sustainable development goals – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

What it means to be of the mountains: ethnography of social embrace in Nivica, Albania

Posted on March 31, 2023 by amanda.woodman-hardy

Aisling Tierney (right) with local Albanians during her research trip. — Aisling Tierney (right) with local Kurvalesh during her research trip to Albania.

In 2022, I made my fifth visit to the village of Nivica in the heart of the Kurvelesh mountainscape. It was a quick trip for lunch and to say hello to the community that has made me welcome there since 2017. Upon visiting the house of the first couple who hosted me, I was greeted with hot tea, sharp raki and sweet cakes. The older couple, Bame and Trendefille, cannot stop themselves from treating me like family. They embrace me. They take my hand to lead me to the indoor seating area. They hug me constantly.

Just a week before the visit I lost my father after a long and terrible illness. There was something profound about feeling so loved in a familiar domestic setting. I was different now. How I received their outpourings of love felt more meaningful than ever. When they asked about my father they were heartbroken to hear of his death. Both my parents were invited innumerable times by the couple, but there was never a chance my mother would make the trip up the wild rocky roads!

During the visit they shared stories of time together with my travel companions. My ego was certainly entertained by their generosity of spirit in these retellings. Amongst their chats, the man of the house said something so lovely and unexpected that I was left speechless. He said that I am Kurveleshi – that is, I am of the Kurvelesh, I am one of them. Coming from one of the most respected members of the community, it meant the world to me.

To be of the Kurvelesh means a lot of things and will be different depending on who you ask. What seemed to be important to Bame was that I showed respect. Concepts like Besa and Kanun are important in the region. The former is all about keeping promises and acting honourably, like a pledge to do right by people. The latter is an overarching customary law governing all aspects of traditional life, passed on through oral tradition for centuries. The Kurvelesh is the last remaining area where Kanun survives beyond the Ottoman era and into the modern age.

Bame compared my team of archaeological researchers to other foreign groups from a range of disciplines. He said we were different, we embraced the mountains and the local culture. We took a different mindset into our research practice that included the community in both personal and professional terms. It is not an exaggeration to say that the team feels like Kurvelesh is a second home. It is no longer a remote foreign place full of the unknown. For us, it is now a place of familiar and familial faces and friendships.

We love the people of the mountains and they love us back.

One of the most unexpected comments I received was why my team laughs so much! We are a jovial bunch, always singing and joking around. It seems less easy to laugh in the Kurvelesh. Life has been hard in the wake of Communism, which is still a sensitive subject for most of the older community. People do not like to talk about their experiences in forced labour groups and the suppression of cultural traditions. We do not push the subject. Like much of Albania, this is also a site of several war fronts, not least of which saw the razing of the whole village by the Greeks in 1913. Remnants of these warfronts constitute a large body of our collection of artefacts from fieldwalking surveys. These objects tell stories themselves. The bullet casings from one misfiring gun are found in several locations adjacent to the modern village. Decorative uniform badges are found in local fields. Artillery shells and rusted guns are even collected and hung on display in homes and the single village café. The past is visible, even if it is unspoken.

We also received comments about how the team is managed. Curious locals asked me how I get my team to work without shouting at them. They were surprised that we were all volunteering our time unpaid and at our expense to investigate local heritage. The fact that we were not renumerated seemed to change their perspective on our intentions in a positive manner.

The community were outwardly pleased that we were fully open about our research. They talked about their assumptions about foreign groups and how the archaeology of the country has been pillaged by others. Our efforts included welcoming anyone to visit the site at their leisure. We were frequently visited by the young and old alike, sometimes as a detour from a walk or while passing with a herd of goats to laugh at us working in the rain. We made our work even more visible by taking finds for cataloguing to tables in the local café, so that the whole community could see everything we had and how we worked with it. Informal lessons and visualisations helped the community to understand the breadth of our work. They were delighted to learn of our multi-period approach and began to bring objects for us to record.

Over time, the community began to trust us. Through friendships and openness, they could see we were there for the right reasons. One local man showed up one day with a purple plastic bag filled with pottery sherds and bronze coins. He allowed us to photograph and record them onto our database. Every item was handed back to him the next day in perfect condition. This happened a few times. Each instance proved we meant what we said – we were not there to take anything, we were there to observe, learn and record only. At the end of each season, we handed all the finds to the local leadership for storage, with some pottery samples collected by the national Institute of Archaeology for their archives.

The community were also surprised that we value their knowledge and insights. We were positively enthused when offered tours of sites that might interest our archaeological endeavors. Every suggestion and prompt from the community was cherished and integrated into our research, valued as of equal value to anything considered more “academic”. This respect for local knowledge also helped our reputation.

The reports compiled after each season were hugely beneficial in communicating the value of the compiled data. They included drawings and maps that showed the community how the data comes together to tell their stories. They were also keen to see how we used LiDAR and drone imaging with our GPS records to map concentrations of finds across the landscape. The visual stories transcended linguistic barriers and helped everyone see why our work was useful and relevant to them. For example, local B&B owners typically spend the most time with visitors and our data is helpful in conveying the history of the landscape to those eager to learn, whether domestic or foreign. The community hopes that the information plaques that we have contributed to and walking trails supported by other international groups, created in recent years, will help foster better understanding of their local history. In the future, they will create a museum featuring artefacts collected by us and the community alike.

Goats being herded in Albania along a winding mountain road.

