Development Engineering Journal Special Issue on “Innovations in monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals to be achieved by the year 2030 as a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. In 2017, the United Nations adopted a resolution to make the SDGs more actionable by identifying specific targets for each goal, along with indicators to measure progress toward each target. To facilitate monitoring, a variety of tools exist to track and visualize progress towards the goals. The intention is to make data more available and easily understood, but data availability often remains a key challenge.

The Journal Development Engineering is excited to announce a Special Issue (SI) that will publish the latest research on innovations that help overcome data gaps and improve monitoring progress towards the SDGs, including geospatial data and related analytical tools, the use of digital survey technologies and crowdsourcing to collect data on indicators at scale, and innovative sensor data that shed light on progress towards targeted SDGs. We also welcome studies that highlight strengths and weaknesses in existing methods and indicators to track progress, papers on how to make these indicators more available and easily understood, and research on the complementarities and trade-offs between achieving different SDGs.

We invite submissions that address these and related topics:

• Studies that highlight innovations in measuring progress towards the SDGs, for instance through geospatial analyses, digital survey technologies, crowdsourcing, or sensor data.
• Analyses that highlight the reliability and accuracy of existing indicators that are being used to track progress towards the SDGs.
• Papers on innovations that can help make data on SDG indicators and targets more available and easily understood.
• Studies using innovative data sources to identify how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted progress towards achieving the SDGs.
• Research that uses innovative data sources or analysis methods to highlight trade-offs or complementarities in achieving different SDGs.

Submissions will be accepted through December 31, 2022. Submissions will be eligible for full open access fee waivers from Elsevier. To submit a manuscript for review, please click here. If you have a question about the applicability of a given topic to the SI, please reach out to Berber Kramer (b.kramer@cgiar.org).

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Development Engineering: The Journal of Engineering in Economic Development is an open-access, interdisciplinary journal applying engineering and economic research to the problems of poverty. Published studies must present novel research motivated by a specific global development problem. The journal, hosted by the USAID-funded Development Impact Lab (DIL) at UC Berkeley, serves as a bridge between engineers, economists, and other scientists involved in research on human, social, and economic development.