Sustainable Development Goals, to be adopted by the United Nations summit at the end of September 2015, will set up international development agenda for next 15 year till 2030. SDGs are making a serious step forward from their ancestor, Millennium Development Goals. Lack of integration across sectors in terms of strategies, policies and implementation has long been perceived as one of the main pitfall of previous approaches to sustainable development. SDGs offer more comprehensive and more integrated approach sustainable development. The backside of this more complex agenda is necessity to understand internal links and trade-offs, both explicit and implicit.

One way to embrace complexity is too look on SDGs as a network of targets:

• Network of SDG goals
• Network of SDG goals and targets

Another way to embrace complexity is to consider extended SDG Goals, which include not only targets listed under each goal (which reflect long negotiation and consultation process rather than internal logic), but also those from other Goals logically linked to the current goal. Here area a couple of examples:

SGD1 Poverty reduction
SDG1: Core
SDG1: Extended

SGD8 Growth and Jobs
SDG8: Core
SDG8: Extended

also see Goals 1, 10 and 8 highlighted
Cluster of 1, 8, 10, and 16 (extended)

Some themes—like migration—do not have a specific goal, they are related to a number of  targets, linked to different goals.

• Green Economy in SDGs
• Green Cities in SDGs
• Core Migration Targets and Migration-Related Targets
• Water-targets around Goal 6

Indicators to measure SDGs should also take into accounting this complexity

• Mapping of social, economic, environmental, and complex indicators in SDGs network

Innovative visualization to explore compelxity of SDGs as a layered network (codename “Funky Octopus”)

See also:

• International Council for Science reviewed proposed SDGs and identified interlinkages between Goals and Targets «Review of Targets for the Sustainable Development Goals: The Science Perspective»
• UNDESA Working paper «Towards integration at last? The sustainable development goals as a network of targets»

SDGs as a network of targets by Mike Peleah is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://peleah.me/sdgs-as-network/.