%) where one in three articles published are concentrated (see Table 3 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t003

Regarding the number of contributions by journal, Sustainability has the largest number of studies on SDGs, in which 689 (13%) of the 5,281 articles studied are concentrated. The Journal of Cleaner Production, indexed to WoS categories related to Environmental SDGs, is the second most prominent journal, with 2.7% participation of the articles (147). Both journals are followed by the multidisciplinary journal Plos One, with 2.2% of the total dataset. In terms of impact factor, the 60 points of the health journal The Lancet are superlative in the whole, which in the other cases ranges between 2.000 and 7.246. As shown in Table 4 , we have developed a “Prominence ranking” by weighting article production by impact factor. This metric shows The Lancet, with only 40 articles on SDGs, as the most relevant journal, followed by Sustainability, which becomes relevant due to the high number of publications (689) despite an impact factor of 2.576. These journals are followed by the Journal of Cleaner Production with 147 articles and an impact factor of 7.246.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t004

3.4. Thematic coverage

Concerning the thematic coverage, Fig 2A and 2B show a diversity of 7,003 Keyword Plus® (KWP), consistently connected to a total of 7,141 KWP assigned by Clarivate as metadata to the set of 5,281 articles studied, which presents a strong concentration in a small number of terms (red colour in the heat map generated with VOSviewer version 1.6.16).

a) Keywords Plus® heatmap and b) heat map zoom to highlight the highest concentration words, data source WoS, 2020.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.g002

Based on this result, a concentration sphere with 85 KWP (= sqrt (7,141)) is established according to Zipf’s Law, which is presented in 50 or more articles out of the total of 5,281. Moreover, a central concentration sphere of 9 KWPs (= sqrt (85)) can be found, with keywords present in a range of 178 to 346 articles out of a total of 5,281. These nine pivotal keywords are all connected in terms of co-occurrence (associated by Clarivate two or more to the same article) and within papers with an average number of citations in WoS that vary from 9.27 to 16.69, as shown in Table 5 . The nine most prominent key words in relation to the study of the SDGs are health, climate change, management, impact, challenges, governance, systems, policy and framework. These terms already suggest some of the themes around which the debate and research in this area revolves.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t005

The prominence of these keywords is obtained by combining the level of occurrence and average citations (see Table 5 ): on the one hand, the occurrence or number of articles with which the KWP is associated (e.g., Management, 346) and, on the other hand, the average citations presented by the articles associated with these words (e.g., Framework. 9.27). The final score (prominence) mixes both concepts, given the product of the occurrences and the average citations of each KWP in proportion to the mean values (e.g., (330 * 16.69)/(246 * 11.96) = 1.9).

3.5. Relations within the academic contributions

The coupling-citation analysis using VOSviewer identifies the 5,281 articles under study, of which only those found in the h-index as a whole have been considered (the h-index in the database is 81, as there are 81 articles cited 81 or more times). The bibliographic coupling analysis found consistent connections in only 73 of these articles, gathered in seven clusters. Such clusters and unconnected articles are represented in Fig 3 .

Data source WoS. 2020.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.g003

In simple terms, discrimination belonging to one cluster or another depends on the total link number that an article has with the other 80 articles based on the use of the common references. Table 6 specifies the articles belonging to the same publication cluster in relation to Fig 3 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t006

Bibliographic coupling analysis can also be used to link the seven clusters that use common references with the field document title (TI), publication name (SO), Keyword Plus-KWP (ID), and research areas (SC). This allows the identification of the main topics of each cluster. As shown in Table 7 , cluster 1 (red) concerns environmental and public affairs; cluster 2 (green), health; cluster 3 (blue), economics; cluster 4 (yellow), health–the burden of disease; cluster 5 (violet), economics–Kuznets curve; cluster 6 (light blue), energy; and cluster 7 (orange), soil—land.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t007

3.6. Outstanding contributions in the field

The cocitation analysis identified a total of 232,081 references cited by the 5,281 articles under study. It suggests taking as references to review those that present 44 or more occurrences in the database (232,081/5,281). This method results in 34 articles that have been used as main inputs for the scientific production under analysis, cited between 44 and 504 times. A result worth highlighting is that one in three of these documents corresponds to reports from international organisations, such as the United Nations (UN), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), World Bank Group (WB) or World Health Organization (WHO). However, it is also possible to identify 21 peer-reviewed scientific contributions. These papers are identified in detail in Table 8 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.t008

The cocitation analysis yields the degree of relationship of these 21 most cited research articles. It is how such references have been used simultaneously in the same article. Fig 4 displays this information (to help readers, it has also been included in Table 8 , centrality in 21 column).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.g004

According to the relationship level in the most cited article’s selection, the graph ( Fig 3 ) has been clustered in three colours: cluster 1 in red colour groups the highest articles proportion (9) published between 2013 and 2017 in 7 journals. These journals present an impact factor (IF) quite heterogeneous, with values ranging from 2.576 (Sustainability) to 60.39 (Lancet) and indexed in one or more of the following WoS categories: Environmental Sciences (4 journals), Green & Sustainable Science & Technology (4), Environmental Studies (2), Development Studies (1), Medicine, General & Internal (1), Multidisciplinary Sciences (1) and Regional & Urban Planning (1). Three of these articles are cited 130–150 times in the 5,281-article dataset and, at the same time, show a connection centrality of 95–100% with the other 20 articles in the graph, implying a high level of cocitation. The other two clusters group six articles each. The articles of cluster 2 (green colour) are included in a widespread WoS category set: Environmental Sciences (3 journals), Geosciences, Multidisciplinary (2), Ecology (1), Economics (1), Energy & Fuels (1), Environmental Studies (1), Green & Sustainable Science & Technology (1), Materials Science, Multidisciplinary (1), Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences (1) and Multidisciplinary Sciences (1). The research of Nilsson [ 101 ] was used as a reference in 176 of the 5,281 articles under study, showing a centrality of 100%. This great connection level is also featured in another less cited article [ 17 ] published in Earth’s Future. Finally, cluster 3 (blue) highlights six articles concentrated in three highly cited journals in the WoS categories: Medicine, General & Internal (Lancet) and Multidisciplinary Sciences (Nature and Science), whose IFs range from 41.9 to 60.4. In general, they are articles less connected (cocited) to the set of 21, with centralities of 30–90%. Two of these articles were referenced 140 times or more, although one was published in 2009. Thus, cluster 3 concentrates the references mainly in journals on environmental issues with scientific-technological orientation, as well as classic and high-impact WoS journals (The Lancet, Nature and Science). It is worth noting that some of these top journals may not be listed in Table 4 as they are not included in the Bradford’s nucleus, due to their comparatively low number of contributions published.

Finally, continuing with the thematic study, a cross-citation analysis was developed. Considering only the 81 articles that are part of the h-index of the total set of 5,821 articles under study, the citations that are presented among this elite article set are explored using VosViewer. The cross-citation analysis detects existing relationships between 37 of these 81 articles. Once the directionality of the citations has been analysed, a directed temporal graph is generated using Pajek 64 version 5.09, which is presented in Fig 5 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.g005

Fig 5 shows how these 37 highly cited articles are related to each other (the number after the name is the publication year), considering that some of these articles are cited as references in other articles in this set. The relationships between the articles in Fig 5 are complex and should be understood under a temporal sequence logic in the citation between two articles. However, some trends can be highlighted.

On the one hand, some contributions stand out for their centrality. Lim et al. [ 102 ] is connected with eight of the 37 articles (21.6%) on citing relationships, as is Fullman et al. [ 27 ], which relates to seven of the 37 articles (18.9%). Both authors researched health issues and are also coauthors of nine articles of the dataset under study. On the other hand, according to the SDG segmentation proposed, Hajer et al. [ 19 ] and Le Blanc [ 12 ] are recognized as seminal articles in social SDGs, since they contribute to the production of other subsequent articles in the set of 37. On the other hand, in health matters, seminal articles are Norheim et al. [ 103 ] and You et al. [ 104 ], two articles published in The Lancet whose citations also contribute to the production of the set introduced as Fig 5 .

4. Discussion

The main purpose of this paper was to develop a critical and comprehensive scientometric analysis of the global academic literature on the SDGs from 2015 to 2020, conducted using the WoS database. The attained results have made it possible to comprehend and communicate to the scientific community the current state of the debate on the SDGs, thus offering insights for future lines of research.

To achieve the objectives, the present study analysed a broad spectrum of 5,281 articles published in 1,135 WoS journals. A first aspect that is striking is the great diversity of topics addressed in these studies, which reflects the multidimensionality of the SDGs. Despite this, more than half of the articles are concentrated in two JCR-WoS categories (Environmental Sciences and Green Sustainable Science Technology), a percentage that exceeds 80% if the categories Environmental Studies and Public Environmental Occupational Health are added. Thus, on the one hand, the size of the body of literature and the broad spectrum of topics more than covers the four perspectives of analysis that are relevant in research on the SDGs, according to Hajer et al. [ 19 ]: planetary boundaries, the safe and just operating space, the energetic society and, last, green competition. However, on the other hand, results also highlight a strong focus on the environmental aspects of the SDGs, which undoubtedly concentrate the most contributions.

The Sustainable Development Goals constitute an area of research that has experienced exponential scientific growth, a tendency already suggested by previous studies [ 81 , 105 ], thus complying with the fundamental principles of Price’s law [ 76 ], which suggests the need for this exponential growth to manifest a continuous renewal of knowledge on the subject under study. The results of this study highlight a significant increase in the number of articles published in the last two years, given that six out of ten articles were published in 2019 or 2020. This tendency confirms how the SDGs continue to arouse great interest in the scientific community and that the debate on the interpretation of sustainable development is still open and very present in academia.

The variety of knowledge areas from which science can approach the SDGs demonstrates the different avenues that exist to address different research questions and their multidimensional nature, as anticipated by Pradhan et al. [ 17 ], a dispersion not far from the traditional fields of knowledge or the conventional dimensions of sustainability. Investigating the reasons for this dispersion in academic research on the SDGs may be a topic of great interest, as anticipated by Burford et al. [ 47 ] and Le Blanc [ 12 ], since understanding the phenomenon of development can only be achieved if the main challenges, both current and future, can be viewed holistically and comprehensively. Along these lines, Imaz and Eizagirre [ 106 ] state that the complexity of the study of the SDGs is undoubtedly marked by their aspiration for universality, by their broad scope encompassing the three basic pillars of sustainable development (economic development, environmental sustainability and social inclusion) and by their desire for integration, motivated by the complexity of the challenges and by the countless interlinkages and interdependencies.

This natural multidimensionality of the SDGs calls for strong cooperation and collaboration between researchers, universities, and countries. In this sense, the scientometric analysis provides good news, as more than a hundred prolific authors (defined as those authors who have published nine or more articles on this topic) have been identified, although these are reduced to eight in contemporary terms (2019 or 2020). This select group of eight authors who lead research and publishing on the SDGs (sometimes with dual or triple affiliations) produce knowledge for universities and research centres both in the global north and the global south: Canada, the U.S., the UK, Germany, Pakistan, Turkey, India, Benin, Russia and Cyprus. The protagonist role played by research institutes in countries in the north has already been acknowledged by previous studies [ 81 , 105 ]. However, the emergence of top scholars producing academic knowledge from developing countries is a more recent tendency, which underscores the pertinence of this analysis.

A closer look at the academic and research curricula of these authors leads to the conclusion that the study of the SDGs does not constitute a final field of research at present. These researchers come from very heterogeneous disciplines, so their approach to the SDGs is also multidisciplinary. To illustrate it with an example, the most cited article by Professor Abhilash of Banaras Hindu University (the most published contemporary prolific author along with Christopher Murray of the University of Washington), with 363 WoS citations in February 2021 alone, is on the use and application of pesticides in India.

In more concrete terms, following Wu et al.’s [ 23 ] classification as a frame of reference, the eight most prolific contemporary authors approach the SDG research problem from two main domains, one of an environmental nature (Abhilash, Leal-Filho, Alola and Kalin) and the other related to health (Murray, Yaya, Bhutta, and Hay). The most common journals where these authors publish on environmental issues are the Journal of Cleaner Production, Higher Education, Water and Science of the Total Environment. Health researchers, on the other hand, tend to publish mainly in the journals of the BMC group, The Lancet and Nature.

This wide diversity of academic fora can be clarified with the application of Bradford’s laws, which identified a core of 18 journals that bring together the debates and academic discussions about the SDGs. It is worth noting that the 18 journals that form the core are distributed in 16 different thematic areas or WoS categories: Development Studies; Ecology; Economics; Education & Educational Research; Engineering, Environmental; Environmental Sciences; Environmental Studies; Green & Sustainable Science & Technology; Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism; International Relations; Medicine, General & Internal; Multidisciplinary Sciences; Public, Environmental & Occupational Health; Regional & Urban Planning; and Water Resources. On the one hand, this wide dispersion in terms of areas of knowledge suggests that research on the SDGs can be studied from different approaches and disciplines, which opens up a wide range of possibilities for researchers from different branches of scientific knowledge, as well as an opportunity for multidisciplinary collaborations. On the other hand, this heterogeneity might also hinder the communication and dissemination of learning from one field to another. The cross-citation analysis provided in Fig 5 suggests this possibility, as seminal works are related to thematic disciplines more than to the seminal contributions identified in Table 8 .

In this sense, it is interesting to analyse the top-cited articles in the database, as they provide a clear picture of the field of knowledge. One-third of these contributions are provided by international institutions, such as the United Nations Development Program or the World Bank, which provide analyses of a normative nature. This prevalence reflects some weaknesses in the academic basis of the analysis of the SDGs as a whole from a scientific approach, an idea reinforced when the most cited papers are analysed. In fact, only six papers have reached more than 100 citations by contributions included in the database [ 4 , 12 , 24 , 29 , 101 , 107 ]. Not only were these papers largely published before the approval of the SDGs themselves, but half of them are editorial material, inviting contributions but are not evidence-based research papers. Highlighting the nature of the most cited contributions does not diminish their value but does speak to the normative approach that underlies the analysis of the SDGs when addressed not individually but as an overall field of research.

Regarding topics and themes of interest, the scientometric analysis carried out in this research identified a strong concentration around a small number of terms, as represented in a heat map ( Fig 2A and 2B ). All these topics constitute a potential source of inspiration for future research on the subject.

Through an analysis of the main keywords, it can be seen that the studies focused on the traditional areas of health and climate change. However, these keywords also provide new elements for discussion, as they uncover some other areas of study that have been highlighted by the literature. First, the appearance of the term Management as one of the main keywords reveals the importance that researchers give to the role of business in achieving the SDGs, as already suggested by Scheyvens et al. [ 49 ] and Spangenber [ 22 ]. Second, the need to address new governance processes and to seek global solutions, as suggested by authors such as Sachs [ 4 ], underscore the keywords Governance, Policy and Framework, all aspects deemed crucial for the achievement of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda [ 108 ]. Finally, other keywords such as Impact, Challenges or Systems are a clear example of the complexity and interdependencies that exist in research on the SDGs, considered an essential aspect by Griggs et al. [ 13 ] or Le Blanc [ 12 ]. The attained results highlight some of the connections between different domains of sustainable development by identifying categories and themes that are highly related in the groupings that emerge from the bibliographic coupling analysis.

In general terms, the holistic vision of development embodied by the SDGs has drawn the attention of very different disciplines, fields and areas of scientific knowledge. However, seven major areas of research have emerged: environmental and public affairs, health, economics, health-burden of disease, economics-Kuznets curve, energy and soil-land. These areas are not far removed from the current paradigm of sustainable development, where poverty or inequality are problems that are not exclusive to developing countries [ 5 , 6 ]. Thus, emerging issues that mainly affect first world countries, including urban planning, the impact of activities such as hospitality, sport or tourism, or education for development, are starting to stand out with increasing intensity, which continues to open new avenues for future research.

In short, the results of the scientometric analysis have provided a systematized overview of the research conducted in relation to the SDGs since the approval of the 2030 Agenda. Among other things, the critical analysis has identified the main trends with respect to the number of publications, the most relevant journals, the most prolific authors, institutions and countries, and the collaborative networks between authors and the research areas at the epicentre of the debate on the SDGs. As Olawumi and Chan [ 105 ] already acknowledged, the power research networks applied to the study of the SDGs offer valuable insights and in-depth understandings not only of key scholars and institutions but also about the state of research fields, emerging trends and salient topics.

Consequently, the results of this work contribute to the systematic analysis of scientific research on the SDGs, which can be of great interest for decision-making at the governmental level (e.g., which research to fund and which not to fund), at the corporate level and at the level of research centres, both public and private. Furthermore, the scientometric analysis carried out may provide clues for academics regarding future lines of research and topics of interest where the debate on the SDGs is currently situated.

5. Conclusions, limitations and future research lines

As could not be otherwise, all research in the field of social sciences has a series of limitations that must be clearly and transparently explained. The two most relevant in this study are the following.

First, although the study of the SDGs is a recent object of research, the rate of publication is growing exponentially, such that scientific knowledge is renewed practically in its entirety every two years. The only articles that escape this scientometric obsolescence are those with a high number of citations (h-index). This circumstance generates a temporal limitation in terms of the conclusions obtained in the present investigation, conclusions that should be revised periodically until the growth of publications stabilizes by adopting a logistic form, as recommended by Sun and Lin [ 109 ].

Second, the articles used as the basis for this research were restricted to those published in the JCR-WoS. This decision was made for two main reasons. On the one hand, the limitation was to eliminate potential distortions that could occur as a result of the constant growth of journals that are incorporated annually into other databases, such as ESCI-WoS (Emerging Sources Citation Index). On the other hand, it is impossible to compare impact indices if integrating other databases such as Scopus.

We are aware of these limitations, which for developing a more selective analysis imply assuming the cost of less coverage in exchange.

Regarding future lines of research, the analysis highlights how the study of the SDGs is failing to balance their economic, social and sustainability components, as it still maintains an overall focus on environmental studies.

This suggests the urgency of increasing studies on social SDGs, key topics on the 2030 Agenda including equity (SDGs 4, 5 and 10), social development (SDGs 11 and 16) and governance (SDG 17). These topics are part of the public discourse and currently a source of social pressure in many latitudes, but they are still research areas that are necessary to deepen.

Economic sustainability studies are more present, but highly concentrated, in health economics, as previously acknowledged by Meschede [ 81 ]. Academic research on the SDGs against poverty (SDG 1) and hunger (SDG 2) has not achieved such a prominent place as health. Even less so, the economics of technological development (SDGs 8 and 9), which are recognized as crucial for economic development.

Finally, the environmental SDGs do not achieve a balance among themselves either. Academic research has prioritized action for climate (SDG 13) and industrial and human consumption, mainly water (SDG 6) and energy (SDG 7). New research should be developed in the area of land (SDG 15), life under the sea (SDG 14) and sustainable production (SDG 12).

Supporting information

S1 dataset..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265409.s001

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 9. Nations United. Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York, NY, USA: United Nations; 2015.

• Open supplemental data
• Reference Manager
• Simple TEXT file

People also looked at

Original research article, unveiling the research landscape of sustainable development goals and their inclusion in higher education institutions and research centers: major trends in 2000–2017.

• 1 Department of Industrial Management, Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
• 2 Department of Biology, Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies (CESAM), Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
• 3 Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Leiria, Portugal
• 4 Life Quality Research Centre, Polytechnic Institute of Santarém, Santarém, Portugal
• 5 Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
• 6 Department of Science and Innovation-National Research Foundation of South Africa Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and STI Policy (SciSTP), Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have become the international framework for sustainability policy. Its legacy is linked with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), established in 2000. In this paper a scientometric analysis was conducted to: (1) Present a new methodological approach to identify the research output related to both SDGs and MDGs (M&SDGs) from 2000 to 2017, with the aim of mapping the global research related to M&SDGs; (2) Describe the thematic specialization based on keyword co-occurrence analysis and citation bursts; and (3) Classify the scientific output into individual SDGs (based on an ad-hoc glossary) and assess SDGs interconnections. Publications conceptually related to M&SDGs (defined by the set of M&SDG core publications and a scientometric expansion based on direct citations) were identified in the in-house CWTS Web of Science database. A total of 25,299 publications were analyzed, of which 21,653 (85.59%) were authored by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) or academic research centers (RCs). The findings reveal the increasing participation of these organizations in this research (660 institutions in 2000–2005 to 1,744 institutions involved in 2012–2017). Some institutions present both a high production and specialization on M&SDG topics (e.g., London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and World Health Organization); and others with a very high specialization although lower production levels (e.g., Stockholm Environment Institute). Regarding the specific topics of research, health (especially in developing countries), women , and socio-economic issues are the most salient. Moreover, it has been observed an important interlinkage in the research outputs of some SDGs (e.g., SDG11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities” and SDG3 “Good Health and Well-Being”). This study provides first evidence of such interconnections, and the results of this study could be useful for policymakers in order to promote a more evidenced-based setting for their research agendas on SDGs.

