UN Sustainable Development Goals: a rubric to evaluate sincerity for implementing long-term sustainability pledges

This paper proposes a simple rubric for evaluating the sincerity of long-term or multigenerational sustainability pledges. Corporate executives and heads of state are increasingly making ambitious pledges towards sustainable development goals. These are generally in response to pressure from civil society or a more socially-conscious generation of consumers. However, there is also growing concern that these pledges will be stalled or withdrawn once pressure has abated or the year’s financial targets have been met. The sincerity for sustainability is critical in addressing global issues such as climate change, multi-national crime, immigration, hunger, and peace, which need global collaboration. Without a mechanism to forecast the likely outcome of a multilateral agreement, these pledges may eventually be found to be empty promises, without consequence for those that made them. Accordingly, this paper propounds a rubric to help evaluate the sincerity of pledges to advance the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) and which may be applied to many other situations upon refinement.

Related research paper: King, S. and Paris, C.M. (2021) ‘UN sustainable development goals: a rubric to evaluate sincerity for implementing long-term sustainability pledges’, Int. J. Sustainable Society,
Vol. 13, No. 4, pp.273–286.