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Sweden
Lessons Learned & Best Practices
Year: 2021Income Group: High incomeSource: VNR
Finding: The first Swedish VNR was submitted in 2017, setting clear "next steps" to be taken by the government to implement the 2030 Agenda, including establishing a national follow-up system with statistical indicators and developing methods to identify synergies and trade-offs between goals.
In this second presentation, the country presents the progress made in that direction, linking both reports by highlighting progress towards the 2017 commitments achievement.
Year: 2021Income Group: High incomeSource: VNR
Finding: The 2021 Swedish VNR addresses policy coherence for sustainable development, highlighting an ongoing pilot project to identify synergies and trade-offs between goals together with the Stockholm Environment Institute, which has developed the "SDG Synergies" tool to survey synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs at the national level.
The tool seeks to provide an overview of systemic effects in implementation based on an assessment of interactions between the SDGs, building networks of interlinkages based on direct and indirect interactions between them.
In an initial stage, expert assessments were reached on how the SDGs have been found to influence each other. On a second stage, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Swedish actors joined to discuss stakeholders' views on surveyed synergies and trade-offs. As a result, some areas that seem to have particular systemic impacts on the national implementation of the 2030 Agenda were identified.
Issue: Drafting the VNR Report
Finding: In January 2021, representatives from the Government Offices and several Swedish stakeholders participated in a virtual study trip to Finland to learn about Finnish experiences of the VNR process in 2020. One of the main messages emerging from the study was, "Use UN's guidelines for the VNR report but add your own national flavor." (p.19)