Introduction

Increasing awareness-building in sustainable development goals.

Sustainability goals have emerged as a global strategy to solve critical world problems, as a result of the global environmental concerns that started in the 1970s. The origin of the notion of sustainable development can be traced back to its most-recognized milestone in 1987; the definition of Sustainable Development in the Brundtland Report 1 . Afterwards, different summits and conferences were held in which sustainability and sustainable development were the core discussions (e.g., Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992). During these early years, sustainable development was a guiding principle to bridge the North-South division ( Siegel and Bastos Lima, 2020 ). However, what was meant by development was replete with competing ideas about its essential aims, together with various theories about its achievement ( Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019 ). In this context, development goals became an unprecedented effort to bridge those divides and find common ground “with a set of ideas as the consensus global norm concerning both the ends and the means of development” ( Fukuda-Parr, 2019 ). These development goals (MDGs and SDGs) are designed with the same principles: (1) Statement of a social political priority ( goal ); (2) Time-bound quantitative aspect to be achieved ( target ); and (3) Measurement tools to monitor progress ( indicator ) ( Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019 ). The goals represent international agreements that create narratives and frame debates about the conceptualization of development challenges ( Fukuda-Parr, 2019 ). It can be argued that the influence of these goals on policy, governments, and other societal stakeholders is mainly driven by their compelling discourse.

The First Development Goals: Millennium Development Goals

In 2000 eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were created at the Millennium Summit, with the ambition of their being achieved by 2015. These MDGs tackled topics such as extreme poverty and hunger, child mortality, and maternal health 2 . They represented an unprecedented effort to tackle the needs of the world's poorest countries. However, MDGs were criticized for: (1) Not being adequately aligned “with human rights standards and principles;” (2) Being formulated in a top-down process, only driven by international organizations and developing country governments; (3) Lacking accountability mechanisms; and (4) Omission of important priorities, i.e., inequality ( International Human Rights Instruments, 2008 ; Fukuda-Parr, 2016 , 2019 ). Another criticism of the MDGs was that they had unsuccessful effects in some important regions, such as Africa ( Easterly, 2009 ). Despite these criticisms, although indeed not all goals were achieved by 2015, some progress was acknowledged ( United Nations, 2015a ). For instance, “the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half since 1990 and the literacy rate among youth aged 15–24 has increased globally, from 83% in 1990 to 91% in 2015” ( Ki-Moon, 2015 ).

The Present: The Sustainable Development Goals

In 2012, the Conference Rio+20 adopted a 15-year plan called Agenda 2030 (2015–2030), targeting sustainable economic growth, social development, and environmental protection ( United Nations, 2015b ). As a result, Agenda 2030 established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a deadline in 2030. This agenda was settled as a normative shift ( Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019 ) and has even been institutionalized as a policy paradigm ( Siegel and Bastos Lima, 2020 ). The agenda has 169 targets and various indicators for monitoring their achievement. The topics of these goals cover five critical areas (the so-called 5 P's); People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership ( United Nations, 2015b ). While MDGs encompassed the notion of development as the North-South project to meet basic needs to end poverty, SDGs reconceptualised development as the “universal aspiration for human progress that is inclusive and sustainable” ( Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019 ). Different from the MDGs, the SDGs pay an increased attention to the interlinkages among different sustainability dimensions and give great attention to inclusiveness ; clearly captured in their motto “No one left behind” ( Siegel and Bastos Lima, 2020 ). In practical terms, SDGs expand with respect to MDGs in: (1) Scope (e.g., there are new goals); (2) Reach (involving developed and developing countries); and (3) Engagement of a larger set of societal actors (e.g., citizen councils) in both their creation and implementation ( Fisher and Fukuda-Parr, 2019 ). However, no specific mechanisms to ensure their applicability across different countries have been settled. One of the main concerns is that SDGs rely on individual countries and the goodwill of their governments on how to pursue and implement each of the goals. In this regard, Siegel and Bastos Lima (2020) pointed out that actual SDG-driven transformations depend on the political context of each country, particularly on how these goals are interpreted and prioritized at the national level. These authors even remarked that despite the very concrete formulation of SDGs, their conceptualization (and we could add, their operationalization ) still leaves room for interpretation. Thus, the pursuing of some specific goals over others by some countries is known as “cherry-picking,” although quite often interpreted as conformity with the whole agenda ( Forestier and Kim, 2020 ). However, the aim of Agenda 2030 and its accomplishment is fundamentally based on the integrative and indivisible nature of the goals ( United Nations, 2015b ), therefore “cherry-picking” should not be an acceptable approach, bringing attention to the relevance of monitoring the engagement and consecution of all SDGs by all countries.

The Role of Monitoring the Achievement of SDGs

In contrast to MDGs, monitoring became a key issue for SDGs. Since the launch of SDGs, an SDG Index 3 has been developed, aiming to evaluate the achievement of each goal across all countries. The SDG index allows identifying priorities for action, support discussions, and debates to identify gaps in the development of the goals. A preliminary set of 330 indicators was introduced in March 2015 ( Hák et al., 2016 ), but only 232 indicators were adopted. This is different from MDGs, in which indicators were only decided on an internal basis 4 . The development of indicators to monitor the achievement of SDGs was based on two parallel processes: (1) Multi-stakeholder public consultation led by the UN General Assembly Open Working Group on SDGs (established in 2013); and (2) Intergovernmental negotiations. Moreover, the indicators developed “come from a mix of official and non-official data sources” (e.g., the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, among others), all subjected to an extensive and rigorous data validation process [ Sachs et al., 2018 , 2019 ]. However, it has been argued that the translation of goals into quantitative indicators can “distort” their meaning, since indicators can be reinterpreted or used to create perverse discourses or incentives ( Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019 ).

Interlinkages Among SDGs

Another distinctive aspect of SDGs in contrast to MDGs is the role of the relationships and interlinkages among the different goals. Several studies already analyzed the interlinkages and interdependencies between pairs of SDGs, both across or within SDGs, particularly regarding the effects that achieving one goal may have on the ability to achieve others. Pradhan et al. (2017) analyzed the synergies (i.e., progress in one goal favors progress in another) and trade-offs (progress in one goal hinders progress in another) within and across SDGs. They found that SDG1 “No poverty,” or SDG3 “Good health and Well-being” have synergetic relationships with many goals, while SDG12 “Responsible consumption and production” is associated with trade-offs as it has negative correlations with 10 other goals based on the data pair analysis. Later, Lusseau and Mancini (2019) analyzed how key synergies and trade-offs between SDG goals and targets, based on the World Bank categories data, vary with respect to a country's gross national income (GNI) per capita. They highlighted that SDG10 “Reduce Inequalities,” SDG12 “Responsible Consumption and Production,” and SDG13 “Climate Action” are the most central ones, interacting negatively (according to the negative strength value calculated in their study) with many other SDGs (for example in high-income countries SDG12 and SDG13 are antagonistic, based on the Laplacian graph and the eigenvalue centrality value). These kinds of conflicting relationships between SDGs suggest a need for differentiated policy priorities between countries as they progress toward the 2030 Agenda. Kroll et al. (2019) also analyzed trade-offs and synergies between goals and future trends until 2030 based on the SDG index data. They found positive developments with notable synergies in some goals (i.e., SDGs 1, 3, 7, 8, 9), despite others presenting trade-offs (i.e., SDGs 11, 13). There are also other studies that analyzed these interlinkages from a qualitative perspective ( Singh et al., 2018 ; Fuso Nerini et al., 2019 ; Vinuesa et al., 2020 ). Particularly relevant for this study is that to date, there are no global studies on the interrelations among SDGs related to the research output of Higher Education Institutions to the best of our knowledge, a gap that this study intends to fill.

Development Goals and Their Relationship With Higher Education Institutions and Research Centers

As discussed above, MDGs and SDGs appeared as a result of the interest and commitment of governments of countries from all over the world toward sustainable development. As Caiado et al. (2018) stated, “The SDG agenda calls for a global partnership—at all levels—between all countries and stakeholders who need to work together to achieve the goals and targets, including a broad spectrum of actions such as multinational businesses, local governments, regional and international bodies, and civil societal organizations.” In this regard, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and Research Centers (RCs) should play an active and central role in promoting and participating in these new goals.

In the past, HEIs played a role in “transforming societies and serving the greater public good, so there is a societal need for universities to assume responsibility for contributing to sustainable development” ( Waas et al., 2010 ), and HEIs “should be leaders in the search for solutions and alternatives to current environmental problems and agents of change” ( Hesselbarth and Schaltegger, 2014 ). For Bizerril et al. (2018) , the knowledge of sustainability in HEIs should be encouraged worldwide and especially those located in regions with serious social and environmental challenges. In this sense, researchers must discuss how to cooperate and to share knowledge for a sustainable society, and HEIs could respond to sustainability through cooperation. According to Lozano et al. (2015) , HEIs (and in extension, RCs) could tackle sustainable development from the following initiatives: (1) Institutional frameworks (i.e., HEIs commitment with vision, missions, SD office…); (2) Campus operations related to the physical built environment (e.g., energy use and energy efficiency, waste, water and water management); (3) Education (e.g., courses on sustainable development); (4) Research (e.g., research centers, publications, research funding); (5) Outreach and collaboration (e.g., exchange programmes for students in the field of sustainable development); (6) Sustainable development through on-campus experiences; and (7) Assessment and reporting. Despite all these aspects, as Caeiro et al. (2013) study stated, only a few institutions follow a holistic implementation, in which sustainable development is applied in all traditional sustainability dimensions via its inclusion in social, economic, and environmental pillars.

The Role of Scientific Research in the Achievement of SDGs

Scientific research is one of the most relevant dimensions in the effective achievement of SDGs and Agenda 2030. According to Tatalović and Antony (2010) science did not factor strongly in the discussions on how to achieve MDGs goals. However, Leal Filho et al. (2017) see SDGs as an opportunity for scientific research to contribute to the achievement of the goals. For Leal Filho et al. (2018) , development goals are an opportunity to encourage sustainability research through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Several authors also support the important role of scientific research to achieve SDGs ( Wuelser and Pohl, 2016 ), namely as a way to solve concrete social problems, while sustainability science 5 could support the transition for sustainability. Yet, to our knowledge, no large-scale study has sought to investigate which SDGs are prioritized in the research by HEIs at a global level. The ambition of this study is precisely to fill this gap by providing a global mapping of research topics related to SDGs, identifying who the main contributing HEIs to this research are.

Scientometric Analyses of SDGs-Related Research Outputs From HEIs

Scientometrics is a research area focused on studying research activities (e.g., production, evolution, collaboration, impact, etc.) in order to understand the scientific dynamics across subject areas, institutions, or countries. Scientometric studies offer a powerful tool to generate global pictures of the research activities in a given area. There are different scientometric studies that previously analyzed sustainability, sustainable development or sustainability science based on a keyword search ( Nučič, 2012 ; Schoolman et al., 2012 ; Hassan et al., 2014 ; Kajikawa et al., 2014 ; Pulgarin et al., 2015 ; Ramírez Ríos et al., 2016 ; Olawumi and Chan, 2018 ). Some studies focused on analyzing the output of sustainability in higher education ( Bizerril et al., 2018 ; Veiga Ávila et al., 2018 ; Alejandro-Cruz et al., 2019 ; Hallinger and Chatpinyakoop, 2019 ). However, few studies have specifically analyzed scientific output on SDGs, probably due to the intrinsic difficulty in determining the contributions of science to SDGs ( Armitage et al., 2020 ).

Despite these difficulties, some studies have already tried to analyze the interrelations among SDGs ( Le Blanc, 2015 ; Griggs et al., 2017 ). Körfgen et al. (2018) analyzed the contribution of Austrian universities toward SDGs. Sweileh (2020) analyzed 18,696 publications from Scopus by searching the term “sustainable development goal.” Another study ( Nakamura et al., 2019 ), analyzed 2,800 publications (with an expansion to 10,300), developed topic maps from the publications identified. One of the authors of this paper had already carried out a preliminary scientometric study ( Bautista-Puig and Mauleón, 2019 ) by analyzing the core of scientific publications on MDGs and SDGs ( n = 4,532) in addition to the interrelations between different SDGs from a scientometric point of view. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has approached a large-scale study of MDGs and SDGs relations from a scientometric point of view, considering the role of Higher Education Institutions and Research Centers in the production of research around MDGs and SDGs.

The development of these types of studies is paramount in order to assess and understand their potential limitations and robustness ( Rafols, 2020 ), particularly given the increasing number that are starting to use keyword-based scientometric queries, and machine learning approaches ( Pukelis et al., 2020 ) in order to map the contribution of research to the understanding of SDGs (e.g., Elsevier, OSDG tool, STRINGS Project, Dimensions, Aurora Project), and even their impact (e.g., Times Higher Education SDG Impact indicators). Thus, it is important that different methods and approaches are considered and discussed, particularly highlighting their advantages and limitations. This study aims at contributing also to this debate, as well as to provide scientometric evidence on the main research patterns around SDGs, that can help foster the debate on the role of universities to the SDGs goal.

The main purpose of this article is to produce a quantitative study of the scientific research on development goals during the period 2000–2017. Our ambition is 2-fold, on the one hand to propose a scientometric method based on citation relations that can be used to identify research conceptually related to MDGs and SDGs (henceforth M&SDGs), and on the other hand to identify and analyze the main institutions involved in the development of M&SDGs-related scientific outputs, as well as to characterize the main underlying topics related to M&SDGs research. The scientometric analysis was guided by three main research questions:

- RQ1: How can M&SDGs research can be scientometrically delineated and collected? This question focuses on applying an advanced citation-based approach to determine what M&SDG-related research is.

- RQ2. How has M&SDGs research carried out by HEIs has developed over time? This question seeks to characterize how the production of research outputs on M&SDGs has evolved over time, with a special focus on its main producers (institutions and countries). The unit of analysis of this study is on HEIs and RCs (hereafter HEIs). For the more specific definition of these terms used in this study, the reader is referred to Supplementary Material .

- RQ3: What are the specific M&SDGs research topics that have been studied by HEIs? This question identifies and characterizes the main research topics studied in the scientific literature produced by HEIs, with a special focus on the interrelations among the 17 SDGs based on the ad-hoc glossary developed by Bautista (2019) .

The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section includes the methods section. This is followed by the results and discussions, providing answers to the research questions. Finally, the last section presents the main conclusions and suggestions for future research.

An important methodological difficulty with the definition of M&SDGs research is the discrepancy between what is research related to M&SDGs and what is research on M&SDGs . “ Research related to M&SDGs” comprises research that is related to concepts, issues or ideas related to the M&SDGs but without necessarily a direct linkage to the M&SDGs core (e.g., an institution doing research related to malaria prior to the official launch of the SDGs). “ Research on M&SDGs” comprises research directly focusing on the concepts, notions and principles of the M&SDGs (e.g., research directly mentioning “Sustainable Development Goal” or citing a paper that does it). In this work we partly incorporate both perspectives. Thus, we consider that a scientific publication is on the M&SDGs if it mentions either the concepts of MDG or SDGS (i.e., core research), or at a minimum cites, or is cited by, the core research. From a conceptual point of view it can be argued that our approach focuses on identifying research conceptually related to the “discourse of development goals,” and more specifically about how this topic has been constructed in the research by HEIs. With this citation-based approach we are providing a focused analysis on the scientific research that has a stronger cognitive 6 alignment with the M&SDGs philosophy and aims, thus avoiding the limitations of semantic approaches (e.g., based on keywords), in which different selections of keywords and terms are possible (and potentially questionable—see Rafols, 2020 ).

The following methodological steps were followed: (1) Formulation of a search strategy to identify the core M&SDGs literature; (2) Expansion of the dataset based on direct citations (cited and citing publications); (3) Data collection refining and information processing; and (4) Development of scientometric indicators.

(1) Formulation of a search strategy to identify the core M&SDGs literature

In the first step, we designed a search strategy composed by keywords that unambiguously relate to M&SDGs 7 . These keywords were searched in titles, abstracts, and keywords (author and paper keywords 8 ). The search strategy was run using the in-house CWTS WoS database (limited to publications from the years 2000–2017). A total of 4,685 publications were collected, and all publication types indexed in the Web of Science were considered. These are considered as the M&SDGs core set of publications.

(2) Expansion of the dataset based on direct citations (cited and citing publications)

Starting from the M&SDG core set of publications ( n = 4,685), the set of their direct citations (DC), considering both cited ( n = 59,180) and citing ( n = 74,859) publications were collected, 9 resulting in a final set of distinct publications referred to as M&SDGs Expansion ( n = 129,379).

(3) Data collection refining and affiliation information processing

In a following step, a total of 25,299 publications between 2000 and 2017 10 were selected, excluding 104,080 publications from years outside this period. These publications were further characterized, identifying those publications with at least one affiliation from HEIs ( Figure 1 ), thus conforming the final dataset of analysis, with 21,653 publications (85.59%). The harmonization of the affiliations was based in the in-house CWTS database ( Waltman et al., 2012 ).

Figure 1 . Methodological workflow for delineating M&SDGs on this study and creating the final dataset.

(4) Development of scientometric indicators & analytics

The following indicators were analyzed for the final dataset:

(i) Research patterns

- Yearly trend in scientific output in M&SDGs overall and by these institutions. A trend analysis of 6-year blocks is considered.

- Cumulative Average Growth Rate (CAGR) . The formula is the following:

Where X 1 and X n are the values found for the first and last periods studied. The expression is equivalent to the compound average growth rate (CAGR) often used in finance to measure mean growth across a time series.

- Output by institutions and countries : Absolute values and “ Activity Index ” (AI) of their M&SDGs research ( Supplementary Equation 1 ). The AI was proposed by Frame (1977) and it is used to analyze the degree of relative specialization of an actor (institution or country) in a research field. The indicator represents the percentage contribution of each country to the total WoS production, compared to the percentage of contribution in the analyzed topic. ArcGis software was used for creating the maps.

(ii) Subject specialization.

- Co-occurrence map 11 based on keywords using the VOSviewer tool 12 to identify thematic clusters within the scientific landscape. Regarding the clustering, VOSviewer applies its own algorithm based on modularity optimization ( Van Eck and Waltman, 2017 ). Table 1 summarizes the indicators analyzed.

Table 1 . List of indicators analyzed for the co-occurrence maps.

- Keywords “burst citation.” Burst is a concept associated with a change of a variable's value in a relatively short time. Those sudden increases in the usage frequency of keywords (i.e., burst strength) in order to determine the hotness of a topic were identified using Kleinberg's algorithm ( Kleinberg, 2003 ). This value is not normalized, but the ranking order and the duration of the burst are rather relevant for its interpretation.

- Scientific production classification into the SDGs . In order to study the semantic relations between the different SDGs (in terms of SDGs sharing similar keywords across publications), the individual publications were classified in accordance with the different SDGs. To classify the publications into individual SDGS, an ad-hoc ontology ( Bautista, 2019 ) with 4,122 terms has been applied. Publications were classified in different individual SDGs based on the linkage between the keywords in the publications and the ontology, allowing publications to be classified in more than one SDG when their keywords would point to different SDGs. A total of 20,749 (82.01%) publications were finally classified in at least one of the 17 SDGs. This includes keywords related to each SDG based on the United Nations-Description (e.g., “poverty” was classified into “SDG1-No poverty,” “sanitation” into “SDG6- clean water and sanitation”), 13 as well as a manual-supervision of the keywords located as the core and its consequent extension.

In this section the main results of the paper are presented in relationship to the main research questions formulated above.

Research Output and Main Actors

This section analyses the M&SDGs-related research output collected, as well as the main actors producing it and their specialization. Figure 2 presents the evolution of the scientific output of development goals produced. The scientific evolution shows a growing tendency, with an overall growth of 828.65% over the period and a CAGR of 14.01%. Since the launch of the SDGs in 2015, there has been a strong concentration of the M&SDGs research output, with more than 31.6% of the overall output published since the launch of the SDGs in 2015 (until 2017).

Figure 2 . Yearly output of the scientific production of organizations (2000–2017).

A total of 1,968 organizations were identified in the affiliations of these publications. The most productive institution was the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with 1,963 publications (9.07%), followed by the World Health Organization (WHO), with 1,675 (7.74%), Johns Hopkins University with 1,324 (6.11%) and Harvard University with 1,079 (4.98%). However, when looking at the 6-year blocs as in Supplementary Table 1 , different tendencies are shown over time. In the first 6-year (2000–2005) sample, the number of publications was 2,330 produced by 660 organizations identified. The most productive organizations in this period were the WHO, with 292 publications (12.53%), followed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with 272 (11.67%) and the Johns Hopkins University with 157 (6.74%). In the second period (2006–2011), a total of 6,671 publications were produced by 1,244 organizations. During this period, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine led the ranking with 682 publications (10.22%), followed by the WHO with 580 (8.69%) and the Johns Hopkins University with 439 (6.58%). In the third period (2012–2017), a total of 12,652 publications, produced by 1,744 organizations, were identified. The same ranking of organizations as in the previous period is also found: The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine leads with 1,009 publications (7.98%), followed by the WHO with 803 publications (6.35%) and the Johns Hopkins University with 728 (5.75%). Among the more productive HEIs there are only five institutions from developing countries: two form South Africa (the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand), one from Uganda (Makerere University), one from Pakistan (Aga Khan University), and one from Brazil (the Federal University of Pelotas).

