Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to the SDG Monitoring Challenge

This paper reflects upon two different methodologies, employed by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and its local US partners, to approach the challenge of subnational monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first method involved local community mapping of existing indicators and metrics to the SDGs and the identification of relevant local proxies (as in San Jose, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles). The second approach has involved a more centralized, top-down review of comparable cross-national indicators and the subsequent compilation of a US SDG Cities Index.