Contributions of the 2030 Agenda to the Implementation and Evaluation of Policies to Fight Poverty and Social Exclusion in Rural and Urban Areas

Dear Colleagues,

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, establishing a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be pursued until 2030, acknowledging the need to adopt a more inclusive and sustainable development model at the global level. The achievement of the SDGs requires global collective action; however, they must be implemented at the domestic level on a non-binding basis. This adoption raises tensions, as the pursuit of domestic interests may detract from funds for international commitments for global development. This is especially relevant for countries in the Global South, as they will be unable to reach the proposed goals without the help of more developed countries. In general, the 2030 Agenda lacks rules to reconcile such tensions.

In this Special Issue, we want to focus on the articulation of the 2030 Agenda at the domestic level on policies addressing social exclusion in rural and urban contexts, both in countries from the Global North and the Global South. In such contexts, a complex multiactor governance mechanism is required to guarantee the participation of all relevant stakeholders in the policy cycle to avoid a scenario in which the most powerful groups co-opt the process. This democratic governance is especially relevant to effectively address the problems faced by the most vulnerable people and groups in rural and urban areas.

Many elements that define the situation of vulnerability and deprivation that people face occur in relation to and are caused by the characteristics of the place where they live, be it a city or a rural area. It is well known that the rural milieu shows higher levels of poverty, hunger, unemployment, economic stagnation, and inequality, as well as a worse endowment of resources related to health, education, water, and sanitation, just to mention some of the issues included in different SDGs. Additionally, and according to the United Nations, in 2030, 60% of the population will live in urban areas, especially in developed countries. However, the major shift will take place in developing countries, where the percentage of people living in cities will grow from the current level, 52%, to 57%. Consequently, cities will gain relevance as a space of social exclusion, vulnerability, and inequality; hence, the 2030 Agenda encourages us in SDG 11 to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. Finally, rural and urban vulnerabilities should not be studied as two separate realities, not only because they share common features, but also because those most deprived in cities are likely to have migrated from the rural milieu in search of a better life. Thus, they can be regarded as two stages in time and space of a continuum of underdevelopment.

In a previous Special Issue (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land/special_issues/agenda2030), the authors explored the influence of the 2030 Agenda in the design of policies to fight poverty and social exclusion in rural and urban contexts. In this Special Issue, we would like to invite scholars to explore questions such as: How is the 2030 Agenda influencing the implementation and evaluation of domestic policies dealing with rural and urban poverty and inequality in those countries that are adopting it as an inspiring framework? How is the conflict between global and domestic interests being incorporated in the implementation of such policies? What elements of the policy implementation and evaluation deal with the participation of the most vulnerable local stakeholders in the process? What lessoms may be drawn from similar experiences of multilevel policy implementation and evaluation (e.g., EU directives or EU recommendations) that could be applied to the 2030 Agenda? How and what diffusion models of the 2030 Agenda are being implemented? Most of these questions are still underexplored in the academic literature, in part due to the still-recent adoption of the 2030 Agenda.

To address these and other similar research questions, this Special Issue invites contributions such as:

• Case studies of public policies that required a multilevel (transnational and domestic) implementation to address social exclusion in rural and urban contexts;
• Elements and principles of the 2030 Agenda effectively included in the implementation and evaluation of national and local policies on rural and urban vulnerability;
• Implementation of policies designed on the basis of Agenda 2030: localization of SDGs, multistakeholder partnerships, etc.;
• Methodological models for studying the articulation of global policies such as the 2030 Agenda in the implementation and evaluation of national and local policies;
• Analysis of policy procedures, processes, spaces, and other levers to facilitate such articulation;
• Case studies on the linkages between design, implementation, and evaluation in multilevel public policies on social exclusion in rural and urban contexts;
• Potentially replicable diffusion and transference models for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda;
• Systematic reviews on these and other issues of similar nature.

This special issue is carried out within the research project 'GlobalGob2030', supported by the Spanish National R&D&I Plan, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant number 'PID2019-104967RB-I00'.

Dr. Antonio Sianes
Prof. Dr. Luis A. Fernández-Portillo
Guest Editors

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