Figure 3 shows a scatter plot of the relation between the institutions with a higher scientific production on SDGs [P(M&SDGs)] and their AI around research on this topic [AI(M&SDG)]. The size of the bubbles indicates the number of publications in WoS of each institution (only institutions with more than 50 are included in the Figure). Overall, the most productive institutions present a lower AI (e.g., the Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University with P(M&SDG) = 1,324 publications and P(M&SDG) = 1,024, respectively, have an AI of 8.70 and 3.89, respectively). The WHO [P(M&SDG) = 1,675] and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [P(M&SDG)= 1,963] present a high AI of more than 88% each. Among the institutions with the larges AI values we find other institutions such as the Stockholm Environment Institute (AI 190.47), Aga Khan University (AI 141.06), or the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (AI 132.55) ( Figure 3 ).

Figure 3 . Scatter plot of the Top 20 organizations ranked by AI (with more than 50 docs.).

A map is drawn in order to show the geographical distribution of M&SDGs publications ( Figure 4 ). The most productive countries during the whole period were the United States (8,473 publications, 39.13%), followed by the United Kingdom (6,053 publications, 27.95%), Switzerland (2,232 publications, 10.31%), Australia (1,959 publications, 9.05%), and Canada (1,757 publications, 8.11%). By periods, in the first one (2000–2005) a total of 67 countries produced at least one publication on M&SDGs research increasing to 86 countries in the second period, and to 95 countries in the third period, with the same set of countries mentioned above as the most productive in each period ( Figure 4 ). From the point of view of the specialization (measured by the AI), African and Asian countries exhibit a stronger specialization in M&SDGs research compared to countries from other regions. Uganda is leading the specialization in the whole period (29 publications and AI of 24% in the first period: 107 and AI 32.60 in the second period and 265 publications and AI of 43.130 in the third period). Supplementary Table 2 provides information on 6-year blocs to see differences over time. Apart from Uganda, other African countries (Tanzania, South-Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Rwanda, Mozambique, or Ethiopia) stand out in specialization. Besides, other countries from Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan), or Europe (Switzerland) present a higher AI on the topic.

Figure 4 . Geographic distribution of scientific publications and AI (countries with >20 publications).

Keyword Co-occurrence Analysis

To reveal the main topics of the M&SDGs research, Figure 5 shows a keyword co-occurrence-based clustering. The parameters for creating the maps are detailed below: LingLog Modularity normalization method, 566 items; link of 65,446; link strength of 298,485; and repulsion, resolution and minimum cluster size with a value of 1 14 . Keywords (nodes) in VOSViewer maps are located in such a way that the distance between them is related to their co-occurrence frequency. Terms located closely in the map means that they tend to appear together in the titles and abstracts of the papers, and therefore it can be argued that they are thematically connected. The following five clusters were identified: Cluster #1, with terms related to the millennium development goals inheritance and policy framework; Cluster #2 with terms about maternal mortality and care; Cluster #3 with terms related to the health systems (“diagnosis,” “treatment”); Cluster #4 with terms about the African health ecosystem, and Cluster #5 including terms related to the developing countries' landscape (health, community, water, and so on). Table 2 summarizes the main information of each cluster (number of nodes, core papers, average year, average links, and the most frequent keywords). It can be observed that cluster 1 is the largest in terms of publications, followed by cluster 2. The number of links per paper (#link avg ) is higher in cluster #2 and cluster #3, both related to health issues, suggesting a stronger connection between these two clusters. In most clusters, the average year (#year avg ) is 2012, suggesting that an important share of the output has been developed in the most recent years of study, which is backed up by the growing M&SDGs output over time discussed above. The percentage of core publications (i.e., directly referring to M&SDGs) for each cluster is indicated in the column “% core papers,” showing that clusters #1 and #2 (with 45.40 and 37.55% of core publications, respectively), are clusters with a stronger conceptual proximity with the M&SDGs core ideas and aims, while the other clusters have a more indirect relationship with these core ideas.

Figure 5 . Co-occurrence map (frequency of, at least, 50 keywords) of scientific research.

Table 2 . Summary of five thematic clusters.

Keyword Burst Analysis

In this section, burst detection for keywords in M&SDGs publications is performed in order to show what terms have more rapidly increased attention in citations accumulation. We have identified at least 60 different bursting keywords during the period. Supplementary Table 3 lists the 60 keywords with the strongest citation bursts, along with their strength and time span. The term “middle income country” has the strongest citation burst with a burst strength of 75.13, followed by “tuberculosis” with 66.52 and “maternal health” with 64.98. Some keywords have only been “bursting” at the very beginning of the period (e.g., “low birth weight,” 2000–2003; “economic growth,” 2000–2001; and “rural Bangladesh,” 2000–2001). However, in more recent years, strongly bursting citation keywords include “new-born” (16.65, time span of 2015–2017), “middle income country” (75.13, 2014–2017), “maternal health” (64.98, 2014–2017), and “delivery” (36.38, 2014–2017).

Individual SDGs Analysis

Publication prevalence.

The following SDGs were most prevalently represented in the publications ( Supplementary Figure 1 ): SDG3 “Good Health and well-being,” with 15,963 papers (76.93%); followed by SDG16 “Peace, justice and strong institutions,” with 11,658 (56.19%); SDG11 “Sustainable cities and communities,” with 9,541 publications (45.98%); and SDG10: “Reduce inequalities,” with 6,115 publications (29.47%). On the other hand, the least represented SDGs are: SDG 12 “Responsible production and consumption,” 939 papers (4.51%); and SDG7 “Affordable and clean energy,” with 1,095 (5.26%).

Geographic Distribution

Figure 6 shows two different perspectives on the production of publications across continents related to their contribution to the research of each individual SDG. In Figure 6A , the contribution of each continent to each SDGs is presented (reading row-wise); while the table on the right depicts the share of each continent across the different individual SDGs (reading column-wise). Publications are assigned to each continent based on the affiliation of the first-author of the paper. The results of the left table show that all goals have higher production in Europe and North America. Considering all M&SDGs research, it can be observed that in Europe the largest percentage of output is in SDG13 “Climate action” (46.23%), followed by SDG12 “Responsible Production” (44.85%) and SDG15 “Life on Land” (44.28%). In America, the largest is SDG2 “Zero Hunger” (37.60%), followed by SDG5 “Gender Equality” (15.50%), and SDG3 “Good Health” (13.32%). In Africa, the highest production is in SDG5 “Gender Equality” (15.50%); SDG4 “Quality Education” (14.27%); and SDG11 “Sustainable cities” (13.73%). In Asia, the greatest output is in SDG17 “Partnership for the goals:” (13.97%); SDG4 “Quality Education:” (13.33%); and SDG5 “Gender Equality” (13.31%). Finally, in Oceania, the higher production of these institutions is in SDG13 “Climate Action” (8.47%); SDG12 “Responsible Production and consumption” (7.24%); and SDG15 “Life on Land” (6.81%). From a global perspective, if we consider the distribution of the publications on each goal by continent to determine their profile ( Figure 6B ), the approach of the different SDGs exhibit more similar patterns, although some SDGs—such as SDG3 “Good Health,” SDG16 “Peace, Justice,” and SDG10 “Reducing Inequalities”—stand out from the others.

Figure 6 . Contribution of each continent to each SDGs (A) and profile by continent (B) .

Cognitive Relationships

Although the interlinked nature of SDGs has been stressed, their interactions are “not explicit in the description of the goals” ( Griggs et al., 2017 ). For instance, SDG11 “Sustainable Cities,” contains targets related to economic dimensions (e.g., financial and technical assistance for developed countries, expenditure on the conservation of cultural and natural heritage), social dimensions (e.g., number of deaths per disaster and urban population living in slums), or environmental dimensions (e.g., reducing the adverse environmental impact of cities per capita, or the proportion of urban solid waste), and these three could be conceptually linked to other SDGs, for example SDG6 “Clean Water.” In our study, to reveal their cognitive relations (measured via citations), a co-citation map has been created. The proximity between SDGs indicates their similarity in terms of co-citation occurrence (i.e., publications from the two SDGs appear often cited together in the same set of publications). The size of the nodes reflects the frequency of SDGs in terms of overall publications, and the thickness of the edges denotes how often these SDGs are co-cited. Figure 7A shows the SDGs map of the M&SDGs research. The following clusters of SDGs are identified:

Figure 7 . Co-citation occurrence map of (A) M&SDGs research, and (B) average publication year.

Cluster 1 (red) is formed by SDGs with a strong industrial and energy orientation [SDG6 ‘Clean Water’, SDG7 ‘Clean Energy’, and SDG9 ‘Industry, Innovation’] and the environment (SDG15 ‘Life on Land’, and SDG14 ‘Life below Water’). Cluster 2 (blue) groups; SDG1 “No Poverty,” and SDG2 “Zero Hunger,” being two of the most important SDGs inheritance of MDGs. SDG1 is directly and indirectly related to all other SDGs, but dependent on SDG2 International Council for Science, 2015 ].

Cluster 3 (yellow) includes SDG10 “Reduced Inequalities,” and SDG17 “Partnership for the Goals,” linking the reduction of inequalities and partnership.

Cluster 4 (green) is composed by SDGs related with health, urbanization and peace: SDG3; “Good health;” SDG4 “Quality Education;” SDG 5 “Gender Equality;” SDG11 “Sustainable Cities;” and SDG16 “Peace, Justice.” For instance, SDG11 “Sustainable Cities” and SDG3 “Good Health” have a strong connection (link strength of 5,154).

Cluster 5 (purple) is composed only by SDG8 “Decent work.” However, this goal has links with SDG9 “Industry, Innovation” and SDG11 “Sustainable Cities,” or SDG3 “Good Health,” among others.

Figure 7B depicts the evolution of the SDG in each cluster from the average publication year (2011–2012). The more yellow indicates the more recent the publications. It can be observed how SDG3 “Good Health,” SDG8 “Decent Work,” SDG16 “Peace, Justice”, and SDG11 “Sustainable Cities” have had research output from earlier years, as compared to the other SDGs. From another perspective, SDGs with a stronger recentness in scientific output include SDG17 “Partnership for the Goals,” SDG10 “Reduced Inequalities,” SDG5 “Gender Equality,” and SDG4 “Quality Education,” indicate that awareness of areas related to education or gender are of a more recent nature.

The proposal of the different SDGs in 2005 together with Agenda 2030 has led to the creation of a path of collective national and international awareness toward sustainability. One of the main features of SDGs is their increasing relevance not only for policy makers, who are encouraging sustainability-oriented policies, but also for the scientific community as a whole ( Kajikawa et al., 2007 ; Sweileh, 2020 ). This study presents an empirical scientometric analysis of M&SDGs research, and the role of HEIs in its development. As stated in the literature review, few studies have focused on analyzing the research output of SDGs, and even fewer have focused on the role of the organizations developing such research. Thus, this paper contributes to the debate around the incorporation of the M&SDGs in the research agenda of HEIs by providing an overview of output in the area, and by proposing a practical methodology approach to delineate this area in bibliometric databases.

How Can M&SDGs-Research Be Scientometrically Delineated and Collected?

A well-delineated methodology is crucial to identify the research publications on a specific topic. In this study, we propose a citation-based methodology to track and monitor M&SDGs-related research. The application of our methodology retrieved a total of 25,299 publications, which identifies a much larger set of publications of M&SDGs at HEIs than in similar previous studies ( Bizerril et al., 2018 ; Veiga Ávila et al., 2018 ; Hallinger and Chatpinyakoop, 2019 ). The study by Nakamura et al. (2019) used a very similar methodology as the one presented here, however we identified a larger set of publications related to M&SDGs (4,685 in the core and 25,299 in total in the present study vs. the 2,800 in the core and 10,300 total in Nakamura study). The main reason for this difference is that in the present study the MDGs were also considered, as well as the fact that the CWTS WoS version has a more efficient citation matching algorithm than the one in WoS ( Olensky et al., 2016 ). The citation-based approach of this study, as well as in Nakamura et al. (2019) , offers some advantages in comparison with previous studies that applied keyword-based approaches ( Kajikawa et al., 2007 ; Elsevier Research Intelligence, 2015 ). For instance, it offers a systematic approach that can easily be reproduced and can be applied to any other database that records citation linkages among publications (e.g., Web of Science, Scopus, Microsoft Academic Graph, Dimensions, Crossref Open Citations, etc.), making possible the replication of this approach in future studies. Another important advantage of our approach is that it focuses on identifying publications that are cognitively related to M&SDGs, since the selected publications have cited/are citing relationships with the core literature on M&SDGs, thus avoiding the problem of delineating M&SDGs-related research using keywords. Keyword-based approaches would typically identify as SDGs-related research publications that only have a circumstantial relationships with SDGs, but that are not totally related to them (e.g., publications related to “economic growth,” but not in the philosophy underlying the M&SDGs—i.e., sustainable economic growth). Finally, the method developed here has the advantage that it captures the M&SDGs research output at the global level, thus providing an international perspective on the discussion around the study of the research activity on M&SDGs. However, in future studies other more local perspectives (e.g., the study of publications in local languages, local publishers) should be also explored.

How Has M&SDGs Research Carried Out by HEIs Developed Over Time?

The results presented in this study suggest that although one may presume that M&SDGs research would have a long tradition since the launch of the MDGs, there is an important concentration of publications in the most recent years, denoting a more recent interest in the SDGs (21.83% in 2000–2014, the MDGs period vs. 31.66% from 2015 to 2017 since the launch of the SDGs). However, we should take into consideration that by using WoS there is a strong bias toward English-language journals and might have distorted the results. In any case, this recency trend in the production of M&SDGs-related research is in line with the results obtained by Olawumi and Chan (2018) who observed that the scientific output on sustainable development, 2015–2016, represents 36.27% (vs. 21.42% on M&SDGs in the present study). There have also been previous publications discussing the growth of the scientific production related with sustainability. For example, Pulgarin et al. (2015) argued that the growth of research production in sustainability can be explained by “the impact of human activity on the environment” which “is leading to this area of research [sustainability] being studied from ever more different fields.” Olawumi and Chan (2018) consider that this increase could be also linked to “more efforts and resources” being devoted to this topic. For Nučič (2012) , the increasing growth of the scientific output could be associated with “sustainability science as a highly interdisciplinary research field.” This is in line with Schoolman et al. (2012) , who indicated that “sustainability research is more interdisciplinary than other scientific research” (based on the Shannon entropy measure), supporting the suggestion by Nakamura et al. (2019) that SDGs research is based on “transdisciplinary knowledge” between different fields, arguing that “most scientific disciplines are expected to contribute toward sustainability since in sustainability we have complex structures, including environmental, technological, societal, and economic facets” ( Kajikawa et al., 2014 ).

In previous studies on M&SDGs the role of these institutions has not been specifically analyzed (e.g., in Nakamura et al., 2019 ). Institutions like the London School of Hygiene, the WHO, and the Johns Hopkins University stand out among the most productive institutions. Their predominant role can be explained by their relatively large sizes; however, their AI confirms that these institutions are also highly specialized on this topic too. The London School of Hygiene belongs to the University of London and is specialized in public health and tropical medicine; while the WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations focused on international public health. As well, London School of Hygiene have focused recently on health systems' strengthening (HSS) ( Seidman, 2017 ). The predominant role in output and specialization of the WHO, which is not a HEI or a RC but a supra-governmental organization that provides statistics for monitoring health-related aspects of the SDGs, 15 may be also seen as a sign of the strong social and political relevance of M&SDGs research.

Some other organizations that, although smaller in terms of output, have a high degree of specialization are the Stockholm Environment Institute (AI 191.47), the Aga Khan University (AI 141.06), or the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (AI 132.55). This relative importance of small organizations goes in line with Nakamura's et al. (2019) results, who suggested that not always the largest institutions “set the agenda” in M&SDGs research, but that smaller ones also could be key players (e.g., Stockholm Environment Institute, and the University of London).

This study confirms the observation by Yarime et al. (2010) of an increasing number of countries engaged in research on sustainability. Our results also resonate with studies like that of Adomßent et al. (2014) , who also stated that the HEIs' sustainability research is mostly produced by authors from developed countries such as the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, or Canada. However, in terms of relative specialization, our study shows that African and Asian countries exhibit a much stronger specialization. A special case is South Africa. This country is the sixth country in number of M&SDGs publications, and one of its universities (i.e., University of Cape Town) is the most prolific African institution in M&SDGs research. This strong relevance of SDGs research in South African can be reinforced by the fact that “South Africa” is a topic in the M&SDGs research map since the name of the country appears as a node in the term co-occurrence map. Although our scientometric evidence is not strong enough to conclude that the higher performance of this country in M&SDGs is the direct effect of policies aimed at encouraging research on M&SDGs, it must be highlighted that the country counts with South Africa's National Development Plan (NDP), which defines national development priorities and provides the foundations for South Africa in order to achieve the SDGs ( Cumming et al., 2017 ).

What Are the Specific M&SDGs Research Topics That Have Been Studied by HEIs?

The SDGs more frequently addressed by HEIs are SDG3 “Good Health” (76.93% of the publications), SDG16 “Peace, Justice” (56.19%), SDG11 “Sustainable Cities” (45.98%) and SDG10 “Reduced inequalities” (29.47%), which is in line with the higher percentage of overall HEIs involved on this research ( Supplementary Table 4 ). Our results contrast with the results obtained by Salvia et al. (2019) , who surveyed research experts in SDGs across continents, highlighting the following SDGs as having more activity: SDG 13 “Climate Action” (41%), SDG 11 “Sustainable Cities” (33%), and SDG 4 “Quality Education” (29%). This remarkable difference between a qualitative approach (i.e., surveys sent to experts in Salvia et al., 2019 ) and our quantitative approach, reinforces the importance of considering and combining different methodologies in the study of how science is contributing to the achievement of SDGs, and how academic stakeholders are approaching the different SDGs.

Regarding the interconnection of SDGs, according to Nilsson et al. (2016) , SDGs are more interconnected among themselves than its predecessors, the MDGs. This idea of SDGs interconnecting among themselves is supported by their consideration as “enablers for integration,” which means that the internal structures of the different SDGs is conceived to fit across more different SDGs ( Le Blanc, 2015 ), thus enabling their own integration and interconnection. This integrative and interconnected property of SDGs is observed in this study, since all goals have connections among them, being particularly remarkable the connections between the following three pairs, which presented a higher co-occurrence values: SDG16 “Peace, Justice” vs. SDG13 “Climate Action;” SDG3 “Good Health” vs. SDG11 “Sustainable Cities;” and SDG16 “Peace, Justice” vs. SDG11 “Sustainable Cities.” Moreover, the linkage between the pairs responds to complementary relationships. For instance, SDG3 “Good Health” and SDG11 “Sustainable Cities,” linking health with cities could be understood as housing, transport, and access to green spaces are major determinants of health and well-being ( International Council for Science, 2015 ).

As mentioned above, SDG3 “Good Health” is the most researched SDG identified in our study. This is not a surprise since this goal has a central role in the achievement of sustainable development ( Pettigrew et al., 2015 ), and Biomedical Research is one of the largest research areas covered in Web of Science ( Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016 ). In any case, our results are in agreement with ( Körfgen et al., 2018 ; Sweileh, 2020 ), and as pointed out by previous studies, SDG3 “Good Health” was found to have a higher share of synergies with other SDGs in most countries ( Pradhan et al., 2017 ). The MDGs, experience has shown that without improvements in health systems performance, progress on the goals was both limited and potentially unsustainable ( Seidman, 2017 ). This may explain why this specific health-related goal (SDG3) became more ambitious and central than in the MDGs ( Seidman, 2017 ; Asi and Williams, 2018 ). It is important to highlight that one the major efforts of SDG3 has been to reduce mortality across population groups (e.g., “the poor” or “women and children”) ( Buse and Hawkes, 2015 ), thus explaining the central role of “good health” in the map of topics presented in this study. However, from our data, there is no empirical evidence suggesting why health is the goal most researched.

