Convergence of sustainable development goals evolution and Five-Year Plans reform: Lessons from China

Although the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a comprehensive and interconnected framework for evaluating sustainable development worldwide, few studies have integrated the influence of national policy formulation and implementation on the interdependencies between SDGs. Accordingly, this study adopts the social network analysis (SNA) approach to construct indicators networks at different stages, and extracts related keywords from China's Five-Year Plans (FYPs) through text analysis. Moreover, the keywords from the FYPs across four periods are aligned with the SDG networks to assess their convergence. The findings indicate that the SDGs networks show distinct characteristics over four stages, shifting from high aggregation to more dispersed structures. As the FYPs progress, China's SDGs evolve from a focus on poverty reduction (G1) and economic growth (G8) to prioritizing climate change (G13) and global partnerships (G17), reflecting the socio-economic reforms of the times in China. Additionally, the stability of the SDGs network increases throughout the four-stage progression as the FYPs are refined. The findings strengthen understanding of sustainable development in China and may provide key insights to help prioritize actions to achieve as many SDGs as possible by 2030.