Existing gaps in understanding Sustainable Development Goals interactions: Insights from a systematic review

Abstract

Most countries remain off track to fulfil the 2030 Agenda's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. One key challenge to achieving the 2030 Agenda lies in trade-offs arising from cherry-picking goals or targets at the expense of others. Overlooking these SDG interactions, i.e., synergies and trade-offs, risks creating conflicting policies that undermine the interconnected nature of sustainable development. Hence, there is a need to comprehensively understand how the interactions are being addressed in the growing body of literature. This study provides a systematic review of 272 articles selected from an initial search of 1818. The review reveals that interactions between targets within individual goals and occurring across different geographic boundaries are understudied. The fragmented representation of geographic scales in existing studies highlights another gap, emphasizing the need to understand local SDG interactions. Further, SDG interaction studies infrequently focus on low-income countries, revealing a geographic bias. Notably, an imbalance persists in SDG coverage, with SDGs requiring complex social, institutional, or political engagement (e.g., SDGs 5, 10, 16, and 17) remaining underrepresented in the literature. Most interaction studies focus on goal level rather than more granular target or indicator level analysis. By observing the trends and co-occurrence of methods used for interaction analysis, this study highlights the dominance of qualitative text-based and stakeholder-inclusive methods and a need to develop new approaches to analyze the interactions underlying causal mechanisms. By identifying key gaps and trends, this review can be leveraged to advance the research landscape, guiding the prioritization of SDGs.