Conclusions

Based on an advanced citation-based field delineation, this paper provides an extensive analysis of M&SDGs research over time and contributes to contextualize and understand its trajectory. The results of this study are relevant for planners and decision-makers in HEIs. First, this paper presents a new delineation procedure for M&SDGs-related research. The methodology is simple and reproducible, allowing its application in future studies for researchers, as well as its implementation in other citation databases (e.g., Scopus, Dimensions, Microsoft Academic Graph, etc.). Second, our work contributes to the expansion of the toolset of research instruments aimed at evaluating the development of research around M&SDGs. We provide a relevant proof of concept on how scientometric methodologies can support the monitoring of the research developed to support the achievement of M&SDGs. The approach proposed in this paper has relevance for all stakeholders engaged in the development of research activities related to M&SDGs (e.g., HEIs, RCs, governmental and supranational organizations, NGOs, and any stakeholder interested in SDGs). Developing reproducible methodologies (as done in this paper) and establishing a stable analytical monitoring framework is fundamental for a proper understanding of how science is contributing to the achievement of SDGs. However, it is important, not only to analyze the number of papers, but also the contribution itself of those papers with the goals, targets, and indicators.

From a scientometric point of view, this study provides a novel contribution to the scientometric analysis on SDGs research output, particularly since most scientometric studies have focused on developing semantic approaches, in which the use of keywords has been the most common approximation to the topic ( Pukelis et al., 2020 ; Rafols, 2020 ). We adopt a citation-based approach. This approach does not suffer from the ambiguity of semantic approaches (e.g., synonymy, homonymy), and more fundamentally, our approach does not hold the limitation that keyword-based approaches may capture research that is not necessarily aligned with the principles and philosophical foundations of M&SDGs. Grounded on the idea that citations represent concept symbols ( Small, 1978 ), in which scientific authors associate ideas by creating symbolic acts with their citations (see also Haustein et al., 2016 ), it can be argued that our approach captures the body of scientific literature most conceptually related with M&SDGs. To the best of our knowledge, only the Nakamura et al. (2019) study and this one have adopted such a citation-based approach, with this study being the most comprehensive to-date in the body of literature analyzed.

It is important however to remark that our citation-based approach still presents some limitations that must be observed when generalizing its findings. By considering only the Web of Science (WoS) database the study may have limitations due to the underrepresentation of other related published works, which may be indexed in other scientometric databases (e.g., Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic…). Also, WoS does not cover all academic fields equally as it presents an underrepresentation of non-English speaking studies. The methodology proposed may not necessarily capture the whole picture of research related to M&SDGs. The sole use of direct citations related to a core set of publications may also be insufficient at times, since many publications genuinely linked to M&SDGs research may be more distanced in their citation relationship with the core set. In addition, despite all types of publications from WoS being included, some other typologies of interest (e.g., governmental reports) are not captured.

Considering the methodological limitations described above, future methodological improvements should take into account the possibility of characterizing not only the directly cited/citing publications of M&SDGs, but also other citation layers (e.g., 2nd, 3 rd , or more—also known as citation cascades — Min et al., 2020 ) in the expansion of the core set of publications. The use of citation cascades would allow the introduction of a more fluid approach (in which a much larger set of scientific publications may be considered regarding their citation proximity to the core set), in contrast with the binary approach (i.e., publication are M&SDGs-related or not) used in this study. Moreover, since this is the first study that has approached the scientific output from MDGs and SDGs together, we cannot assess whether other scientometric approaches or delineations would have delivered other results, therefore this is an aspect to be considered in future studies. Moreover, future studies on the topic might be complemented by means of qualitative research methods to uncover more specific motivations and drivers for research on SDGs in different contexts. The combination of scientometric indicators with other monitoring indicators (e.g., the SDG index) should also be considered. Such combination of methods will enable more advanced insights on the relationship between the research production of countries (as done in this study) and their success in their actual achievement of the specific SDGs, thus providing a more holistic perspective on how research can complement and support the consecution of Agenda 2030.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11106113.v1 .

Author Contributions

NB-P: conceptualization, data curation, software, visualization, formal analysis, and writing- original draft preparation. AA: investigation, and writing—review and editing. SL and UA: writing—review and editing. RC: conceptualization, investigation, methodology, resources, software, validation, supervision, and writing—review and editing. All authors: contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was partly supported by the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2021.620743/full#supplementary-material

1. ^ Sustainable development was defined as a “kind of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” ( United Nations, 1987 ).

2. ^ Information on the MDGs available at the following link: https://www.who.int/topics/millennium_development_goals/about/en/ (accessed December 30, 2019).

3. ^ SDG Index available at: http://sdgindex.org/ (accessed December 30, 2019).

4. ^ There was no public consultation, as with the SDGs.

5. ^ Sustainability science is a new scientific field that investigates “complex and dynamic interactions between natural and human systems and aims “to bridge the gap between science and society and limit its knowledge to actions for sustainability” ( Disterheft et al., 2013 ).

6. ^ From a theoretical point of view, we build on the notion of citations as “concept symbols” ( Small, 1978 ) in which any publication cited by or citing M&SDGs core publications can considered to have a cognitive association with M&SDGs research.

7. ^ The search strategy was composed of the following parameters: TS = “Millennium Development Goal * ” OR TS = “Millennium Goal * ” OR TS = “Sustainable Development Goal * ”.

8. ^ Web of Science divides between author keywords (included in records of articles and determined by the authors) and keywords plus or “paper authors” (index terms automatically generated from the titles of cited articles).

9. ^ The approach used in this study (identification of a seed of papers, and expansion based on citation relationships) has been used in previous studies (see Reijnhoudt et al., 2014 ).

10. ^ The period corresponds with the launch of the MDGs in 2000.

11. ^ Co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two publications are cited together by other publications.

12. ^ VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may include nodes of journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. Additionally, it offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of terms extracted from a research dataset ( https://www.vosviewer.com/ —accessed December 30, 2019).

13. ^ Information available at: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ (accessed December 30, 2019).

14. ^ For more clarification of these values the author is referred to the VOSViewer Manual https://www.vosviewer.com/documentation/Manual_VOSviewer_1.6.8.pdf .

15. ^ Information available at: https://www.who.int/sdg/en/ .

Adomßent, M., Fischer, D., Godemann, J., Herzig, C., Otte, I., Rieckmann, M., et al. (2014). Emerging areas in research on higher education for sustainable development e management education, sustainable consumption and perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe. J. Clean. Prod. 62, 1–7. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.09.045

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Alejandro-Cruz, J. S., Rio-Belver, R. M., Almanza-Arjona, Y. C., and Rodriguez-Andara, A. (2019). Towards a science map on sustainability in higher education. Sustainability 11:3521. doi: 10.3390/su11133521

Armitage, C. S., Lorenz, M., and Mikki, S. (2020). Mapping scholarly publications related to the Sustainable Development Goals: do independent bibliometric approaches get the same results? Quantitative Sci. Stud. 1, 1092–1108. doi: 10.1162/qss_a_00071

Asi, Y. M., and Williams, C. (2018). The role of digital health in making progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 in conflict-affected populations. Int. J. Med. Inform. 114, 114–120. doi: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2017.11.003

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Bautista, N. (2019). SDG Ontology . doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.11106113.v1

CrossRef Full Text

Bautista-Puig, N., and Mauleón, E. (2019). “Unveiling the path towards sustainability: is there a research interest on sustainable goals?” in International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics , Vol. 17 (Rome), 2770–2771.

Bizerril, M., Rosa, M. J., Carvalho, T., and Pedrosa, J. (2018). Sustainability in higher education: a review of contributions from Portuguese Speaking Countries. J. Clean. Prod. 171, 600–612. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.10.048

Buse, K., and Hawkes, S. (2015). Health in the sustainable development goals: ready for a paradigm shift? Glob. Health 11, 1–8. doi: 10.1186/s12992-015-0098-8

Caeiro, S., Azeiteiro, U. M., Filho, W. L., and Jabbour, C., (eds.). (2013). Sustainability Assessment Tools in Higher Education Institutions: Mapping Trends and Good Practices Around the World . Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Google Scholar

Caiado, R. G. G., Filho, W. L., Quelhas, O. L. G., Nascimento, D. L. d. M., and Ávila, L. V. (2018). A literature-based review on potentials and constraints in the implementation of the sustainable development goals. J. Clean. Prod. 198, 1276–1288. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.07.102

Cumming, T. L., Shackleton, R. T., Förster, J., Dini, J., Khan, A., Gumula, M., et al. (2017). Achieving the national development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through investment in ecological infrastructure: a case study of South Africa. Ecosyst. Serv. 27, 253–260. doi: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2017.05.005

Disterheft, A., Caeiro, S., Azeiteiro, U. M., and Leal Filho, W. (2013). “Sustainability science and education for sustainable development in universities: a way for transition,” in Sustainability Assessment Tools in Higher Education Institutions: Mapping Trends and Good Practices Around the World , eds S. Caeiro, W. L. Filho, C. Jabbour, and U. M. Azeiteiro (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 3–27.

Easterly, W. (2009). How the millennium development goals are unfair to Africa. World Dev. 37, 26–35. doi: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.02.009

Elsevier Research Intelligence (2015). Sustainability Science in a Global Landscape . Available online at: https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/sustainability-2015

Fisher, A., and Fukuda-Parr, S. (2019). Introduction—data, knowledge, politics and localizing the SDGs. J. Hum. Dev. Capabil. 20, 375–385. doi: 10.1080/19452829.2019.1669144

Forestier, O., and Kim, R. E. (2020). Cherry-picking the Sustainable Development Goals: goal prioritization by national governments and implications for global governance. Sustain. Dev. 28, 1269–1278. doi: 10.1002/sd.2082

Frame, J. D. (1977). Mainstream research in Latin America and the Caribbean. Interciencia 2, 143–148.

Fukuda-Parr, S. (2016). From the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals: shifts in purpose, concept, and politics of global goal setting for development. Gender Dev. 24, 43–52. doi: 10.1080/13552074.2016.1145895

Fukuda-Parr, S. (2019). Keeping out extreme inequality from the SDG agenda – the politics of indicators. Global Policy 10, 61–69. doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12602

Fukuda-Parr, S., and McNeill, D. (2019). Knowledge and politics in setting and measuring the SDGs: introduction to special issue. Global Policy 10, 5–15. doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12604

Fuso Nerini, F., Sovacool, B., Hughes, N., Cozzi, L., Cosgrave, E., Howells, M., et al. (2019). Connecting climate action with other Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability 2, 674–680. doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0334-y

Griggs, D. J., Nilsson, M., Stevance, A., and McCollum, D. (2017). A Guide to SDG Interactions: From Science to Implementation . Paris: International Council for Science.

Hák, T., Janousková, S., and Moldan, B. (2016). Sustainable Development Goals: a need for relevant indicators. Ecol. Indic 60, 565–573. doi: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.08.003

Hallinger, P., and Chatpinyakoop, C. (2019). A bibliometric review of research on higher education for sustainable development 1998-2018. Sustainability 11, 1–20. doi: 10.3390/su11082401

Hassan, S. U., Haddawy, P., and Zhu, J. (2014). A bibliometric study of the world's research activity in sustainable development and its sub-areas using scientific literature. Scientometrics 99, 549–579. doi: 10.1007/s11192-013-1193-3

Haustein, S., Bowman, T. D., and Costas, R. (2016). “Interpreting “altmetrics”: viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories,” in Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication , ed C. R. Sugimoto (De Gruyter Saur), 372–406. doi: 10.1515/9783110308464-022

Hesselbarth, C., and Schaltegger, S. (2014). Educating change agents for sustainability – learnings from the first sustainability management master of business administration. J. Clean. Prod 62, 24–36. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2013.03.042

International Council for Science (2015). Review of the Sustainable Development Goals: The Science Perspective . Paris: International Council for Science (ICSU).

International Human Rights Instruments. (2008). Report on Indicators for Promoting and Monitoring the Implementation of Human Rights . Geneva: United Nations.

Kajikawa, Y., Ohno, J., Takeda, Y., Matsushima, K., and Komiyama, H. (2007). Creating an academic landscape of sustainability science: an analysis of the citation network. Sustain. Sci. 2:221. doi: 10.1007/s11625-007-0027-8

Kajikawa, Y., Tacoa, F., and Yamaguchi, K. (2014). Sustainability science: the changing landscape of sustainability research. Sustain. Sci. 9, 431–438. doi: 10.1007/s11625-014-0244-x

Ki-Moon, B. (2015). The millennium development goals report 2015 . United Nations Publications.

Kleinberg, J. (2003). Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams. Data Mining Knowl. Disc . 7, 373–397. doi: 10.1023/A:1024940629314

Körfgen, A., Förster, K., Glatz, I., Maier, S., Becsi, B., Meyer, A., et al. (2018). It's a hit! Mapping Austrian research contributions to the sustainable development goals. Sustainability 10, 1–13. doi: 10.3390/su10093295

Kroll, C., Warchold, A., and Pradhan, P. (2019). Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): are we successful in turning trade-offs into synergies? Palgrave Commun. 5, 1–11. doi: 10.1057/s41599-019-0335-5

Le Blanc, D. (2015). Towards integration at last? The sustainable development goals as a network of targets. Sustain. Dev. 23, 176–187. doi: 10.1002/sd.1582

Leal Filho, W., Pallant, E., Enete, A., Richter, B., and Brandli, L. L. (2018). Planning and implementing sustainability in higher education institutions: an overview of the difficulties and potentials. In. J. Sustain. Dev. World Ecol . 25, 713–721. doi: 10.1080/13504509.2018.1461707

Leal Filho, W., Wu, Y.-C. J., Brandli, L. L., Avila, L. V., Azeiteiro, U. A., Caeiro, S., et al. (2017). Identifying and overcoming obstacles to the implementation of sustainable development at universities. J. Integrative Environ. Sci. 14, 93–108. doi: 10.1080/1943815X.2017.1362007

Lozano, R., Ceulemans, K., Alonso-Almeida, M., Huisingh, D., Lozano, F. J., Waas, T., et al. (2015). A review of commitment and implementation of sustainable development in higher education: Results from a worldwide survey. J. Clean. Prod. 108, 1–18. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.09.048

Lusseau, D., and Mancini, F. (2019). Income-based variation in Sustainable Development Goal interaction networks. Nat. Sustain. 2, 242–247. doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0231-4

Min, C., Chen, Q., Yan, E., Bu, Y., and Sun, J. (2020). Citation cascade and the evolution of topic relevance. J. Assoc. Information Sci. Technol. 2020, 110–127. doi: 10.1002/asi.24370

Mongeon, P., and Paul-Hus, A. (2016). The journal coverage of web of science and scopus: a comparative analysis. Scientometrics 106, 213–228. doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1765-5

Nakamura, M., Pendlebury, D., Schnell, J., and Szomszor, M. (2019). Navigating the structure of research on Sustainable Development Goals. Policy 11:12.

Nilsson, M., Griggs, D., and Visbeck, M. (2016). Policy: map the interactions between Sustainable Development Goals. Nat. News 534:320. doi: 10.1038/534320a

Nučič, M. (2012). Is sustainability science becoming more interdisciplinary over time? Acta Geogr. Sloven. 52, 215–236. doi: 10.3986/AGS52109

Olawumi, T. O., and Chan, D. W. M. (2018). A scientometric review of global research on sustainability and sustainable development. J. Clean. Prod. 183, 231–250. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.02.162

Olensky, M., Schmidt, M., and Van Eck, N. J. (2016). Evaluation of the citation matching algorithms of CWTS and iFQ in comparison to the web of science. J. Assoc. Information Sci. Technol. 67, 2550–2564. doi: 10.1002/asi.23590

Pettigrew, L. M., De Maeseneer, J., Anderson, M. I. P., Essuman, A., Kidd, M. R., and Haines, A. (2015). Primary health care and the Sustainable Development Goals. Lancet 386, 2119–2121. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00949-6

Pradhan, P., Costa, L., Rybski, D., Lucht, W., and Kropp, J. P. (2017). A systematic study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) interactions. Earth's Future 5, 1169–1179. doi: 10.1002/2017EF000632

Pukelis, L., Bautista-Puig, N., Skrynik, M., and Stanciauskas, V. (2020). OSDG–open-source approach to classify text data by UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.14569.

Pulgarin, A., Eklund, P., Garrote, R., and Escalona-Fernandez, M. I. (2015). Evolution and structure of ‘sustainable development’: a bibliometric study. Brazil. J. Information Sci. Res. Trends 9:24. doi: 10.36311/1981-1640.2015.v9n1.03.p22

Rafols, I. (2020). Consensus and Dissensus in ‘Mappings’ of Science for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Blog Post on 10th August 2020 . Available online at: https://leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/consensus-and-dissensus-in-mappings-of-science-for-sustainable-development-goals-sdgs

Ramírez Ríos, J. F., Alzate Ibáñez, A. M., and Montenegro Riaño, D. F. (2016). Los discursos de la sostenibilidad: análisis de tendencias conceptuales a partir de mediciones bibliométricas. Questionar: Investigación Específica 4, 82–96. doi: 10.29097/23461098.114

Reijnhoudt, L., Costas, R., Noyons, E., Börner, K., and Scharnhorst, A. (2014). ‘Seed+ expand’: a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers. Scientometrics 101, 1403–1417. doi: 10.1007/s11192-014-1256-0

Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Lafortune, G., and Fuller, G. (2018). SD.G Index and Dashboards Report 2018 . New York, NY: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Lafortune, G., and Fuller, G. (2019). Sustainable Development Report 2019 . New York, NY: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

Salvia, A. L., Leal Filho, W., Brandli, L. L., and Griebelera, J. S. (2019). Assessing research trends related to Sustainable Development Goals: local and global issues. J. Clean Prod. 208, 841–849. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.242

Schoolman, E. D., Guest, J. S., Bush, K. F., and Bell, A. R. (2012). How interdisciplinary is sustainability research? Analyzing the structure of an emerging scientific field. Sustain. Sci. 7, 67–80. doi: 10.1007/s11625-011-0139-z

Seidman, G. (2017). Does SDG 3 have an adequate theory of change for improving health systems performance? J. Glob. Health 7. doi: 10.7189/jogh.07.010302

Siegel, K. M., and Bastos Lima, M. G. (2020). When international sustainability frameworks encounter domestic politics: the sustainable development goals and agri-food governance in South America. World Dev. 135:105053. doi: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105053

Singh, G. G., Cisneros-Montemayor, A. M., Swartz, W., Cheung, W., Guy, J. A., Kenny, T. A., et al. (2018). A rapid assessment of co-benefits and trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals. Marine Policy 93, 223–231. doi: 10.1016/j.marpol.2017.05.030

Small, H. (1978). Cited documents as concept symbols. Soc. Stud. Sci 8, 327–340. doi: 10.1177/030631277800800305

Sweileh, W. M. (2020). Bibliometric analysis of scientific publications on “sustainable development goals” with emphasis on “good health and well-being” goal (2015–2019). Global. Health 16:68. doi: 10.1186/s12992-020-00602-2

Tatalović Antony (2010). What Has It Done For The Millennium Development Goals?' Available online at: http://www.scidev.net/global/health/feature/science-what-has-it-done-for-the-millennium-development-goals-1.html

United Nations (1987). Our Common Future: Report of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development . Oslo: United Nations.

United Nations (2015a). Millennium Development Goals: 2015 Progress Chart . Available online at: https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20PC%20final.pdf

United Nations (2015b). Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1) . Available online at: https://undocs.org/A/RES/70/1

Van Eck, N. J., and Waltman, L. (2017). Citation-based clustering of publications using CitNetExplorer and VOSviewer. Scientometrics 111, 1053–1070. doi: 10.1007/s11192-017-2300-7

Veiga Ávila, L., Rossato Facco, A. L., Bento, M. H., dos, S., Arigony, M. M., Obregon, S. L., et al. (2018). Sustainability and education for sustainability: an analysis of publications from the last decade. Environ. Qual. Manage. 27, 107–118. doi: 10.1002/tqem.21537

Vinuesa, R., Azizpour, H., Leite, I., Balaam, M., Dignum, V., Domisch, S., et al. (2020). The role of artificial intelligence in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Nat. Commun. 11, 1–10. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-14108-y

Waas, T., Verbruggen, A., and Wright, T. (2010). University research for sustainable development: Definition and characteristics explored. J. Clean. Prod. 18, 629–636. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.09.017

Waltman, L., Calero-Medina, C., Kosten, J., Noyons, E. C., Tijssen, R. J., van Eck, N. J., et al. (2012). The Leiden ranking 2011/2012: data collection, indicators, and interpretation. J. Am. Soc. Information Sci. Technol. 63, 2419–2432. doi: 10.1002/asi.22708

Wuelser, G., and Pohl, C. (2016). How researchers frame scientific contributions to sustainable development: a typology based on grounded theory. Sustain. Sci 11, 789–800. doi: 10.1007/s11625-016-0363-7

Yarime, M., Takeda, Y., and Kajikawa, Y. (2010). Towards institutional analysis of sustainability science: a quantitative examination of the patterns of research collaboration. Sustain. Sci. 5:115. doi: 10.1007/s11625-009-0090-4

Keywords: sustainable development goals, millennium development goals, higher education institutions, sustainability science, bibliometrics, scientometrics

Citation: Bautista-Puig N, Aleixo AM, Leal S, Azeiteiro U and Costas R (2021) Unveiling the Research Landscape of Sustainable Development Goals and Their Inclusion in Higher Education Institutions and Research Centers: Major Trends in 2000–2017. Front. Sustain. 2:620743. doi: 10.3389/frsus.2021.620743

Received: 23 October 2020; Accepted: 01 March 2021; Published: 25 March 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Bautista-Puig, Aleixo, Leal, Azeiteiro and Costas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Núria Bautista-Puig, nuria.bautista.puig@hig.se

The Sustainable Development Agenda

17 Goals for People, for Planet

World leaders came together in 2015 and made a historic promise to secure the rights and well-being of everyone on a healthy, thriving planet when they adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) .

