Natural language processing and network analysis provide novel insights on policy and scientific discourse around Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The United Nations' (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are heterogeneous and interdependent, comprising 169 targets and 231 indicators of sustainable development in such diverse areas as health, the environment, and human rights. Existing efforts to map relationships among SDGs are either theoretical investigations of sustainability concepts, or empirical analyses of development indicators and policy simulations. We present an alternative approach, which describes and quantifies the complex network of SDG interdependencies by applying computational methods to policy and scientific documents. Methods of Natural Language Processing are used to measure overlaps in international policy discourse around SDGs, as represented by the corpus of all existing UN progress reports about each goal (N = 85 reports). We then examine if SDG interdependencies emerging from UN discourse are reflected in patterns of integration and collaboration in SDG-related science, by analyzing data on all scientific articles addressing relevant SDGs in the past two decades (N = 779,901 articles). Results identify a strong discursive divide between environmental goals and all other SDGs, and unexpected interdependencies between SDGs in different areas. While UN discourse partially aligns with integration patterns in SDG-related science, important differences are also observed between priorities emerging in UN and global scientific discourse. We discuss implications and insights for scientific research and policy on sustainable development after COVID-19.

Figure 1

Discursive overlap between SDGs based on cosine similarity in doc2vec embeddings. (A) Heatmap of cosine similarity matrix with dendrogram of matrix hierarchical clustering. (B) Weighted network of cosine similarities (node colors represent subgroups identified via the Louvain network community detection algorithm).

Figure 2

Overlap (Jaccard Index) between scientific articles classified as relevant to SDGs 5-Gender, 10-Inequality, 14-Aquatic, 15-Terrestrial, 16-Peace, and 17-Partnerships since 2012 (the year SDGs were first proposed at the Rio + 20 conference).

Figure 3

Integration and collaboration between scientists conducting SDG-related research in the three SDGs pairs with strongest interconnection in UN discourse (2000–2020). (A) Proportion of scientists working on both SDGs relative to those working on either SDG. (B) Entropy of Louvain communities by scientist SDG designation in coauthorship networks. (C) Assortativity index by scientist SDG designation in coauthorship networks. Locally estimated scatterplot smoothing (LOESS) is applied to fit a polynomial moving average to the data.