How to Integrate the Sustainable Development Goals

We can’t address Sustainable Development Goals without considering their social context. Energy and gender provide an example.
Everyone’s trying to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and that’s a good thing.

But the goals are complex, and they can’t be addressed one by one. To make progress on any SDG, we need to dive deep into the local context, to understand how culture and circumstances affect action.

Sound complicated? We can learn from recent research that looked at how efforts to address SDG #7, Affordable and Clean Energy, affected SDG #5, Gender Equity.

In 2017, researcher Meital Rosenberg went to rural India to see how greater household access to energy (SDG 7) affected women’s lives (SDG 5). She found that local gender norms had a big impact. Because men make 78% of household decisions in rural India, their interests shaped whether new energy resources went to activities and appliances that would improve women’s lives – or to the men’s priorities.

“The state we were in, Gujarat, made a real push to extend energy to local homes,” Rosenberg explained “But they didn’t consider how that energy would be used.”

As your organization works on the SDGs, keep an eye on the broader context. Based on their experience, Rosenberg and her colleagues offer specific advice on how to advance SDGs with the best chance of success.

The research recently won the NBS Research Impact on Practice Award for all co-authors: Meital Rosenberg and Michaël Aklin from the University of Pittsburgh, and Daniel Erian Armanios and Paulina Jaramillo from Carnegie Mellon University.

Why Energy Access Didn’t Advance Gender Equity
Energy access is a clear priority. In 2019, 13% of the global population still didn’t have access to energy.

In theory, improving energy access can be particularly valuable for women in developing countries. Women can spend less time on routine labour (e.g., cooking and fuel collection), gaining time to participate in the economy or get an education.

So, when Rosenberg and her colleagues studied the State of Gujarat, a region in India that has successfully increased rural energy access, they should have found that women’s lives improved as a result… right?

Wrong. Only a quarter of women felt that the energy expansion efforts had improved their lives, according to the researchers’ survey. The issue comes down to the difference between energy access and energy use.

Although households in Gujarat now had access to the grid, they didn’t typically use that energy for tasks and appliances that improved women’s lives. Men decided how energy was used and generally prioritized appliances they used more frequently (e.g., TVs, non-kitchen fans, and phones) over those used equally or more by women, like kitchen appliances. As a result, women don’t realize the expected benefits of increased energy access.

“Seeing this disparity was frustrating,” Rosenberg said. “We knew that the intention of improving electricity access was to help everyone. But that wasn’t the result.”

Every Issue Has a Social Context
There’s a lesson here for anyone who wants to address resource-based goals, like Zero Hunger (SDG 2); Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6); and Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7); those goals inevitably interact with more social goals, like #1, No Poverty; #3, Good Health and Wellbeing; #5, Gender Equity; and #10, Reduced Inequalities.

“Understanding the power of linkages in the SDGs can lead to better outcomes and address systems problems. Neglecting to understand these linkages can create new problems,” the researchers write.

Companies, policy makers, philanthropists, and NGOs need to recognize that social inequalities often prevent some groups from realizing the benefits of their SDG action.

For example, organizations building new infrastructure, like a bridge, can often leave marginalized communities behind. Armanios found this pattern in other research. “We tend to build infrastructur