The Agenda remains the world’s roadmap for ending poverty, protecting the planet and tackling inequalities. The 17 SDGs, the cornerstone of the Agenda, offer the most practical and effective pathway to tackle the causes of violent conflict, human rights abuses, climate change and environmental degradation and aim to ensure that no one will be left behind. The SDGs reflect an understanding that sustainable development everywhere must integrate economic growth, social well-being and environmental protection.

Keeping the Promise

While a fragile global economy, rising conflicts and the climate emergency have placed the promise of the Goals in peril, we can still turn things around in the remaining seven years. Notably, there has been some SDG success since 2015 with improvements in key areas, including poverty reduction, child mortality, electricity access and the battle against certain diseases.

Countries continue to supercharge efforts to achieve the SDGs. We see this at the annual High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development — the central platform for reviewing progress on the SDGs — where for the last eight years, countries, civil society and businesses have gathered to showcase the bold actions they are taking to achieve the SDGs.

Every four years, the High-Level Political Forum meets under the auspices of the UN General Assembly, known as the SDG Summit   . In 2023, the second SDG Summit took place on September 18-19, bringing together Heads of State and Government to catalyze renewed efforts towards accelerating progress on the SDGs. The Summit culminated in the adoption of  a  political declaration   to accelerate action to achieve the 17 goals.

SDG Report 2023

The annual SDG reports provide an overview of the world’s implementation efforts to date, highlighting areas of progress and where more action needs to be taken. They are prepared by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, with input from international and regional organizations and the United Nations system of agencies, funds and programmes. Several national statisticians, experts from civil society and academia also contribute to the reports.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is sustainable development?

• Sustainable development has been defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
• Sustainable development calls for concerted efforts towards building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet.
• For sustainable development to be achieved, it is crucial to harmonize three core elements: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection. These elements are interconnected and all are crucial for the well-being of individuals and societies.
• Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. To this end, there must be promotion of sustainable, inclusive and equitable economic growth, creating greater opportunities for all, reducing inequalities, raising basic standards of living, fostering equitable social development and inclusion, and promoting integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems.

How will the Sustainable Development Goals be implemented?

• The Addis Ababa Action Agenda  that came out of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development provided concrete policies and actions to support the implementation of the new agenda.
• Implementation and success will rely on countries’ own sustainable development policies, plans and programmes, and will be led by countries. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be a compass for aligning countries’ plans with their global commitments.
• Nationally owned and country-led sustainable development strategies will require resource mobilization and financing strategies.
• All stakeholders: governments, civil society, the private sector, and others, are expected to contribute to the realisation of the new agenda.
• A revitalized global partnership at the global level is needed to support national efforts. This is recognized in the 2030 Agenda.
• Multi-stakeholder partnerships have been recognized as an important component of strategies that seek to mobilize all stakeholders around the new agenda.

How will the Sustainable Development Goals be monitored?

• At the global level, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets of the new agenda will be monitored and reviewed using a set of global indicators. The global indicator framework for Sustainable Development Goals was developed by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) and agreed upon at the 48 th  session of the United Nations Statistical Commission held in March 2017.
• Governments will also develop their own national indicators to assist in monitoring progress made on the goals and targets.
• Chief statisticians from Member States are working on the identification of the targets with the aim to have 2 indicators for each target. There will be approximately 300 indicators for all the targets. Where the targets cover cross-cutting issues, however, the number of indicators may be reduced.
• The follow-up and review process will be informed by an annual SDG Progress Report to be prepared by the Secretary-General.
• The annual meetings of the High-level Political Forum on sustainable development will play a central role in reviewing progress towards the SDGs at the global level. The means of implementation of the SDGs will be monitored and reviewed as outlined in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the outcome document of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, to ensure that financial resources are effectively mobilized to support the new sustainable development agenda.

How much will the implementation of this sustainable development agenda cost?

• To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, annual investment requirements across all sectors have been estimated at around $5-7 trillion. Current investment levels are far from the scale needed. With global financial assets estimated at over $200 trillion, financing is available, but most of these resources are not being channeled towards sustainable development at the scale and speed necessary to achieve the SDGs and objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
• Interest and investment in the Sustainable Development Goals are growing and investment in the Goals makes economic sense. Achieving the SDGs could open up US$12 trillion of market opportunities and create 380 million new jobs by 2030.
• The  Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance , a UN-supported coalition of 30 business leaders  announced  in October 2019, works to provide decisive leadership in mobilizing resources for sustainable development and identifying incentives for long-term sustainable investments.Net Official Development Assistance totaled $149 billion in 2018, down by 2.7% in real terms from 2017.

How does climate change relate to sustainable development?

• Climate change is already impacting public health, food and water security, migration, peace and security. Climate change, left unchecked, will roll back the development gains we have made over the last decades and will make further gains impossible.
• Investments in sustainable development will help address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building climate resilience.
• Conversely, action on climate change will drive sustainable development.
• Tackling climate change and fostering sustainable development are two mutually reinforcing sides of the same coin; sustainable development cannot be achieved without climate action. Conversely, many of the SDGs are addressing the core drivers of climate change.

Are the Sustainable Development Goals legally binding?

• No. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not legally binding.
• Nevertheless, countries are expected to take ownership and establish a national framework for achieving the 17 Goals.
• Implementation and success will rely on countries’ own sustainable development policies, plans and programmes.
• Countries have the primary responsibility for follow-up and review, at the national, regional and global levels, with regard to the progress made in implementing the Goals and targets by 2030.
• Actions at the national level to monitor progress will require quality, accessible and timely data collection and regional follow-up and review.

How are the Sustainable Development Goals different from the MDGs?

• The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets are broader in scope and go further than the MDGs by addressing the root causes of poverty and the universal need for development that works for all people. The goals cover the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection.
• Building on the success and momentum of the MDGs, the new goals cover more ground, with ambitions to address inequalities, economic growth, decent jobs, cities and human settlements, industrialization, oceans, ecosystems, energy, climate change, sustainable consumption and production, peace and justice.
• The new Goals are universal and apply to all countries, whereas the MDGs were intended for action in developing countries only.
• A core feature of the SDGs is their strong focus on means of implementation—the mobilization of financial resources—capacity-building and technology, as well as data and institutions.
• The new Goals recognize that tackling climate change is essential for sustainable development and poverty eradication. SDG 13 aims to promote urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

Leveraging collective action and environmental literacy to address complex sustainability challenges

• Perspective
• Open access
• Published: 09 August 2022
• Volume 52 , pages 30–44, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

• Nicole M. Ardoin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3290-8211 1 ,
• Alison W. Bowers 2 &
• Mele Wheaton 3  

8233 Accesses

18 Citations

20 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Developing and enhancing societal capacity to understand, debate elements of, and take actionable steps toward a sustainable future at a scale beyond the individual are critical when addressing sustainability challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, and zoonotic disease. Although mounting evidence exists for how to facilitate individual action to address sustainability challenges, there is less understanding of how to foster collective action in this realm. To support research and practice promoting collective action to address sustainability issues, we define the term “collective environmental literacy” by delineating four key potent aspects: scale, dynamic processes, shared resources, and synergy. Building on existing collective constructs and thought, we highlight areas where researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can support individuals and communities as they come together to identify, develop, and implement solutions to wicked problems. We close by discussing limitations of this work and future directions in studying collective environmental literacy.

Similar content being viewed by others

Three pillars of sustainability: in search of conceptual origins

Reimagining the language of engagement in a post-stakeholder world

Can public awareness, knowledge and engagement improve climate change adaptation policies?

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

For socio-ecologically intertwined issues—such as climate change, land conversion, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and zoonotic diseases—and their associated multi-decadal timeframes, individual action is necessary, yet not sufficient, for systemic, sustained change (Amel et al. 2017 ; Bodin 2017 ; Niemiec et al. 2020 ; Spitzer and Fraser 2020 ). Instead, collective action, or individuals working together toward a common good, is essential for achieving the scope and scale of solutions to current sustainability challenges. To support communities as they engage in policy and action for socio-environmental change, communicators, land managers, policymakers, and other practitioners need an understanding of how communities coalesce and leverage their shared knowledge, skills, connections, and experiences.

Engagement efforts, such as those grounded in behavior-change approaches or community-based social marketing initiatives, that address socio-environmental issues have often emphasized individuals as the pathway to change. Such efforts address a range of domains including, but not limited to, residential energy use, personal transportation choices, and workplace recycling efforts, often doing so in a stepwise fashion, envisioning each setting or suite of behaviors as discrete spheres of action and influence (Heimlich and Ardoin 2008 ; McKenzie-Mohr 2011 ). In this way, specific actions are treated incrementally and linearly, considering first the individual barriers to be removed and then the motivations to be activated (and, sometimes, sustained; Monroe 2003 ; Gifford et al. 2011 ). Once each behavior is successfully instantiated, the next barrier is then addressed. Proceeding methodically from one action to the next, such initiatives often quite successfully alter a series of actions or group of related behaviors (at least initially) by addressing them incrementally, one at a time (Byerly et al. 2018 ). Following this aspirational logic chain, many resources have been channeled into such programs under the assumption that, by raising awareness and knowledge, such information, communication, and educational outreach efforts will shift attitudes and behaviors to an extent that, ultimately, mass-scale change will follow. (See discussion in Wals et al. 2014 .)

Numerous studies have demonstrated, however, that challenges arise with these stepwise approaches, particularly with regard to their ability to address complex issues and persist over time (Heimlich and Ardoin 2008 ; Wals et al. 2014 ). Such approaches place a tremendous—and unrealistic—burden on individuals, ignoring key aspects not only of behavioral science but also of social science more broadly, including the view that humans exist nested within socio-ecological systems and, thus, are most successful at achieving lasting change when it is meaningful, relevant, and undertaken within a supportive context (Swim et al. 2011 ; Feola 2015 ). Individualized approaches often require multiple steps or nudges (Byerly et al. 2018 ), or ongoing reminders to retain their salience (Stern et al. 2008 ). Because of the emphasis on decontextualized action, such approaches can miss, ignore, obfuscate, or minimize the importance of the bigger picture, which includes the sociocultural, biophysical, and political economic contexts (Ardoin 2006 ; Amel et al. 2017 ). Although the tightly trained focus on small, actionable steps and reliance on individual willpower may help in initially achieving success with initial habit formation (Carden and Wood 2018 ), it becomes questionable in terms of bringing about a wave of transformation on larger scales in the longer term. For those decontextualized actions to persist, they require continued prompting, constancy, and support in the social and biophysical context (Schultz 2014 ; Manfredo et al. 2016 ; Wood and Rünger 2016 ).

Less common in practice are theoretically based initiatives that embrace the holistic nature of the human experience, which occurs within complex systems spanning time and space in a multidimensional, weblike fashion (Bronfenbrenner 1979 ; Rogoff 2003 ; Barron 2006 ; DeCaro and Stokes 2008 ; Gould et al. 2019 ; Hovardas 2020 ). These systems-thinking approaches, while varying across disciplines and epistemological perspectives, envision human experiences, including learning and behavior, as occurring within a milieu that include the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts (Rogoff 2003 ; Roth and Lee 2007 ; Swim et al. 2011 ; Gordon 2019 ). In such a view, people’s everyday practices continuously reflect and grow out of past learning and experiences, not only at the individual, but also at the collective level (Lave 1991 ; Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003 ; Nasir et al. 2020 ; Ardoin and Heimlich 2021 ). The multidimensional context in which we exist—including the broader temporal and spatial ecosystem—both facilitates and constrains our actions.

Scholars across diverse areas of study discuss the need for and power of collective thought and action, using various conceptual frames, models, and terms, such as collective action, behavior, impact, and intelligence; collaborative governance; communities of practice; crowdsourcing; and social movement theory; among many others (Table 1 ). These scholars acknowledge and explore the influence of our multidimensional context on collective thought and action. In this paper, we explore the elements and processes that constitute collective environmental literacy . We draw on the vast, relevant literature and, in so doing, we attempt to invoke the power of the collective: by reviewing and synthesizing ideas from a variety of fields, we strive to leverage existing constructs and perspectives that explore notions of the “collective” (see Table 1 for a summary of constructs and theories reviewed to develop our working definition of collective environmental literacy). A primary goal of this paper is to dialogue with other researchers and practitioners working in this arena who are eager to uncover and further explore related avenues.

First, we present a formal definition of collective environmental literacy. Next, we briefly review the dominant view of environmental literacy at the individual level and, in support of a collective take on environmental literacy, we examine various collective constructs. We then delve more deeply into the definition of collective environmental literacy by outlining four key aspects: scale, dynamic processes, shared resources, and synergy. We conclude by providing suggestions for future directions in studying collective environmental literacy.

Defining collective environmental literacy

Decades of research in political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and the learning sciences, among other fields (Chawla and Cushing 2007 ; Ostrom 2009 ; Sawyer 2014 ; Bamberg et al. 2015 ; Chan 2016 ; Jost et al. 2017 ) repeatedly demonstrates the effectiveness, and indeed necessity of, collective action when addressing problems that are inherently social in nature. Yet theoretical frameworks and empirical documentation emphasize that such collective activities rarely arise spontaneously and, when they do, are a result of preconditions that have sown fertile ground (van Zomeren et al. 2008 ; Duncan 2018 ). Persistent and effective collective action then requires scaffolding in the form of institutional, sociocultural, and political economic structure that provides ongoing support. To facilitate discussions of how to effectively support collective action around sustainability issues, we suggest the concept of “collective environmental literacy.” We conceptualize collective environmental literacy as more than collective action; rather, we suggest that the term encapsulates action along with its various supporting structures and resources. Additionally, we employ the word “literacy” as it connotes learning, intention, and the idea that knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors can be enhanced iteratively over time. By using “literacy,” we strive to highlight the efforts, often unseen, that lead to effective collective action in communities. We draw on scholarship in science and health education, areas that have begun over the past two decades to theorize about related areas of collective science literacy (Roth and Lee 2002 , 2004 ; Lee and Roth 2003 ; Feinstein 2018 ) and health literacy (Freedman et al. 2009 ; Papen 2009 ; Chinn 2011 ; Guzys et al. 2015 ). Although these evolving constructs lack consensus definitions, they illuminate affordances and constraints that exist when conceptualizing collective environmental literacy (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM] 2016 ).

Some of the key necessary—but not sufficient—conditions that facilitate aligned, collective actions include a common body of decision-making information; shared attitudes, values, and beliefs toward a motivating issue or concern; and efficacy skills that facilitate change-making (Sturmer and Simon 2004 ; van Zomeren et al. 2008 ; Jagers et al. 2020 ). In addition, other contextual factors are essential, such as trust, reciprocity, collective efficacy, and communication among group members and societal-level facilitators, such as social norms, institutions, and technology (Bandura 2000 ; Ostrom 2010 ; McAdam and Boudet 2012 ; Jagers et al. 2020 ). Taken together, we term this body of knowledge, dispositions, skills, and the context in which they flourish collective environmental literacy . More formally, we define collective environmental literacy as: a dynamic, synergistic process that occurs as group members develop and leverage shared resources to undertake individual and aggregate actions over time to address sustainability issues within the multi-scalar context of a socio-environmental system (Fig.  1 ).

Key elements of collective environmental literacy

Environmental literacy: Historically individual, increasingly collective

Over the past five decades, the term “environmental literacy” has come into increasingly frequent use. Breaking from the traditional association of “literacy” with reading and writing in formal school contexts, environmental literacy emphasizes associations with character and behavior, often in the form of responsible environmental stewardship (Roth 1992 ). Footnote 1 Such perspectives define the concept as including affective (attitudinal), cognitive (knowledge-based), and behavioral domains, emphasizing that environmental literacy is both a process and outcome that develops, builds, and morphs over time (Hollweg et al. 2011 ; Wheaton et al. 2018 ; Clark et al. 2020 ).

The emphasis on defining, measuring, and developing interventions to bring about environmental literacy has primarily remained at the individual scale, as evidenced by frequent descriptions of an environmentally literate person (Roth 1992 ; Hollweg et al. 2011 among others) rather than community or community member. In most understandings, discussions, and manifestations of environmental literacy, the implicit assumption remains that the unit of action, intervention, and therefore analysis occurs at the individual level. Yet instinctively and perhaps by nature, community members often seek information and, as a result, take action collectively, sharing what some scholars call “the hive mind” or “group mind,” relying on each other for distributed knowledge, expertise, motivation, and support (Surowiecki 2005 ; Sunstein 2008 ; Sloman and Fernbach 2017 ; Paul 2021 ).

As with the proverbial elephant (Saxe, n.d.), each person, household, or neighborhood group may understand or “see” a different part of an issue or challenge, bring a novel understanding to the table, and have a certain perspective or skill to contribute. Although some environmental literacy discussions allude to a collective lens (e.g., Hollweg et al. 2011 ; Ardoin et al. 2013 ; Wheaton et al. 2018 ; Bey et al. 2020 ), defining, developing frameworks, and creating measures to assess the efficacy of such collective-scale sustainability-related endeavors has remained elusive. Footnote 2 Looking to related fields and disciplines—such as ecosystem theory, epidemiology and public health, sociology, network theory, and urban planning, among others—can provide insight, theoretical frames, and empirical examples to assist in such conceptualizations (McAdam and Boudet 2012 ; National Research Council 2015 ) (See Table 1 for an overview of some of the many areas of study that informed our conceptualization of collective environmental literacy).

Seeking the essence of the collective: Looking to and learning from others

The social sciences have long focused on “the kinds of activities engaged in by sizable but loosely organized groups of people” (Turner et al. 2020 , para. 1) and addressed various collective constructs, such as collective behavior, action, intelligence, and memory (Table 1 ). Although related constructs in both the social and natural sciences—such as communities of practice (Wenger and Snyder 2000 ), collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2008 ; Emerson et al. 2012 ), and the collaboration–coordination continuum (Sadoff and Grey 2005 ; Prager 2015 ), as well as those from social movement theory and related areas (McAdam and Boudet 2012 ; de Moor and Wahlström 2019 )—lack the word “collective” in name, they too leverage the benefits of collectivity. A central tenet connects all of these areas: powerful processes, actions, and outcomes can arise when individuals coalesce around a common purpose or cause. This notion of a dynamic, potent force transcending the individual to enhance the efficacy of outcomes motivates the application of a collective lens to the environmental literacy concept.

Dating to the 1800s, discussions of collective behavior have explored connections to social order, structures, and norms (Park 1927 ; Smelser 2011 /1962; Turner and Killian 1987 ). Initially, the focus emphasized spontaneous, often violent crowd behaviors, such as riots, mobs, and rebellions. More contemporarily, sociologists, political scientists, and others who study social movements and collective behaviors acknowledge that such phenomena may take many forms, including those occurring in natural ecosystems, such as ant colonies, bird flocks, and even the human brain (Gordon 2019 ). In sociology, collective action represents a paradigm shift highlighting coordinated, purposeful pro-social movements, while de-emphasizing aroused emotions and crowd behavior (Miller 2014 ). In political science, Ostrom’s ( 1990 , 2000 , 2010 ) theory of collective action in the context of the management of shared resources extends the concept’s reach to economics and other fields. In education and the learning sciences, social learning and sociocultural theories tap into the idea of learning as a social-cognitive-cultural endeavor (Vygotsky 1980 ; Lave and Wenger 1991 ; Tudge and Winterhoff 1993 ; Rogoff 2003 ; Reed et al. 2010 ).

