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Beyond 2030: Rethinking the Sustainable Development Goals

  • 3 hours ago
  • 2 min read

The 2030 Agenda is fast approaching its terminal date, and we are facing a stark reality: the majority of its targets remain unmet. This impending deadline raises a critical question that the Agenda itself does not answer: what exactly should be carried forward?  


In my latest pre-print research paper, currently available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN - Elsevier), we set out to answer this.  


How We Assessed the Data

We wanted to look beyond basic progress reports to understand the synergies and trade-offs that condition global progress. To do this, we conducted a systematic review reported according to the PRISMA 2020 framework.  

Review Parameter

Detail

Timeframe Assessed

January 2015 to December 2025  

Evidence Base

28 peer-reviewed studies  

Databases Searched

Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect  

Three Major Takeaways

After synthesizing the evidence across various analytical designs, three striking regularities emerged:  

  • The Human Development "Win-Win": Goals addressing poverty, health, education, energy, and infrastructure tend to advance together. Importantly, this positive pattern holds across different country groupings and income levels.  

  • The Environmental Trade-off: Counteracting relationships concentrate at the specific interface between those human development goals and the goals addressing consumption, climate, oceans, and land. Furthermore, these trade-offs are most pronounced when consumption-based accounting is applied.  

  • Context is Everything: The sign of an interaction (whether it helps or hinders another goal) is not fixed. It is heavily conditional on the specific institutional and distributional context.  


Looking to the Future

It is important to note that current findings on goal interactions are sensitive to indicator selection and rely largely on correlational designs, meaning causal interpretation remains weakly supported. We cannot simply hope that goals will naturally align.  

A post-2030 framework should therefore treat interactions as governed quantities and state the conditions under which trade-offs are expected to bind.  

I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this pre-print before we move forward with the final version. You can access the full paper here: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7172339



🔗 Read the full pre-print here: Beyond 2030 on SSRN (Published via Elsevier)


 
 

About the Author

Dr. Habib Al Souleiman is a researcher and educator who is passionate about AI, behavioural economics, consumer psychology and the human side of financial decision-making. He writes about how emotions, perception and timing affect the choices people make in markets, and how a better understanding of these forces can help to support wiser and more confident decisions. His work is dedicated to translating academic ideas into simple, practical lessons for students, professionals and ordinary readers, always with the goal of stimulating thoughtful, ethical and forward-looking engagement with the economy. He writes articles and thoughts on his website to let everyone learn about economics and human behavior.

Artificial Intelligence – Declaration on Use
The author used AI tools only to improve language and readability of this manuscript. All conceptual design, theoretical framing and analytical interpretation were done independently by the human author. 

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