On 14 September, SDG Lab, CEPEI, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) hosted a pre-SDG Summit dialogue where the three of us spoke about what to expect from the upcoming SDG Summit. Now that the Summit has come and gone, we thought we’d better do our own “voluntary review” and bookend our pre-SDG Summit discussion with a post-SDG Summit review. What happened in the areas we flagged to keep an eye on? Was the summit a “success,” and, importantly, what happens next?

A quick recap of the pre-Summit dialogue

When moderator Trine Schmidt, Strategic Advisor, SDG Lab, asked us what our expectations were, the analogy that stuck was ‘halftime in the game.’ While we hadn’t scored many goals yet, the SDG Summit was a moment to “go back to the locker room” and re-strategize because games are won or lost in the second half. Abdulrahman emphasized the importance of using this moment to generate political will and high-level engagement with the agenda, especially implementation through national action plans. John highlighted the window of opportunity in moving the needle on SDG financing, as well as accelerating the right kind of change by advancing our monitoring and tracking capacities. Nudhara presented a general framework to think about the approach to the SDG Summit:

• Bucket 1: which reforms and initiatives have we already agreed on that we should propel forward and implement?
• Bucket 2: which agendas have consensus in principle but we need to agree on actions?
• Bucket 3: which ideas do we need to start building consensus on?

Here is our hindsight review on these three “buckets.”

Read the full commentary on the IISD website.

John Gilroy is Climate and Sustainable Development Lead at the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the UN, New York.

Abdulrahman Al-Thani is Second Secretary, Permanent Mission of Qatar to the UN, New York.

Nudhara Yusuf is Executive Coordinator, Global Governance Innovation Network, and Global Youth Coordinator Coalition for the UN We Need.