Collective action, specifically, and collective constructs, generally, have found their way into the research and practice in the fields of conservation, natural resources, and environmental management. Collective action theory has been applied in a range of settings and scenarios, including agriculture (Mills et al. 2011 ), invasive species management (Marshall et al. 2016 ; Sullivan et al. 2017 ; Lubeck et al. 2019 ; Clarke et al. 2021 ), fire management (Canadas et al. 2016 ; Charnley et al. 2020 ), habitat conservation (Raymond 2006 ; Niemiec et al. 2020 ), and water governance (Lopez-Gunn 2003 ; Baldwin et al. 2018 ), among others. Frameworks and methods that emphasize other collective-related ideas—like collaboration, co-production, and group learning—are also ubiquitous in natural resource and environmental management. These constructs include community-based conservation (DeCaro and Stokes 2008 ; Niemiec et al. 2016 ), community natural resource management (Kellert et al. 2000 ; Dale et al. 2020 ), collaboration/coordination (Sadoff and Grey 2005 ; Prager 2015 ), polycentricity (Galaz et al. 2012 ; Heikkila et al. 2018 ), knowledge co-production (Armitage et al. 2011 ; Singh et al. 2021 ), and social learning (Reed et al. 2010 ; Hovardas 2020 ). Many writings on collective efforts in the social sciences broadly, and applied in the area of environment specifically, provide insights into collective action’s necessary preconditions, which prove invaluable to further defining and later operationalizing collective environmental literacy.

Unpacking the definition of collective environmental literacy: Anchoring principles

As described, we propose the following working definition of collective environmental literacy drawing on our analysis of related literatures and informed by scholarly and professional experience in the sustainability and conservation fields: a dynamic, synergistic process that occurs as group members develop and leverage shared resources to undertake individual and aggregate actions over time to address sustainability issues within the multi-scalar context of a socio-environmental system (Fig.  1 ). This definition centers on four core, intertwined ideas: the scale of the group involved; the dynamic nature of the process; shared resources brought by, available to, and needed by the group; and the synergy that arises from group interaction.

Multi-scalar

When transitioning from the focus on individual to collective actions—and, herein, principles of environmental literacy—the most obvious and primary requisite shift is one of scale. Yet, moving to a collective scale does not mean abandoning action at the individual scale; rather, success at the collective level is intrinsically tied to what occurs at an individual level. Such collective-scale impacts leverage the power of the hive, harnessing people’s willingness, ability, and motivation to take action alongside others, share their ideas and resources to build collective ideas and resources, contribute to making a difference in an impactful way, and participate communally in pro-social activities.

Collective environmental literacy is likely dynamic in its orientation to scale, incorporating place-based notions, such as ecoregional or community-level environmental literacy (with an emphasis on geographic boundaries). On the other hand, it may encapsulate environmental literacy of a group or organization united by a common identity (e.g., organizational membership) or cause (e.g., old-growth forests, coastal protection), rather than solely or even primarily by geography. Although shifting scales can make measuring collective environmental literacy more difficult, dynamic levels may be a benefit when addressing planetary boundary issues such as climate change, biodiversity, and ocean acidification (Galaz et al. 2012 ). Some scholars have called for a polycentric approach to these large-scale issues in response to a perceived failure of global-wide, top-down solutions (Ostrom 2010 , 2012 ; Jordan et al. 2018 ). Conceptualizing and consequently supporting collective environmental literacy at multiple scales can facilitate such desired polycentricity.

Rather than representing a static outcome, environmental literacy is a dynamic process that is fluctuating and complex, reflective of iterative interactions among community members, whose discussions and negotiations reflect the changing context of sustainability issues. Footnote 3 Such open-minded processes allow for, and indeed welcome, adaptation in a way that builds social-ecological resilience (Berkes and Jolly 2002 ; Adger et al. 2005 ; Berkes 2007 ). Additionally, this dynamism allows for collective development and maturation, supporting community growth in collective knowledge, attitudes, skills, and actions via new experiences, interactions, and efforts (Berkman et al. 2010 ). With this mindset, and within a sociocultural perspective, collective environmental literacy evolves through drawing on and contributing to the community’s funds of knowledge (González et al. 2006 ). Movement and actions within and among groups impact collective literacy, as members share knowledge and other resources, shifting individuals and the group in the course of their shared practices (Samerski 2019 ).

In a collective mode, effectiveness is heightened as shared resources are streamlined, waste is minimized, and innovation maximized. Rather than each group member developing individual expertise in every matter of concern, the shared knowledge, skills, and behaviors can be distributed, pursued, and amplified among group members efficiently and effectively, with collective literacy emerging from the process of pooling diverse forms of capital and aggregating resources. This perspective builds on ideas of social capital as a collective good (Ostrom 1990 ; Putnam 2020 ), wherein relationships of trust and reciprocity are both inputs and outcomes (Pretty and Ward 2001 ). The shared resources then catalyze and sustain action as they are reassembled and coalesced at the group level for collective impact.

The pooled resources—likely vast—may include, but are not limited to, physical and human resources, funding, time, energy, and space and place (physical or digital). Shared resources may also include forms of theorized capital, such as intellectual and social (Putnam 2020 ). Also of note is the recognition that these resources extend far beyond information and knowledge. Of particular interest when building collective environmental literacy are resources previously ignored or overlooked by those in power in prior sustainability efforts. For example, collective environmental literacy can draw strength from shared resources unique to the community or even subgroups within the larger community. Discussions of Indigenous knowledge (Gadgil et al. 1993 ) and funds of knowledge (González et al. 2006 ; Cruz et al. 2018 ) suggest critical, shared resources that highlight strengths of an individual community and its members. Another dimension of shared resources relates to the strength of institutional connections, such as the benefits that accrue from leveraging the collective knowledge, expertise, and resources of organizational collaborators working in adjacent areas to further and amplify each other’s impact (Wojcik et al. 2021 ).

Synergistic

Finally, given the inherent complexities related to defining, deploying, implementing, and measuring these dynamic, at-times ephemeral processes, resources, and outcomes at a collective scale, working in such a manner must be clearly advantageous to pressing sustainability issues at hand. Numerous related constructs and approaches from a range of fields emphasize the benefits of diverse collaboration to collective thought and action, including improved solutions, more effective and fair processes, and more socioculturally just outcomes (Klein 1990 ; Jörg 2011 ; Wenger and Snyder 2000 ; Djenontin and Meadow 2018 ). These benefits go beyond efficient aggregation and distribution of resources, invoking an almost magical quality that defines synergy, resulting in robust processes and outcomes that are more than the sum of the parts.

This synergy relies on the diversity of a group across various dimensions, bringing power, strength, and insight to a decision-making process (Bear and Woolley 2011 ; Curşeu and Pluut 2013 ; Freeman and Huang 2015 ; Lu et al. 2017 ; Bendor and Page 2019 ). Individuals are limited not only to singular knowledge-perspectives and skillsets, but also to their own experiences, which influence their self-affirming viewpoints and tendencies to seek out confirmatory information for existing beliefs (Kahan et al. 2011 ). Although the coming together of those from different racial, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds facilitates a collective literacy process that draws on a wider range of resources and equips a gestalt, it also sets up the need to consider issues of power, privilege, voice, and representation (Bäckstrand 2006 ) and the role of social capital, leading to questions related to trust and reciprocity in effective collectives (Pretty and Ward 2001 ; Folke et al. 2005 ).

Leveraging the ‘Hive’: Proceeding with collective environmental literacy

This paper presents one conceptualization of collective environmental literacy, with the understanding that numerous ways exist to envision its definition, formation, deployment, and measurement. Characterized by a collective effort, such literacies at scale offer a way to imagine, measure, and support the synergy that occurs when the emphasis moves from an individual to a larger whole. By expanding the scale and focusing on shared responsibility among actors at the systems level, opportunities arise for inspiring and enabling a broader contribution to a sustainable future. These evolving notions serve to invite ongoing conversation, both in research and practice, about how to enact our collective responsibility toward, as well as vision of, a thriving future.

Emerging from the many discussions of shared and collaborative efforts to address socio-environmental issues, our conceptualization of collective environmental literacy is a first step toward supporting communities as they work to identify, address, and solve sustainability problems. We urge continued discussions on this topic, with the goal of understanding the concept of collective environmental literacy, how to measure it, and the implications of this work for practitioners. The conceptual roots of collective environmental literacy reach into countless fields of study and, as such, a transdisciplinary approach, which includes an eye toward practice, is necessary to fully capture and maximize the tremendous amount of knowledge, wisdom, and experience around this topic. Specifically, next steps to evolve the concept include engaging sustainability researchers and practitioners in discussions of the saliency of the presented definition of collective environmental literacy. These discussions include verifying the completeness of the definition and ensuring a thorough review of relevant research: Are parts of the definition missing or unclear? What are the “blank, blind, bald, and bright spots” in the literature (Reid 2019 p. 158)? Additionally, recognizing and leveraging literacy at a collective scale most certainly is not unique to environmental work, nor is adopting literacy-related language to conceptualize and measure process outcomes, although the former has consistently proven more challenging. Moreover, although we (the authors) appreciate the connotations and structures gained by using a literacy framework, we struggle with whether “environmental literacy” is the most appropriate and useful term for the conceptualizations as described herein; we, thus, welcome lively discussions about the need for new terminology.

Even at this early stage of conceptualization, this work has implications for practitioners. For scientists, communicators, policymakers, land managers, and other professionals desiring to work with communities to address sustainability issues, a primary take-away message concerns the holistic nature of what is needed for effective collective action in the environmental realm. Many previous efforts have focused on conveying information and, while a lack of knowledge and awareness may be a barrier to action in some cases, the need for a more holistic lens is increasingly clear. This move beyond an individually focused, information-deficit model is essential for effective impact (Bolderdijk et al. 2013 ; van der Linden 2014 ; Geiger et al. 2019 ). The concept of collective environmental literacy suggests a role for developing shared resources that can foster effective collective action. When working with communities, a critical early step includes some form of needs assessment—a systematic, in-depth process that allows for meaningfully gauging gaps in shared resources required to tackle sustainability issues (Braus 2011). Following this initial, evaluative step, an understanding of the components of collective environmental literacy, as outlined in this paper, can be used to guide the development of interventions to support communities in their efforts to address those issues.

Growing discussion of collective literacy constructs, and related areas, suggests researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working in pro-social areas recognize and value collective efforts, despite the need for clearer definitions and effective measures. This definitional and measurement work, in both research and practice, is not easy. The ever-changing, dynamic contexts in which collective environmental literacy exists make defining the concept a moving target, compounded by a need to draw upon work in countless, often distinct academic fields of study. Furthermore, the hard-to-see, inner workings of collective constructs make measurement difficult. Yet, the “power of the hive” is intriguing, as the synergism that arises from communities working in an aligned manner toward a unified vision suggests a potency and wave of motivated action essential to coalescing and leveraging individual goodwill, harnessing its power and potential toward effective sustainability solutions.

See Stables and Bishop’s ( 2001 ) idea of defining environmental literacy by viewing the environment as “text.”

The climate change education literature also includes a nascent, but growing, discussion of collective-lens thinking and literacy. See, for example, Waldron et al. ( 2019 ), Mochizuki and Bryan ( 2015 ), and Kopnina ( 2016 ).

This conceptualization is similar to how some scholars describe collective health literacy (Berkman et al., 2010 ; Mårtensson and Hensing, 2012 ).

Adger, W.N. 2003. Social capital, collective action, and adaptation to climate change. Economic Geography 79: 387–404.

Article   Google Scholar  

Adger, W.N., T.P. Hughes, C. Folke, S.R. Carpenter, and J. Rockström. 2005. Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters. Science 309: 1036–1039. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1112122 .

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Adler, P.S., and S.-W. Kwon. 2002. Social capital: Prospects for a new concept. Academy of Management Review 27: 17–40. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2002.5922314 .

Agrawal, A. 1995. Dismantling the divide between Indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and Change 26: 413–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00560.x .

Aguilar, O.M. 2018. Examining the literature to reveal the nature of community EE/ESD programs and research. Environmental Education Research 24: 26–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2016.1244658 .

Aguilar, O., A. Price, and M. Krasny. 2015. Perspectives on community environmental education. In M.C. Monroe & M.E. Krasny (Eds.), Across the spectrum: Resources for environmental educators (3rd edn., pp. 235–249). North American Association for Environmental Education.

Aldrich, D.P., and M.A. Meyer. 2015. Social capital and community resilience. American Behavioral Scientist 59: 254–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764214550299 .

Amel, E., C. Manning, B. Scott, and S. Koger. 2017. Beyond the roots of human inaction: Fostering collective effort toward ecosystem conservation. Science 356: 275–279. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal1931 .

Ansell, C., and A. Gash. 2008. Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18: 543–571. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mum032 .

Ardoin, N.M. 2006. Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of place: Lessons for environmental education. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 11: 112–126.

Google Scholar  

Ardoin, N.M., and J.E. Heimlich. 2021. Environmental learning in everyday life: Foundations of meaning and a context for change. Environmental Education Research 27: 1681–1699. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2021.1992354 .

Ardoin, N.M., C. Clark, and E. Kelsey. 2013. An exploration of future trends in environmental education research. Environmental Education Research 19: 499–520. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.709823 .

Armitage, D., F. Berkes, A. Dale, E. Kocho-Schellenberg, and E. Patton. 2011. Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt in Canada’s Arctic. Global Environmental Change 21: 995–1004. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.04.006 .

Assis Neto, F.R., and C.A.S. Santos. 2018. Understanding crowdsourcing projects: A systematic review of tendencies, workflow, and quality management. Information Processing & Management 54: 490–506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2018.03.006 .

Bäckstrand, K. 2006. Multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Rethinking legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness. European Environment 16: 290–306. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.425 .

Baldwin, E., P. McCord, J. Dell’Angelo, and T. Evans. 2018. Collective action in a polycentric water governance system. Environmental Policy and Governance 28: 212–222. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1810 .

Bamberg, S., J. Rees, and S. Seebauer. 2015. Collective climate action: Determinants of participation intention in community-based pro-environmental initiatives. Journal of Environmental Psychology 43: 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.06.006 .

Bandura, A. 1977. Social learning theory . Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Bandura, A. 2000. Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy. Current Directions in Psychological Science 9: 75–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00064 .

Barron, B. 2006. Interest and self-sustained learning as catalysts of development: A learning ecology perspective. Human Development 49: 193–224. https://doi.org/10.1159/000094368 .

Barry, M.M., M. D’Eath, and J. Sixsmith. 2013. Interventions for improving population health literacy: Insights from a rapid review of the evidence. Journal of Health Communication 18: 1507–1522. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2013.840699 .

Barton, A.C., and E. Tan. 2009. Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 46: 50–73. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20269 .

Bear, J.B., and A.W. Woolley. 2011. The role of gender in team collaboration and performance. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 36: 146–153. https://doi.org/10.1179/030801811X13013181961473 .

Bendor, J., and S.E. Page. 2019. Optimal team composition for tool-based problem solving. Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 28: 734–764. https://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12295 .

Berkes, F. 2007. Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: Lessons from resilience thinking. Natural Hazards 41: 283–295. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-006-9036-7 .

Berkes, F., and D. Jolly. 2002. Adapting to climate change: Social-ecological resilience in a Canadian western Arctic community. Conservation Ecology 5: 45.

Berkes, F., and H. Ross. 2013. Community resilience: Toward an integrated approach. Society & Natural Resources 26: 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2012.736605 .

Berkes, F., M.K. Berkes, and H. Fast. 2007. Collaborative integrated management in Canada’s north: The role of local and traditional knowledge and community-based monitoring. Coastal Management 35: 143–162.

Berkman, N.D., T.C. Davis, and L. McCormack. 2010. Health literacy: What is it? Journal of Health Communication 15: 9–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2010.499985 .

Bey, G., C. McDougall, and S. Schoedinger. 2020. Report on the NOAA office of education environmental literacy program community resilience education theory of change. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . https://doi.org/10.25923/mh0g-5q69 .

Blumer, H. 1971. Social problems as collective behavior. Social Problems 18: 298–306.

Bodin, Ö. 2017. Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems. Science . https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan1114 .

Bolderdijk, J.W., M. Gorsira, K. Keizer, and L. Steg. 2013. Values determine the (in)effectiveness of informational interventions in promoting pro-environmental behavior. PLoS ONE 8: e83911. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083911 .

Brabham, D.C. 2013. Crowdsourcing . Cambridge: MIT Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Braus, J. (Ed.). 2011. Tools of engagement: A toolkit for engaging people in conservation. NAAEE/Audubon. https://cdn.naaee.org/sites/default/files/eepro/resource/files/toolsofengagement.pdf .

Brieger, S.A. 2019. Social identity and environmental concern: The importance of contextual effects. Environment and Behavior 51: 828–855. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916518756988 .

Briggs, J. 2005. The use of Indigenous knowledge in development: Problems and challenges. Progress in Development Studies 5: 99–114. https://doi.org/10.1191/1464993405ps105oa .

Briggs, J., and J. Sharp. 2004. Indigenous knowledges and development: A postcolonial caution. Third World Quarterly 25: 661–676. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590410001678915 .

Bronfenbrenner, U. 1979. The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bruce, C., and P. Chesterton. 2002. Constituting collective consciousness: Information literacy in university curricula. International Journal for Academic Development 7: 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440210156457 .

Byerly, H., A. Balmford, P.J. Ferraro, C.H. Wagner, E. Palchak, S. Polasky, T.H. Ricketts, A.J. Schwartz, et al. 2018. Nudging pro-environmental behavior: Evidence and opportunities. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 16: 159–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1777 .

Canadas, M.J., A. Novais, and M. Marques. 2016. Wildfires, forest management and landowners’ collective action: A comparative approach at the local level. Land Use Policy 56: 179–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.04.035 .

Carden, L., and W. Wood. 2018. Habit formation and change. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 20: 117–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.12.009 .

Chan, M. 2016. Psychological antecedents and motivational models of collective action: Examining the role of perceived effectiveness in political protest participation. Social Movement Studies 15: 305–321. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1096192 .

Charnley, S., E.C. Kelly, and A.P. Fischer. 2020. Fostering collective action to reduce wildfire risk across property boundaries in the American West. Environmental Research Letters 15: 025007. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab639a .

Chawla, L., and D.F. Cushing. 2007. Education for strategic environmental behavior. Environmental Education Research 13: 437–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620701581539 .

Chinn, D. 2011. Critical health literacy: A review and critical analysis. Social Science & Medicine 73: 60–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.04.004 .

Clark, C.R., J.E. Heimlich, N.M. Ardoin, and J. Braus. 2020. Using a Delphi study to clarify the landscape and core outcomes in environmental education. Environmental Education Research 26: 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1727859 .

Clarke, M., Z. Ma, S.A. Snyder, and K. Floress. 2021. Factors influencing family forest owners’ interest in community-led collective invasive plant management. Environmental Management 67: 1088–1099. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-021-01454-1 .

Cruz, A.R., S.T. Selby, and W.H. Durham. 2018. Place-based education for environmental behavior: A ‘funds of knowledge’ and social capital approach. Environmental Education Research 24: 627–647. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1311842 .

Curşeu, P.L., and H. Pluut. 2013. Student groups as learning entities: The effect of group diversity and teamwork quality on groups’ cognitive complexity. Studies in Higher Education 38: 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.565122 .

Cutter, S.L., L. Barnes, M. Berry, C. Burton, E. Evans, E. Tate, and J. Webb. 2008. A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters. Global Environmental Change 18: 598–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.07.013 .

Dale, A., K. Vella, S. Ryan, K. Broderick, R. Hill, R. Potts, and T. Brewer. 2020. Governing community-based natural resource management in Australia: International implications. Land 9: 234. https://doi.org/10.3390/land9070234 .

de Moor, J., and M. Wahlström. 2019. Narrating political opportunities: Explaining strategic adaptation in the climate movement. Theory and Society 48: 419–451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09347-3 .

DeCaro, D., and M. Stokes. 2008. Social-psychological principles of community-based conservation and conservancy motivation: Attaining goals within an autonomy-supportive environment. Conservation Biology 22: 1443–1451.

Djenontin, I.N.S., and A.M. Meadow. 2018. The art of co-production of knowledge in environmental sciences and management: Lessons from international practice. Environmental Management 61: 885–903. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-018-1028-3 .

Duncan, L.E. 2018. The psychology of collective action. In The Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology , ed. K. Deaux and M. Snyder. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edwards, M., F. Wood, M. Davies, and A. Edwards. 2015. ‘Distributed health literacy’: Longitudinal qualitative analysis of the roles of health literacy mediators and social networks of people living with a long-term health condition. Health Expectations 18: 1180–1193. https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.12093 .

Emerson, K., T. Nabatchi, and S. Balogh. 2012. An integrative framework for collaborative governance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 22: 1–29.

Engeström, Y. 2001. Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work 14: 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080020028747 .

Ensor, J., and B. Harvey. 2015. Social learning and climate change adaptation: Evidence for international development practice. Wires Climate Change 6: 509–522. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.348 .

Fanta, V., M. Šálek, and P. Sklenicka. 2019. How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory? Nature Communications 10: 1105. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09102-3 .

