Abstract
In 2015, the United Nations declared the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ‘the people’s agenda,’ with the theme of ‘leave no one behind.’ Five year later, there is a growing realization that more needs to be done to inspire people to become involved in order to fulfil the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda (SDGs). Citizen engagement in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda is essential to promote a sense of public ownership and acceptance, and this is particularly relevant in the adoption of the SDGs at the local level. However, after a thorough review of the literature on the subject, it was observed that there is a lack of a globally agreed-upon framework or tool through which to evaluate and encourage citizen participation in the local implementation of the SDGs, especially in cities. In this regard, a checklist was formulated to serve as a preliminary assessment of participation in the local implementation of the Agenda. To this end, experiences in various cities were studied to determine if: i) the city government has a local SDG strategy, either planned or in progress, and ii) if effective citizen participation was observed. The analysis of these experiences and good practices contributed to the design of the conceptual checklist, which also incorporates established concepts of public participation. The checklist systematizes the different domains of the SDG localization process, and proposes questions for reflection to evaluate citizen engagement and participation in this endeavor.
