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Anna Tegunimataka . Photo

Anna Tegunimataka

Senior lecturer

Anna Tegunimataka . Photo

How do Small Island Developing States Meet the Sustainable Development Goals?

Author

  • Ellen Hillbom
  • Andrés Palacio
  • Anna Tegunimataka

Summary, in English

States in the Global South are facing a double challenge of achieving socio-economic development while adapting to climate change impacts. This study maps to what extent Small Island Developing States (SIDS) manage to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SIDS are at the front line of climate change and while they share numerous challenges, the SIDS are also a heterogeneous group containing a great variation in terms of economic development, institutional structures, and factor endowments. This paper complements the existing broader international evaluation of SDG outcomes by highlighting SIDS specifically, a group that has been only sporadically covered in the literature. By improving our understanding of different SIDS’s development status and challenges we hope both to make the group more visible in the global debate and to contribute useful knowledge to the ongoing development work in and between the SIDS themselves. We compare the SIDS development performance, defined as meeting the SDGs, to a Global Average (GA), in the three dimensions of sustainable development – economic, social, and environmental. Our investigation confirms that the SIDS are overrepresented among the countries in the world with the poorest data coverage and shows the magnitude of the problem. Further, in our global comparison, we find that they stand out in three aspects – having relatively low levels of poverty, high levels of adult obesity, and low levels of gender equality especially manifested in the share of women in parliament.

Department/s

  • Economic development of the Global South
  • Department of Economic History
  • Centre for Economic Demography
  • LU Profile Area: Human rights

Publishing year

2023

Language

English

Pages

17-37

Publication/Series

Journal of Sustainable Development

Volume

16

Issue

1

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Canadian Center of Science and Education

Topic

  • Economic Geography

Keywords

  • sustainable development
  • Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
  • Sustainable Development Goals SDGs
  • economic dimension
  • social dimension
  • environmental dimension

Status

Published

Project

  • Sustainable development in Small Island Developing States

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1913-9063