Feinstein, N.W. 2018. Collective science literacy: A key to community science capacity [Conference session]. American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, Austin, TX, USA https://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/files/earthconnections/collective_science_literacy_key.pdf .

Feola, G. 2015. Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: A review of emerging concepts. Ambio 44: 376–390. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2689741 .

Fernandez-Gimenez, M.E., H.L. Ballard, and V.E. Sturtevant. 2008. Adaptive management and social learning in collaborative and community-based monitoring: A study of five community-based forestry organizations in the western USA. Ecology and Society 13: 15.

Folke, C., T. Hahn, P. Olsson, and J. Norberg. 2005. Adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30: 441–473. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511 .

Freedman, D.A., K.D. Bess, H.A. Tucker, D.L. Boyd, A.M. Tuchman, and K.A. Wallston. 2009. Public health literacy defined. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 36: 446–451. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2009.02.001 .

Freeman, R.B., and W. Huang. 2015. Collaborating with people like me: Ethnic coauthorship within the United States. Journal of Labor Economics 33: S289–S318.

Gadgil, M., F. Berkes, and C. Folke. 1993. Indigenous knowledge for biodiversity conservation. Ambio 22: 151–156.

Galaz, V., B. Crona, H. Österblom, P. Olsson, and C. Folke. 2012. Polycentric systems and interacting planetary boundaries—Emerging governance of climate change–ocean acidification–marine biodiversity. Ecological Economics 81: 21–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.11.012 .

Geiger, S.M., M. Geiger, and O. Wilhelm. 2019. Environment-specific vs general knowledge and their role in pro-environmental behavior. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 718. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00718 .

Gifford, R., C. Kormos, and A. McIntyre. 2011. Behavioral dimensions of climate change: Drivers, responses, barriers, and interventions. Wires Climate Change 2: 801–827. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.143 .

González, N., L.C. Moll, and C. Amanti. 2006. Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms . New York: Routledge.

Gordon, D.M. 2019. Measuring collective behavior: An ecological approach. Theory in Biosciences . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-019-00302-5 .

Gould, R.K., N.M. Ardoin, J.M. Thomsen, and N. Wyman Roth. 2019. Exploring connections between environmental learning and behavior through four everyday-life case studies. Environmental Education Research 25: 314–340.

Graham, S., A.L. Metcalf, N. Gill, R. Niemiec, C. Moreno, T. Bach, V. Ikutegbe, L. Hallstrom, et al. 2019. Opportunities for better use of collective action theory in research and governance for invasive species management. Conservation Biology 33: 275–287. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13266 .

Granovetter, M. 1978. Threshold models of collective behavior. American Journal of Sociology 83: 1420–1443.

Groulx, M., M.C. Brisbois, C.J. Lemieux, A. Winegardner, and L. Fishback. 2017. A role for nature-based citizen science in promoting individual and collective climate change action? A systematic review of learning outcomes. Science Communication 39: 45–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547016688324 .

Gutiérrez, K.D., and B. Rogoff. 2003. Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher 32: 19–25. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032005019 .

Guzys, D., A. Kenny, V. Dickson-Swift, and G. Threlkeld. 2015. A critical review of population health literacy assessment. BMC Public Health 15: 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-1551-6 .

Halbwachs, M. 1992. On collective memory (L. A. Coser, Ed. & Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original works published 1941 and 1952).

Heikkila, T., S. Villamayor-Tomas, and D. Garrick. 2018. Bringing polycentric systems into focus for environmental governance. Environmental Policy and Governance 28: 207–211. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1809 .

Heimlich, J.E., and N.M. Ardoin. 2008. Understanding behavior to understand behavior change: A literature review. Environmental Education Research 14: 215–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620802148881 .

Hill, R., F.J. Walsh, J. Davies, A. Sparrow, M. Mooney, R.M. Wise, and M. Tengö. 2020. Knowledge co-production for Indigenous adaptation pathways: Transform post-colonial articulation complexes to empower local decision-making. Global Environmental Change 65: 102161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102161 .

Hollweg, K.S., J. Taylor, R.W. Bybee, T.J. Marcinkowski, W.C. McBeth, and P. Zoido. 2011. Developing a framework for assessing environmental literacy: Executive summary . North American Association for Environmental Education. https://cdn.naaee.org/sites/default/files/envliteracyexesummary.pdf .

Hovardas, T. 2020. A social learning approach for stakeholder engagement in large carnivore conservation and management. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 8: 436. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.525278 .

Jagers, S.C., N. Harring, Å. Löfgren, M. Sjöstedt, F. Alpizar, B. Brülde, D. Langlet, A. Nilsson, et al. 2020. On the preconditions for large-scale collective action. Ambio 49: 1282–1296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01284-w .

Jordan, A., D. Huitema, H. van Asselt, and J. Forster. 2018. Governing climate change: Polycentricity in action? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jörg, T. 2011. New thinking in complexity for the social sciences and humanities: A generative, transdisciplinary approach . New York: Springer Science & Business Media.

Jost, J.T., J. Becker, D. Osborne, and V. Badaan. 2017. Missing in (collective) action: Ideology, system justification, and the motivational antecedents of two types of protest behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science 26: 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417690633 .

Jull, J., A. Giles, and I.D. Graham. 2017. Community-based participatory research and integrated knowledge translation: Advancing the co-creation of knowledge. Implementation Science 12: 150. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-017-0696-3 .

Kahan, D.M., H. Jenkins-Smith, and D. Braman. 2011. Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research 14: 147–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2010.511246 .

Kania, J., and M. Kramer. 2011. Collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review 9: 36–41.

Karachiwalla, R., and F. Pinkow. 2021. Understanding crowdsourcing projects: A review on the key design elements of a crowdsourcing initiative. Creativity and Innovation Management 30: 563–584. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12454 .

Kellert, S.R., J.N. Mehta, S.A. Ebbin, and L.L. Lichtenfeld. 2000. Community natural resource management: Promise, rhetoric, and reality. Society & Natural Resources 13: 705–715.

Klein, J.T. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Knapp, C.N., R.S. Reid, M.E. Fernández-Giménez, J.A. Klein, and K.A. Galvin. 2019. Placing transdisciplinarity in context: A review of approaches to connect scholars, society and action. Sustainability 11: 4899. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11184899 .

Koliou, M., J.W. van de Lindt, T.P. McAllister, B.R. Ellingwood, M. Dillard, and H. Cutler. 2020. State of the research in community resilience: Progress and challenges. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure 5: 131–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2017.1418547 .

Kopnina, H. 2016. Of big hegemonies and little tigers: Ecocentrism and environmental justice. The Journal of Environmental Education 47: 139–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2015.1048502 .

Krasny, M.E., M. Mukute, O. Aguilar, M.P. Masilela, and L. Olvitt. 2017. Community environmental education. In Urban environmental education review , ed. A. Russ and M.E. Krasny, 124–132. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Lave, J. 1991. Situating learning in communities of practice.

Lave, J., and E. Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, S., and W.-M. Roth. 2003. Science and the “good citizen”: Community-based scientific literacy. Science, Technology, & Human Values 28: 403–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243903028003003 .

Lévy, P., and R. Bononno. 1997. Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace . New York: Perseus Books.

Lloyd, A. 2005. No man (or woman) is an island: Information literacy, affordances and communities of practice. The Australian Library Journal 54: 230–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2005.10721760 .

Lopez-Gunn, E. 2003. The role of collective action in water governance: A comparative study of groundwater user associations in La Mancha aquifers in Spain. Water International 28: 367–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060308691711 .

Lu, J.G., A.C. Hafenbrack, P.W. Eastwick, D.J. Wang, W.W. Maddux, and A.D. Galinsky. 2017. “Going out” of the box: Close intercultural friendships and romantic relationships spark creativity, workplace innovation, and entrepreneurship. Journal of Applied Psychology 102: 1091–1108. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000212 .

Lubeck, A., A. Metcalf, C. Beckman, L. Yung, and J. Angle. 2019. Collective factors drive individual invasive species control behaviors: Evidence from private lands in Montana, USA. Ecology and Society . https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10897-240232 .

Mackay, C.M.L., M.T. Schmitt, A.E. Lutz, and J. Mendel. 2021. Recent developments in the social identity approach to the psychology of climate change. Current Opinion in Psychology 42: 95–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.04.009 .

Magis, K. 2010. Community resilience: An indicator of social sustainability. Society & Natural Resources 23: 401–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920903305674 .

Manfredo, M.J., T.L. Teel, and A.M. Dietsch. 2016. Implications of human value shift and persistence for biodiversity conservation. Conservation Biology 30: 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12619 .

Marshall, G.R., M.J. Coleman, B.M. Sindel, I.J. Reeve, and P.J. Berney. 2016. Collective action in invasive species control, and prospects for community-based governance: The case of serrated tussock ( Nassella trichotoma ) in New South Wales, Australia. Land Use Policy 56: 100–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.04.028 .

Mårtensson, L., and G. Hensing. 2012. Health literacy: A heterogeneous phenomenon: A literature review. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences 26: 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6712.2011.00900.x .

Martin, C., and C. Steinkuehler. 2010. Collective information literacy in massively multiplayer online games. E-Learning and Digital Media 7: 355–365. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2010.7.4.355 .

Masson, T., and I. Fritsche. 2021. We need climate change mitigation and climate change mitigation needs the ‘We’: A state-of-the-art review of social identity effects motivating climate change action. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 42: 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.04.006 .

Massung, E., D. Coyle, K.F. Cater, M. Jay, and C. Preist. 2013. Using crowdsourcing to support pro-environmental community activism. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470708 .

McAdam, D. 2017. Social movement theory and the prospects for climate change activism in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052615-025801 .

McAdam, D., and H. Boudet. 2012. Putting social movements in their place: Explaining opposition to energy projects in the United States, 2000–2005 . Cambridge University Press.

McKenzie-Mohr, D. 2011. Fostering sustainable behavior: An introduction to community-based social marketing (3rd edn.). New Society Publishers.

McKinley, D.C., A.J. Miller-Rushing, H.L. Ballard, R. Bonney, H. Brown, S.C. Cook-Patton, D.M. Evans, R.A. French, et al. 2017. Citizen science can improve conservation science, natural resource management, and environmental protection. Biological Conservation 208: 15–28.

Miller, D.L. 2014. Introduction to collective behavior and collective action (3rd ed.). Waveland Press.

Mills, J., D. Gibbon, J. Ingram, M. Reed, C. Short, and J. Dwyer. 2011. Organising collective action for effective environmental management and social learning in Wales. The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension 17: 69–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/1389224X.2011.536356 .

Mistry, J., and A. Berardi. 2016. Bridging Indigenous and scientific knowledge. Science 352: 1274–1275. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf1160 .

Mochizuki, Y., and A. Bryan. 2015. Climate change education in the context of education for sustainable development: Rationale and principles. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 9: 4–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973408215569109 .

Monroe, M.C. 2003. Two avenues for encouraging conservation behaviors. Human Ecology Review 10: 113–125.

Nasir, N.S., M.M. de Royston, B. Barron, P. Bell, R. Pea, R. Stevens, and S. Goldman. 2020. Learning pathways: How learning is culturally organized. In Handbook of the cultural foundations of learning , ed. N.S. Nasir, C.D. Lee, R. Pea, and M.M. de Royston, 195–211. Routledge.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. Science literacy: Concepts, contexts, and consequences . https://doi.org/10.17226/23595

National Research Council. 2015. Collective behavior: From cells to societies: Interdisciplinary research team summaries . National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/21737

Niemiec, R.M., N.M. Ardoin, C.B. Wharton, and G.P. Asner G.P. 2016. Motivating residents to combat invasive species on private lands: Social norms and community reciprocity. Ecology and Society , 21. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08362-210230

Niemiec, R.M., S. McCaffrey, and M.S. Jones. 2020. Clarifying the degree and type of public good collective action problem posed by natural resource management challenges. Ecology and Society 25: 30. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11483-250130 .

Norström, A.V., C. Cvitanovic, M.F. Löf, S. West, C. Wyborn, P. Balvanera, A.T. Bednarek, E.M. Bennett, et al. 2020. Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability 3: 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2 .

Olick, J.K. 1999. Collective memory: The two cultures. Sociological Theory 17: 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00083 .

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action . Cambridge University Press.

Ostrom, E. 2000. Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of Economic Perspectives 14: 137–158. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.14.3.137 .

Ostrom, E. 2009. A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems. Science 325: 419–422. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133 .

Ostrom, E. 2010. Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change 20: 550–557. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.07.004 .

Ostrom, E. 2012. Nested externalities and polycentric institutions: Must we wait for global solutions to climate change before taking actions at other scales? Economic Theory 49: 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-010-0558-6 .

Ostrom, E., and T.K. Ahn. 2009. The meaning of social capital and its link to collective action. In Handbook of social capital: The troika of sociology, political science and economics , ed. G.T. Svendsen and G.L.H. Svendsen, 17–35. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Papen, U. 2009. Literacy, learning and health: A social practices view of health literacy. Literacy and Numeracy Studies . https://doi.org/10.5130/lns.v0i0.1275 .

Park, R.E. 1927. Human nature and collective behavior. American Journal of Sociology 32: 733–741.

Paul, A.M. 2021. The extended mind: The power of thinking outside the brain . Boston: Mariner Books.

Pawilen, G.T. 2021. Integrating Indigenous knowledge in the Philippine elementary science curriculum: Integrating Indigenous knowledge. International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction 13: 1148–1160.

Prager, K. 2015. Agri-environmental collaboratives for landscape management in Europe. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 12: 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2014.10.009 .

Pretty, J., and H. Ward. 2001. Social capital and the environment. World Development 29: 209–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(00)00098-X .

Putnam, R.D. 2020. Bowling alone: Revised and updated: The collapse and revival of American community . Anniversary. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Raymond, L. 2006. Cooperation without trust: Overcoming collective action barriers to endangered species protection. Policy Studies Journal 34: 37–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.2006.00144.x .

Reed, M.S., A.C. Evely, G. Cundill, I. Fazey, J. Glass, A. Laing, J. Newig, B. Parrish, et al. 2010. What is social learning? Ecology and Society 15: 12.

Reicher, S., R. Spears, and S.A. Haslam. 2010. The social identity approach in social psychology. In The SAGE handbook of identities (pp. 45–62). SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200889

Reid, A. 2019. Blank, blind, bald and bright spots in environmental education research. Environmental Education Research 25: 157–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1615735 .

Rogoff, B. 2003. The cultural nature of human development (Reprint edition) . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roth, C.E. 1992. Environmental literacy: Its roots, evolution and directions in the 1990s . http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED348235

Roth, W.-M. 2003. Scientific literacy as an emergent feature of collective human praxis. Journal of Curriculum Studies 35: 9–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220270210134600 .

Roth, W.-M., and A.C. Barton. 2004. Rethinking scientific literacy . London: Psychology Press.

Roth, W.-M., and S. Lee. 2002. Scientific literacy as collective praxis. Public Understanding of Science 11: 33–56. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/11/1/302 .

Roth, W.-M., and S. Lee. 2004. Science education as/for participation in the community. Science Education 88: 263–291.

Roth, W.-M., and Y.-J. Lee. 2007. “Vygotsky’s neglected legacy”: Cultural-historical activity theory. Review of Educational Research 77: 186–232.

Sadoff, C.W., and D. Grey. 2005. Cooperation on international rivers: A continuum for securing and sharing benefits. Water International 30: 420–427.

Samerski, S. 2019. Health literacy as a social practice: Social and empirical dimensions of knowledge on health and healthcare. Social Science & Medicine 226: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.02.024 .

Sawyer, R.K. 2014. The future of learning: Grounding educational innovation in the learning sciences. In The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences , ed. R.K. Sawyer, 726–746. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Saxe, J.G. n.d.. The blind man and the elephant . All Poetry. Retrieved October 6, 2020, from https://allpoetry.com/The-Blind-Man-And-The-Elephant .

Scheepers, D., and N. Ellemers. 2019. Social identity theory. In Social psychology in action: Evidence-based interventions from theory to practice , ed. K. Sassenberg and M.L.W. Vliek, 129–143. New York: Springer International Publishing.

Schipper, E.L.F., N.K. Dubash, and Y. Mulugetta. 2021. Climate change research and the search for solutions: Rethinking interdisciplinarity. Climatic Change 168: 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03237-3 .

Schoerning, E. 2018. A no-conflict approach to informal science education increases community science literacy and engagement. Journal of Science Communication, Doi 10: 17030205.

Schultz, P.W. 2014. Strategies for promoting proenvironmental behavior: Lots of tools but few instructions. European Psychologist 19: 107–117. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000163 .

Sharifi, A. 2016. A critical review of selected tools for assessing community resilience. Ecological Indicators 69: 629–647. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2016.05.023 .

Sherrieb, K., F.H. Norris, and S. Galea. 2010. Measuring capacities for community resilience. Social Indicators Research 99: 227–247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9576-9 .

Singh, R.K., A. Singh, K.K. Zander, S. Mathew, and A. Kumar. 2021. Measuring successful processes of knowledge co-production for managing climate change and associated environmental stressors: Adaptation policies and practices to support Indian farmers. Journal of Environmental Management 282: 111679. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111679 .

Sloman, S., and P. Fernbach. 2017. The knowledge illusion: Why we never think alone . New York: Riverhead Books.

Smelser, N.J. 2011. Theory of collective behavior . Quid Pro Books. (Original work published 1962).

Sørensen, K., S. Van den Broucke, J. Fullam, G. Doyle, J. Pelikan, Z. Slonska, H. Brand, and (HLS-EU) Consortium Health Literacy Project European. 2012. Health literacy and public health: A systematic review and integration of definitions and models. BMC Public Health 12: 80. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-12-80 .

Spitzer, W., and J. Fraser. 2020. Advancing community science literacy. Journal of Museum Education 45: 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2020.1720403 .

Stables, A., and K. Bishop. 2001. Weak and strong conceptions of environmental literacy: Implications for environmental education. Environmental Education Research 7: 89. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620125643 .

Stern, M.J., R.B. Powell, and N.M. Ardoin. 2008. What difference does it make? Assessing outcomes from participation in a residential environmental education program. The Journal of Environmental Education 39: 31–43. https://doi.org/10.3200/JOEE.39.4.31-43 .

Stets, J.E., and P.J. Burke. 2000. Identity theory and social identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly 63: 224–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/2695870 .

Sturmer, S., and B. Simon. 2004. Collective action: Towards a dual-pathway model. European Review of Social Psychology 15: 59–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280340000117 .

Sullivan, A., A. York, D. White, S. Hall, and S. Yabiku. 2017. De jure versus de facto institutions: Trust, information, and collective efforts to manage the invasive mile-a-minute weed (Mikania micrantha). International Journal of the Commons 11: 171–199. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.676 .

Sunstein, C.R. 2008. Infotopia: How many minds produce knowledge . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Surowiecki, J. 2005. The wisdom of crowds . New York: Anchor.

Swim, J.K., S. Clayton, and G.S. Howard. 2011. Human behavioral contributions to climate change: Psychological and contextual drivers. American Psychologist 66: 251–264.

Thaker, J., P. Howe, A. Leiserowitz, and E. Maibach. 2019. Perceived collective efficacy and trust in government influence public engagement with climate change-related water conservation policies. Environmental Communication 13: 681–699. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1438302 .

Tudge, J.R.H., and P.A. Winterhoff. 1993. Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bandura: Perspectives on the relations between the social world and cognitive development. Human Development 36: 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1159/000277297 .

Turner, R.H., and L.M. Killian. 1987. Collective behavior , 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Turner, R.H., N.J. Smelser, and L.M. Killian. 2020. Collective behaviour. In Encyclopedia Britannica . Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. https://www.britannica.com/science/collective-behaviour .

van der Linden, S. 2014. Towards a new model for communicating climate change. In Understanding and governing sustainable tourism mobility , ed. S. Cohen, J. Higham, P. Peeters, and S. Gössling, 263–295. Milton Park: Routledge.

van Zomeren, M., T. Postmes, and R. Spears. 2008. Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives. Psychological Bulletin 134: 504–535. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.4.504 .

Vygotsky, L.S. 1980. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Waldron, F., B. Ruane, R. Oberman, and S. Morris. 2019. Geographical process or global injustice? Contrasting educational perspectives on climate change. Environmental Education Research 25: 895–911. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2016.1255876 .

Wals, A.E.J., M. Brody, J. Dillon, and R.B. Stevenson. 2014. Convergence between science and environmental education. Science 344: 583–584.

Wenger, E.C., and W.M. Snyder. 2000. Communities of practice: The organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review 78: 139–146.

Weschsler, D. 1971. Concept of collective intelligence. American Psychologist 26: 904–907. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0032223 .

