Can the SDGs be used to measure the concerns of youth?

Today’s 18 year-olds were only 10 years old when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were created in 2015. These same 18-year olds will only be 25 when the 2030-ambitions set by the SDGs are hoped to be achieved, although some have no end date. 

Despite being too young to contribute to the creation of these goals, these 18-year-olds are the ones who have to live in the future that we’re trying to secure through the SDGs.

So that begs the questions:

• Do the current Sustainable Development Goals represent the concerns of young people today?
• Can we use them to measure the big issues youth face, or are they unable to adequately capture the problems young people face today and into their future?

This is what we at SDSN Youth AusNZPac (supported by the Monash Sustainable Development Institute) have attempted to answer through our youth-led project, Towards a Youth SDG Index for AusNZPac, where we use the SDGs to measure youth progress towards achieving sustainable development by 2030 compared to the general population in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa and Fiji.

We used this framework as the Sustainable Development Goals were created with the purpose of being measurable. This manifests in the SDGs’ list of 169 targets that outline what should be achieved to reach “sustainable development”.

They were made with the intention of localisation and adaptation to the needs of any person and their communities. Hence, these goals are supposed to “leave no one behind”.

There have been multiple attempts to capture the world's progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Reports such as the Sustainable Development Report measure progress across countries across the world. These reports are often enormous and thus use the average values from each country.

Hence, while these sorts of reports obviously provide incredible insight into progress towards the SDGs, they incidentally miss the nuance that different people experience sustainable development very differently.

One’s class, gender, race, sexual orientation, ability and age all influence the access they have to resources that help them adapt to the sustainable development challenges of our times.

These factors also influence how one is perceived and treated by their governments and communities.

Hence, this report aims to add to a very important emerging tradition of adapting the SDGs to measure how marginalised populations experience sustainability.

These attempts involve an SDSN USA report that (unsurprisingly) found that one's race significantly alters Americans’ experience of health and access to resources.

Similarly, Equal Measures created a SDG Gender Index that measures progress towards SDGs, separated by gender. Once again, the researchers found that people who are not men lag behind on progress towards the SDGs internationally.

Our attempt at disaggregated measurement, “Towards a Youth SDG Index”, aims to corroborate the cries of youth and the struggles that they face in Australia, New Zealand and across the Pacific.

For example, young people have been at the forefront of protests and campaigns for climate action, rent freeze, Indigenous rights, and reproductive healthcare. Young people are clearly fearful of what their future holds. But many are also struggling to maintain a quality standard of living, with the cost-of-living crisis being particularly burdensome.

To capture these varied concerns, our report’s methodology began with a consultation of more than 40 young people from across the Oceania region.

We used the Sustainable Development Goals to structure a prioritisation process in which they identified their greatest concerns.

This process left us with 20 indicators about numerous challenges such as mental health, poverty, climate change, biodiversity, governance, and employment. We then undertook data-searching and analysis exercises in an attempt to measure youth progress towards achieving these indicators compared to the general population in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa and Fiji.

What we found was hardly surprising. Youth were lagging behind the general population in challenges such as mental health, poverty, rent overburden, homelessness, and unemployment.

However what did surprise us was how little existing data there was that disaggregates by age. Issues youth care about, such as food insecurity, access to affordable and clean energy, access to reproductive health care, and access to social services, were all unmeasured (or at least inaccessible) across the region.

Hence, this report and our findings are important to researchers and policymakers for several reasons.

Firstly, it begins to extrapolate the ways the youth from our region are lagging behind, and therefore where policies need to be designed to address these challenges.

Further, the significant gaps in data that we found should also motivate organisations to begin to measure more disaggregated data and address the blindspots we uncovered.

Addressing the hardships

We hope others can embark on a similar process. Across the world, your race, class, gender, ability and sexual orientation makes your experience of the SDGs different. The marginalised are disproportionately experiencing hardships, and this must be addressed if the world wishes to reach some semblance of “sustainable development”.

These disproportionalities are either similar or likely even more severe in other places around the world compared to what we found in our region. Hence, we offer this method to anyone concerned about the uneven distribution of sustainable development outcomes.

Finally, during the aforementioned consultations we undertook, we asked the youth in attendance if they thought the SDGs represented their concerns.

After we had completed the consultations and the attendees had thoroughly gone through the SDG targets, 65% of the young people said they didn’t feel that the current global goals represented their concerns.

This figure is disheartening. How can we expect current and future generations to rally around goals that they think do not represent them or the challenges they face?

Hence, the report also advocates that in any future iteration of the “global goals”, genuine and involved youth consultation needs to occur.