The un- sustainable development goals: few learnings on synergies and trade-offs

With the world going through the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the catastrophic effects of the Pandemic on the lives and livelihoods of people are not only disturbing but also devastating. Due to COVID-19, the development and progress of several years and decades have been stalled or have been put in the backseat. In 2021, as the global economy started to rebound, the global output expanded by 5.5%. The United Nations Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provides the blueprint that all United Nations (UN) member states have pledged to fulfil. The achievement of this agenda crucially depends on whether humankind will be able to maximize synergies and resolve existing trade-offs between the SDGs. The analysis of future interactions for projected SDG trends until 2030 within and between goals have been analysed by numerous scholars which show how trade-offs and synergies have evolved in the recent past globally. The best practices of turning trade-offs into synergies would require an actionable learning process in the requisite SDGs areas so as to expand the lessons onto other goals with persistent trade-offs. Several researches have shown that for various SDGs interactions, the synergies are diminishing and trade-offs as well as non-associations are increasing. The analysis of the SDGs as a social imaginary have highlighted on the conflict between global and local, between rhetoric and practice, between pragmatism and aspirations, between targets and meaning, between top-down policy discourses and bottom-up initiatives. This paper highlights few significant implications for managers and policymakers alike. The sustainability reporting by leading firms show that they may be making some progress toward the achievement of some of the SDGs. Several researches have shown that many firms are not only narrowly resorting to “cherry-picking” in their reporting, but also they are not engaging with all the SDGs in a systematic manner. There may be some organizational limits that make rigorously designing, implementing, and reporting change across all 17 SDGs difficult to achieve. The necessity for sparking, supporting, and scaling creative collaboration between various entities would go a long way to achieve the 17 SDGs of the UN. To recover from the adverse effects of the pandemic and achieve the Agenda 2030 targets of the UN, there is a need not only for a multi-faceted approach but also for adoption of multi-pronged strategies by various countries. More specifically, concrete and coordinated action is the need of the hour. There is an urgent requirement for mapping of critical pathways to success based on sound research so as to have a whole new set of policies and interventions which are aimed at rendering the achievement of Agenda 2030 of the UN in letter and spirit.