Wheaton, M., A. Kannan, and N.M. Ardoin. 2018. Environmental literacy: Setting the stage (Environmental Literacy Brief, Vol. 1). Social Ecology Lab, Stanford University. https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/news/images/stanfordsocialecologylab-brief-1.pdf .

Wojcik, D.J., N.M. Ardoin, and R.K. Gould. 2021. Using social network analysis to explore and expand our understanding of a robust environmental learning landscape. Environmental Education Research 27: 1263–1283.

Wood, W., and D. Rünger. 2016. Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology 67: 289–314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417 .

Woolley, A.W., C.F. Chabris, A. Pentland, N. Hashmi, and T.W. Malone. 2010. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science 330: 686–688. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193147 .

Download references

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Maria DiGiano, Anna Lee, and Becca Shareff for their feedback and contributions to early drafts of this paper. We appreciate the research and writing assistance supporting this paper provided by various members of the Stanford Social Ecology Lab, especially: Brennecke Gale, Pari Ghorbani, Regina Kong, Naomi Ray, and Austin Stack.

This work was supported by a grant from the Pisces Foundation.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Graduate School of Education, and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 233 Littlefield Hall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

Nicole M. Ardoin

Social Ecology Lab, Graduate School of Education and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 233 Littlefield Hall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

Alison W. Bowers

Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, 473 Via Ortega, Suite 226, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

Mele Wheaton

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nicole M. Ardoin .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Ardoin, N.M., Bowers, A.W. & Wheaton, M. Leveraging collective action and environmental literacy to address complex sustainability challenges. Ambio 52 , 30–44 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01764-6

Download citation

Received : 11 July 2021

Revised : 11 January 2022

Accepted : 22 June 2022

Published : 09 August 2022

Issue Date : January 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01764-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Collective action
• Environmental literacy
• Social movements
• Sustainability
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

MAKE THE SDGS A REALITY

9th multi-stakeholder forum on science, technology and innovation for the…, high-level political forum 2024.

The High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) will be held from …

Expert Group Meetings for 2024 HLPF Thematic Review

Sustainable development topics, 2024 ecosoc partnership forum, un 2024 sids conference, 4th international conference on small island developing states, 1st plenary, side event at sids4 conference - accelerate implementation of sdg 6 in sids - how does the un system wide strategy for water and sanitation support sids, the 17 goals.

Publications

End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.

Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.

Reduce inequality within and among countries.

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

• Division for Sustainable Development Goals

Quick links

• The Sustainable Development Goals
• 2030 Agenda
• High-Level Political Forum
• Technology Facilitation Mechanism
• Small Island Developing States
• Harmony with Nature

Online Databases

• SDG Acceleration Actions
• SDG Good Practices
• UN System SDG Implementation
• Voluntary National Reviews Database
• Inputs to HLPF

Partnerships

• About partnerships
• The Partnership Platform
• Ocean Voluntary Commitments Registry
• Small Island Developing States Partnership Framework
• Partnership Accelerator

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Published: 20 October 2022

A new urban narrative for sustainable development

• Michael Keith   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9448-2674 1 ,
• Eugenie Birch 2 ,
• Nicolas J. A. Buchoud 3 ,
• Maruxa Cardama 4 ,
• William Cobbett 5 ,
• Michael Cohen 6 ,
• Thomas Elmqvist   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4617-6197 7 ,
• Jessica Espey   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5140-7463 8 ,
• Maarten Hajer 9 ,
• Gunnar Hartmann 10 ,
• Tadashi Matsumoto 11 ,
• Susan Parnell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5702-1684 8 ,
• Aromar Revi 12 ,
• Debra C. Roberts 13 ,
• Emilia Saiz 14 ,
• Tim Schwanen 15 ,
• Karen C. Seto   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4928-2446 16 ,
• Raf Tuts 17 &
• Martin van der Pütten 18  

Nature Sustainability volume  6 ,  pages 115–117 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

14k Accesses

19 Citations

93 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Decision making
• Sustainability

Our planet is rapidly urbanizing. Research has recognized the complexity of city-driven dynamics, but our political realities have yet to catch up. A new narrative of sustainable urban development must become central to global policymaking to help humanity respond to the most pressing social and environmental challenges.

Almost all growth of the human population this century will be accounted for by a growing number of city dwellers 1 . This demographic reality has elevated political attention to urban issues. Between 2012 and 2015, a dialogue on urban issues within the United Nations (UN) General Assembly resulted in the inclusion of a dedicated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on cities and human settlements within the 2030 Agenda. SDG 11 committed national governments to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” 2 . This goal is of major significance. By including a commitment focused on cities within a nationally determined agenda, countries recognized both the importance of a place-based approach to development and the unique nature of the challenges facing urban communities of all shapes and sizes 3 .

Before 2015, cities and urban areas had been neglected, with their only forum for international dialogue the UN Conferences on Housing and Urban Development in 1976 and 1996 and the biennial World Urban Forum 4 . While these conferences helped focus collective attention on issues of urban poverty and infrastructure, they did not acknowledge the importance of cities as the drivers of economic growth and climate-resilient development 5 , 6 . The dedicated SDG gave urban practitioners, policymakers and local government representatives a formalized space in policy dialogues that acknowledged varied roles for local, national and multilateral actors in urban governance.

Beyond SDG 11, the commitment to localize the 2030 Agenda and “work closely on implementation [of the goals] with regional and local authorities” opened up opportunities for local governments to engage across the spectrum of national planning processes 2 . In 2016, the parallel but complementary Habitat III conference attempted to highlight further the urban imperative and while it did not succeed in gaining high-level international traction, it did provide a normative and operational framework for global urban policy 7 . Furthermore, in 2020, six international organizations (including the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank) agreed upon a harmonized definition of urban settlements, following a decades-long and hotly contested debate 8 .

Together these agreements have helped to shape a ‘Global Urban Agenda’, which has continued to gain ground among technical audiences, exemplified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s commitment to issue a Special Report on Cities and Climate Change in its 7th Assessment cycle and recent discussion of urban challenges in the reports of Working Groups II and III 6 , 9 . However, the turbulence of recent world events and the need for post-pandemic reconstruction is limiting the political and fiscal space for upscaling and even maintaining global urban deliberations. This is despite the fact that the pandemic revealed opportunities for more systemic interventions to reduce future pandemic and climate change risk in cities and towns 6 .

A close look at the outcomes of the major global macroeconomic and political meetings of the past decade, such as the G20 or G7, show that issues of urban development have been consistently undervalued in national discussions 10 . Cities and many subnational governments were on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the disproportionate burden they face was not acknowledged in the outcome statement from the extraordinary G20 summit on COVID-19 (ref. 11 ). This is in spite of evidence suggesting that most cities are financially ill-equipped to cope with post-pandemic challenges; “lower exports, a decline in tourism revenues and remittances, and an acute contraction of economic activities are translating into a precipitous drop in tax revenues” for local authorities, making it incredibly hard to cope with increased vulnerability and service demand 12 .

Furthermore, urban governance challenges were ignored in the Declaration from the 75th General Assembly of the UN in 2020, which specifically discussed the necessity for a reinvigoration of multilateralism to help deal with modern social, economic and environmental crises. The 2021 report of the UN Secretary General did shine some light on the role of local governments and call for the creation of an Advisory Group on Local and Regional Governments to help Member States engage local government in recovery efforts, but this is not enough 13 .

Creating a new urban narrative

To prevent political backsliding and to keep the spotlight on how to govern complex urban dynamics, urban stakeholders need to organize themselves into a coherent epistemic community, with clear political messaging. New bridges need to be built, such as with long-term investors, both public and private, to avoid the risks of geopolitical fragmentation. During the period 2012–2015, the urban community demonstrated unprecedented coordination, mobilizing in support of an Urban SDG and orchestrating a related campaign (#UrbanSDG), as well as establishing a Global Taskforce: a common platform for local and regional government associations. Now, halfway through the SDG project, this community needs to regroup, reignite these platforms and call for a renewed focus on urban and place-based development, with clear ambitions for the next 5–10 years.

First, this community needs to coalesce around a new narrative of what urban sustainable development really is, building on recent literature that foregrounds complexity and systems thinking. Complexity in urban environments has a long academic tradition, with inputs from biology, computational sciences and physics, among others 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 . Complexity theory has also spawned new models and planning tools, which are increasingly being used by cities and their service operators to better understand spatial organization and governance systems 18 . The fact that urban planning embraces complexity head on makes it a highly practical and pertinent approach to implement a global, interdependent and complex sustainable development agenda.

Second, the new narrative needs to address emergent challenges; for instance, the necessity to foster resilient and equitable social systems rather than focusing only on economic development, better integrating the climate change, health and well-being, and biodiversity agendas, and ensuring disaster-resilient infrastructure 6 , 19 . Urban inequality also constitutes a series of pressing challenges, including the inequities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as healthcare coverage, but also socio-economic inequalities in housing and labour markets and differentiated climate vulnerabilities 20 . It is crucial to respond to the failure of existing urban development models that have resulted in unplanned, informal urban expansion in many cities in the Global South.

Third, this community needs to engage meaningfully with policy experts and social scientists who are immersed in the complex architecture of the international governance system and can help place key messages at the top of political agendas 21 . Engaging at this level is essential to garner political commitment and to help change power dynamics within countries that might otherwise be reluctant to empower local government leaders. It is clear from the limited attention to local and regional government in international dialogues that current modes of engagement (for example, via the Major Groups to the UN) are insufficient. Similarly, the vast reservoir of expertise that exists in the field of south–south cooperation too often remains untapped. Urban stakeholders need to capitalize on the techniques that proved so effective during the SDG deliberations and focus on delivering unified, concise messaging, framed in ways that resonate with political decision-makers and communicated by partners who can access the various organs of the international system.

But it is not just about smarter lobbying. We need to embrace a new and changing political geography, which, alongside global governance hubs such as New York or Geneva, or Washington DC, includes regional fora such as the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) or the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), major macroeconomic fora such as the G20, and regional unions, such as the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and others 22 . According to the Deputy Secretary General of the UN, these regional entities must play a key role in helping countries to achieve their sustainable development objectives, acting as ‘think-tanks’ and hubs for regional partnership 23 . Engaging with countries in their own regional context is particularly important to address the regionalized nature of urban concerns and governance.

Cities as sites of international decision-making

The struggle to secure a global focus on cities began nearly a decade ago and culminated in a commitment to localization, place-based development and a dedicated Urban SDG. Since then, the world has been torn asunder and the focus on cities as sites of sustainable development action has eroded. Given the complexity of sustainable development, a place-based approach to development is imperative.

Urban stakeholders need to once again come together and articulate a coherent narrative that can be used to galvanize attention to cities as key international decision-making spaces. Yet, the lessons of the past decade — from financial, economic, health and environmental crises — show that urban stakeholders need to join forces at a wider scale than ever before. It is not just about looking back to the epic narrative of SDG 11. Recoupling urbanization with social progress, and within planetary boundaries, depends on our shared ability to articulate these interconnections, to galvanize attention and to create a larger political space for cities as key sites of international decision-making.

World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2019).

Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015); https://go.nature.com/3BJXh7a

Barnett, C. & Parnell, S. Environ. Urban. 28 , 87–98 (2016).

Article   Google Scholar  

Cohen, M. A. Environ. Impact Assess. Rev. 16 , 429–433 (1996).

Revi, A. et al. in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects (eds Field, C. B. et al.) 535–612 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).

IPCC Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (eds Pörtner, H.-O. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022).

Caprotti, F. et al. The new urban agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice. Urban Res. Pract. 10 , 367–378 (2017).

Cities in the World: A New Perspective on Urbanisation (OECD and European Commission, 2020); https://doi.org/10.1787/d0efcbda-en

IPCC Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Shukla, P. R. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022).

Bouchoud, N. J. A., Keith, M., Parnell, S. & van der Pütten, M. A G7/G20 Pact on Sustainable Urbanization? Building on the Positive Legacy of Italy’s G20 Presidenc y (IAI Commentaries, 2022); https://go.nature.com/3S194mx

Extraordinary G20 Leaders’ Summit: Statement on COVID-19 (G20 Leaders, 2020); https://go.nature.com/3RKxvF5

Wahba, S., Sharif, M. M., Mizutori, M. & Sorkin, L. Cities are on the Front Lines of COVID-19 (World Bank Blogs, May 2020); https://go.nature.com/3Ldzxv2

Our Common Agenda – Report of the Secretary General (United Nations, 2021); https://go.nature.com/3U97MrG

Batty, M. The New Science of Cities (MIT Press, 2013).

Alexander, C. A City Is Not a Tree (Sustasis Press, 2017).

Barthelemy, M. The Structure and Dynamics of Cities (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016).

Keith, M., O’Clery, N., Parnell, S. & Revi, A. Cities 105 , 102820 (2020).

Gallotti, R., Sacco, P. & De Domenico, M. Complexity https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/1782354 (2021).

Abdullaev, I. et al. Building a New Sustainable Economy. Investing in Infrastructure For Distribution and Well-being (T20 Italy — Taskforce 7 on Infrastructure Investment and Financing, 2021); https://go.nature.com/3eIFO5L

Nijman, J. & Wei, Y. Appl. Geogr. 117 , 102188 (2020).

Acuto, M. Nature 537 , 611–613 (2016).

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Balsa-Barreiro, J., Li, Y., Morales, A. & Pentland, A. J. Clean. Prod. 239 , 117923 (2019).

Regional Commissions Consider Objectives for UN Reform (IISD, 2017); https://go.nature.com/3qDJDMo

Download references

Acknowledgements

This piece emerged from a workshop sponsored by UKRI’s PEAK Urban programme, grant reference ES/P011055/1.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Peak Urban Research Programme, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Michael Keith

Penn Institute for Urban Research, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Eugenie Birch

Renaissance Urbaine, Global Solutions Initiative, Berlin, Germany

Nicolas J. A. Buchoud

SLOCAT Partnership, Brussels, Belgium

Maruxa Cardama

Independent Consultant, Cirencester, UK

William Cobbett

Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment, The New School, New York, NY, USA

Michael Cohen

Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Thomas Elmqvist

School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Jessica Espey & Susan Parnell

Urban Futures Studio, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Maarten Hajer

New Dialogues, Berlin, Germany

Gunnar Hartmann

Sustainable Urban Development Unit, OECD, Paris, France

Tadashi Matsumoto

Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, India

Aromar Revi

Durban Municipal Government, Durban, South Africa

Debra C. Roberts

United Cities and Local Governments, Barcelona, Spain

Emilia Saiz

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Tim Schwanen

Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Karen C. Seto

Global Solutions Division, UN Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya

International Relations Division, City of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

Martin van der Pütten

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jessica Espey .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information.

Nature Sustainability thanks Jose Balsa Barreiro and Robert Cowley for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Keith, M., Birch, E., Buchoud, N.J.A. et al. A new urban narrative for sustainable development. Nat Sustain 6 , 115–117 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00979-5

Download citation

Published : 20 October 2022

Issue Date : February 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00979-5

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Using urban pasts to speak to urban presents in the anthropocene.

• Patrick Roberts
• W. Christopher Carleton
• Jürgen Renn

Nature Cities (2024)

Investigation of the contamination behavior in water and soil of an inactive dump from chemical analysis and geophysical method

• Leonides Guireli Netto
• Camila Camolesi Guimarães
• Otávio Coaracy Brasil Gandolfo

Discover Geoscience (2024)

Diverse types of coupling trends in urban tree and nontree vegetation associated with urbanization levels

• Liding Chen

npj Urban Sustainability (2023)

Global inequities in population exposure to urban greenspaces increased amidst tree and nontree vegetation cover expansion

Communications Earth & Environment (2023)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Improving the Teacher Workforce

• Posted May 20, 2024
• By Elizabeth M. Ross

Mary Laski understands how vital effective teachers are. “I had the privilege of having great teachers and know how important that was for me getting here,” says the HGSE doctoral marshal whose mother was also a teacher. Inspired by her own positive experiences, Laski wants to help put more great teachers in front of more students.

For her doctoral dissertation called Essays on the Teacher Workforce , Laski wrote three separate pieces. Two of her papers have already been shared publicly, including research on lessons the teaching profession can learn from encouraging developments in the nursing field and an evaluation of a pilot teaching program in Mississippi .  The pilot allowed some school principals in the state to tackle teacher shortages by selecting in-house paraeducators and other experienced staff, who had not been able to pass Mississippi’s traditional licensing exams, to fill open teaching positions using provisional licenses. Because Laski found positive results with the program, Mississippi has moved forward with a performance-based licensure pathway for some teachers based on their success in the classroom. Laski’s third paper examined the role that principals play in the quality of teachers in schools.

“If you read the education news, all you hear about is how hard it is to be a teacher and how everything is going wrong with the teaching profession, and there's some truth in that,” Laski explains. “But I ended my research journey on an optimistic note. There are bright spots and places where we could be thinking more carefully about supporting teachers and getting great teachers in the classrooms.”

Laski recently reflected on ways to improve the teaching field and shared what she values most about her time at HGSE.

Where do you think the hope lies for the teaching profession, following the research that you’ve done?   I think the pandemic really put a spotlight on how hard it is to be a teacher and a lot of issues with the profession, so I think this is a prime moment now to be thinking more critically about this role that we all know is really important but is also really hard. It doesn’t have to be this way. Nursing has figured out a way to be a more appealing profession and there are ways that we could be thinking about teaching differently to make it more appealing. Also, principals clearly can be doing things to support their schools in their management of teaching. And we could be thinking more carefully about how to support principals in making the best decisions for their schools.

How has your time at HGSE helped you?   Six years is a long time and the amount of things that have happened is mind blowing to me. There was the global pandemic. I also became a parent, which was a huge personal change, so I feel like a very different person than I was six years ago. I feel very grateful for all of the opportunities I've had. I think I'm most grateful for my cohort of other doctoral candidates. We became really, really close our first year and I’m so glad about that because we were able to keep our community going when we all went virtual the second year [during the pandemic.] We had Zoom study groups and regular reading groups.  We were able to keep supporting each other continuously. That community, I feel, is the only way that I made it through this program so, I'm very, very thankful for them. 

How did you balance being a new mom and getting your Ph.D. at the same time? 

Several of my friends also became parents for the first time so there's a group of new mom friends and having other people going through that big change with you or that have done it recently is very helpful. But yes, particularly managing being in a Ph.D. program, I could not have done that without many other women in my same program who helped me understand how to manage it.... I'm actually expecting another kid this summer. There are also some other people that are graduating pregnant. We have a good community of moms.

What does it mean to be chosen by your peers to be a Commencement marshal?   It’s really one of the most meaningful parts of graduation for me. I built lifelong friendships in this program. I learned a lot in my classes, but I think I maybe learned more from my cohort mates and that is really one of the greatest benefits of this program. I didn't even appreciate, before applying or starting here, how much I would benefit from having that group of colleagues who were thinking about similar things and so smart and so caring and going through the same things as me. I'm just very, very flattered and honored.

What are your future plans?    I actually have already started a position at Arizona State University as a research principal, continuing a lot of the same work, thinking about how we can be reimagining what teaching looks like to make it more sustainable and attractive to folks. Arizona State has this big initiative called the Next Education Workforce. It's basically getting teachers to work together in teams, sharing a roster of students, and distributing their expertise — really making the job look different, so that they're working together a lot more, collaborating. Everyone always talks about the first year of teaching being so hard, but when you're all alone in a classroom all day with kids and it's really hard, that just makes it even worse. The opportunity to have more support with your co-workers is something that we look for in a lot of professions. What I like about my job is collaborating with really smart, caring people and we don't always offer teachers that opportunity.

The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Related Articles

Building The ‘Bridge’ Between Research and Practice

Marshal Doug Mosher, Ph.D.'24, reflects on his journey to the Ed. School and the lessons — musical and teaching — learned along the way

Exploring the Effects of Desegregation

The Impact of Immigration on Families

• Toggle navigation

KellyAnn Fray ,Kari Thomas ,Sheikh Tusher

• Project Profile
• Service Description
• Market Analysis
• Qualification
• Presentation

. “There will be multiple research methods employed before any type of consulting, as every place is different and has different requirements and regulations” . “We will look at research on any industry reports and regulations, analyze what the partnering organization wants to be consulted about, get input through surveys from the neighborhood community, and take a look at multiple angles that could accommodate the wants and needs of all parties” . “An important part of what we will offer is situational planning where we do enough research to have solutions prepared in case of any setbacks and make sure that we are never caught off guard”

Recent Posts

• Welcome In Urban World

© 2024 Sustainable Urban Development Initiative.

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑

The OpenLab at City Tech: A place to learn, work, and share

The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.

New York City College of Technology | City University of New York

Accessibility

Our goal is to make the OpenLab accessible for all users.

Learn more about accessibility on the OpenLab

Creative Commons

• - Attribution
• - NonCommercial
• - ShareAlike

© New York City College of Technology | City University of New York