The Global Goals Workstream

The Sustainable Development Goals—also known as the Global Goals—are a lens through which to measure local, national, and global progress on building a just, ecologically intelligent, free and prosperous human society. They encompass 17 areas of action, spanning both policy priorities and private-sector and community-level future-building. Among the 17 Global Goals, there are 169 Targets, designed to provide a framework for measuring that progress.

Connecting the SDGs as You Live Them

Please use the following form to tell us how you see the Sustainable Development Goals. Whether you work on one or more in your professional life, whether you are passionate about specific issues, or whether you hope for a world that has certain qualities, we want to hear how you are connecting to these global priorities.

Engagement with the ACCESS to GOOD Coalition

The ACCESS to GOOD Project is an open, collaborative, ongoing reporting process, aiming to identify observable levers of action for adding value, momentum, and scope to investments in climate action and resilient human development.

ACCESS is a framework for analyzing the level of progress on comprehensive climate action. The axis standard aims to measure six qualifications of public policy, investment prioritization and business action:

GOOD is a framework for analyzing the generative tendencies, inclucing community-building reinforcements and local value added of day to day economic activity, at the human scale. This analysis operates on the premise that all economic behavior has at its roots a basic and specific demand for generative optimizing capabilities operating organically through routine human behavior.

We can improve conditions; we make an effort to do so, through collaboration of many kinds, and we assess the value of a transaction based on the degree to which it meets our aim of doing just a bit better. In other words, what we call economic behavior is necessarily rooted in generative organic optimization demand.

Looking at human-scale economic activity through the GOOD economics lens, specific kinds of generative reinforcements can be observed, measured, and tracked for their clear value added.

Biological: First of all are the life-sustaining compounds without which human life is not possible: clean air, clean water, and food-borne nutrients.
Structural: Next are those structural comforts of the built environment, without which human beings are less able to achieve long life expectancy and educational and professional excellence: shelter, plumbing and heat and electricity.
Intellectual: Then come the intellectual commodities: information, education, technology sufficient for erasing the digital divide.
Political: The hope, then, would be that with these come political liberties: freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom from all forms of discrimination, and an enforceable guarantee of voting rights and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, in short: to put the preceding good reinforcement into practice in the world.
Community: Individuals and families tend to be, as economic actors, expressions of Generative Organic Optimization Demand, specifically over and above the four preceding categories of primordial GOOD economic requirements: biological, structural, intellectual, political. Individuals and families are best able to participate in the economic, social and political constellation of influences, when there is community infrastructure allowing for substantive, character-driven interaction at the human scale.

The Citizens’ Climate Engagement Network is engaging with the ACCESS to GOOD Project in order to ensure the widest possible space for citizen participation in global information-sharing, policy innovation, and decision-making. This engagement also provides an optimal framework for the Global Goals Workstream to do targeted work that will enhance policy planning in relation to the SDGs.

SDG17: ACCESS to GOOD is one of the Partnerships for the Goals.
SDG16: Peace, justice and strong institutions, rooted in legitimacy and transparency, require progress on GOOD Political Reinforcements.
SDG4: Quality education open to all falls under GOOD Intellectual Reinforcements.
GOOD Biological Reinforcements connect to SDGs 2, 6, 14 and 15.
GOOD Structural Reinforcements connect to SDGs 6, 9, 11 and 12.
GOOD Community Reinforcements line up with SDGs 1-6, 8, 10 and 16.
And climate action under the ACCESS standard connects directly with SDGs 7 and 9, as well as with Goals 11-15.
And climate action connects indirectly with all 17 goals.

Activating the Workstream

On September 27, 2015, we activated the Global Goals Workstream, as part of the Pathway to Paris effort to establish an always-active Citizens’ Climate Engagement Network. Throughout the fall of 2015, and at the Minneapolis 2015 climate action forum, the Workstream sustained the following targeted dialogues:

SDG 1: The Poverty-Climate Connection
SDG 2: Food and Hunger in a Destabilized Climate
SDG 5: Climate-Related Gender Impacts and Solutions
SDG 6: The Climate-Water Connection
SDG 7: Affordable Clean Energy for Everyone
SDG 8: How Climate Impacts Working Life and Local Business
SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Climate
SDG 17: Collaborative Climate Action (on all fronts)

Among the SDGs, we have dedicated policy workstreams for: