On October 3rd, Roland Zinkernagel will defend his licentiate thesis on “Localising the Sustainable Development Goals: tools and processes for building urban transformative capacity – the case of Malmö”
Roland has been researching on how cities can utilize the SDGs to contribute to sustainable development. In this licentiate thesis, he has explored the potential to use indicators associated with the SDGs to monitor urban sustainable development, and uses a spatial planning process in Malmö where the SDGs have been translated to fit the local context. The work has been utilizingInstitutional Capacity Building as analytical framework to assess relational-, knowledge-and mobilisational capacities in this process.
The results from Roland’s work show that cities are challenged, amongst other things, by the large amount of data that they are expected to collect using the SDGs in order to monitor progress. The high number of indicators opens up for the possibility to prioritise according to the local context. At the same time it poses the risk of local cherry picking and difficulties in implementing long-term consistent monitoring. Furthermore, findings include that the SDGs can have a shepherding function, unifying stakeholders across disciplines and sectors. The SDGs can therefore facilitate new ways of collaboration and finding innovative solutions.
Date: October 3rd at 13.00, 2022
Location: IIIEE, Room 201
Opponent: Kristina Jönsson, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University
Please contact roland [dot] zinkernagel [at] iiiee [dot] lu [dot] se (Roland Zinkernagel) for access to the publication.
