Version 1
: Received: 21 October 2018 / Approved: 22 October 2018 / Online: 22 October 2018 (13:01:39 CEST)
Version 2
: Received: 28 November 2018 / Approved: 29 November 2018 / Online: 29 November 2018 (03:16:51 CET)
Ulbrich, P.; Porto de Albuquerque, J.; Coaffee, J. The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.2019, 8, 6.
Ulbrich, P.; Porto de Albuquerque, J.; Coaffee, J. The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8, 6.
Ulbrich, P.; Porto de Albuquerque, J.; Coaffee, J. The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.2019, 8, 6.
Ulbrich, P.; Porto de Albuquerque, J.; Coaffee, J. The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8, 6.
Abstract
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for collaborative goal-led and evidence-based governance, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as techno-managerial framework, that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system’s ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. Attention to the role of inequalities for SDG monitoring is of particular importance for SDG 11 due to the additional methodological challenge posed by the need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators – especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations among neighbourhoods. Investigating the extent to which its representativeness is vulnerable to inequalities we systematically analyse the current methodological proposals for the SDG 11 indicator framework. The outcome is a call for 1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, 2) the development of a methodological approach to “recalibrate” the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and 3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city that is being assessed. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