What makes our research fieldwork a bit different than most is that we take with us interdisciplinary perspectives. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the lens by which we evaluate our work and contributions. This maps well onto local and national initiatives that seek to offset long-standing issues facing mountain communities. These issues include depopulation, losing traditional intangible cultural heritage, lack of attractive jobs, and environmental sustainability. Our heritage story is a small part of a much bigger picture. Rather than consider our work on our terms, we embrace domestic value systems and methods of seeing value.

One of our team has undertaken a project interviewing the community about their lives and experiences culminating in an MLitt dissertation, How do rural communities negotiate the legacy of a contested landscape in contemporary southern Albania? (A. Donnelly 2020, 95pps). Her work explores the landscape, agricultural practices, ethnobotanical knowledge, local recipes, conflict and rebellion, unique worship practices, folklore, and music. A taught masters student also produced a dissertation, How can social media function as a tool for initial tourist development? Lessons from rural Albania (R. Sanders 2020, 77pps). Her research reviewed the multivocality of tourists, the power of word-of-mouth marketing, and authenticity of touristic experience as demarcated by local business owners. Other outputs include fieldwork reports in 2018 (Tierney et al. 131pps) and 2019 (Tierney et al. 41pps), and multimedia engagement through public-engagement videos and at conferences. Additionally, I have integrated learnings from fieldwork into both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching at two universities. Several peer reviewed papers are underway and will be published soon. They include a comprehensive overview of the SDGs at Nivica, fieldwork survey analysis and artefact analysis.

In academia, quantifiable outputs and impacts are championed. Even in the realm of public engagement academic discourse, the value of authentic, deep and personal trusting relationships are muted. For me, hearts and minds in a framework of respect are worth more than anything else. If our research work enables us to contribute positively to a community that we adore, then our work is a success. I am optimistic that this personal narrative helps to contribute something to how we view ourselves as fieldwork researchers in relation to the places and communities that we encounter and, hopefully, embrace. In a world replete with mental health strain and professional angst, as the higher education system pinches more and more, there are things more valuable than traditional academic milestones. It is one thing to love one’s work, it is another to be truly loved back by the people we work for.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member, Dr Aisling Tierney.

Why no change? Sustainable development, extractivism and the environment in Bolivia

Posted on September 24, 2019March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

As an early career academic, it’s been a challenge to research sustainable development and the SDGs. The SDGs may be a new set of development goals but the concept of sustainable development is old….and already much critiqued. In my recent research on the early take-up and implementation of the SDGs in Bolivia, I have tried to use this as a starting point for my work. In terms of theory, this has meant asking what can help us think about sustainable development differently? And in terms of my empirical focus, this has meant questioning how the mainstreaming of the SDGs, as a global (and globalizing) response to climate change, effect more radical environmental agendas – those that have emerged since the mainstreaming of sustainable development in the 1980s (and sometimes in critique of the concept). Somewhat conversely, these efforts to think differently have actually helped me to better understand why things are staying the same and how, in Bolivia, powerful, extractivist development logics are being maintained and reworked.

Bolivia is an insightful case through which to investigate reiterations of sustainable development. With the election of President Evo Morales in 2005, himself an indigenous social movement leader, Bolivia was looked to as one of the most radical countries in Latin America’s move left. New development and environmental ideas and policies were enacted by the state, which have mostly promoted indigenous knowledges, rights and anti-colonial agendas. Particularly relevant to the environmental remit of the SDGs are those that re-conceptualised development as Vivir Bien/‘Good Living’ (replacing targets for economic growth with targets for social and environmental well-being), granted legal rights to nature and pledged significantly enhanced territorial rights to indigenous and campesino groups. Yet, since 2009, intensifying commitments to extractivism have come to dominate Bolivian politics and debates, as well override progressive agendas. In 2015, the Morales administration set out commitments for Bolivia to be the ‘energy heart of Latin America’ – expanding hydrocarbon infrastructure and exports to include fracking, hydropower megaprojects and solar farms. It is in the context of this contested politics that the SDGs are being implemented.

In terms of thinking differently, I have found assemblage theory useful to researching and analyzing the SDGs in Bolivia. Assemblage theory foregrounds the ways realities come into being through particular (and changing) relationships and connections between, for example, objects, places, institutions, discourses and policies. Drawing on how Deleuze and Guatarri’s theories of assemblage (agencement) have been used in social science, primarily by Tania Murray Li, I have used assemblage thinking to analyse how powerful common-senses are being made, maintained and reworked. In Bolivia, adopting this approach has firstly foregrounded how the take-up of the SDGs emerges in relation to existing development agendas, actors and networks. The SDGs are primarily being operationalized by the state, by international NGOs and by their national partners.

Secondly, the goals were brought into existing initiatives, rather than causing a wholesale reappraisal of development work. Thirdly, I found that, crucially, the SDGs assemblage is disciplined – with NGOs, for example, being clear that their work could not address disputes between the state and civil society. This meant the contentious politics of extractivism is excluded from sustainable development projects and discourse. A fourth finding about is that through its emergence, disciplining and holding together, progressive discourses are being “deployed to new ends”. The central government has aligned its commitments to the SDGs with their interpretations of Vivir Bien, which fall within the parameters of an extractive-led development model. So rather than providing support to those contesting extractive-led development, the SDGs are helping to consolidate its hegemony. This interpretation and deployment of Vivir Bien is contradictory to how Vivir Bien has been conceptualized and advocated by activists and scholars. In their critical reading, Vivir Bien/ Buen Vivir provides an alternative to sustainable development, as it decentres growth and instead moves toward a more holistic measure of wellbeing (including how communities live with and treat nature). In summary, assemblage thinking reveals that the SDGs are acting as a form of anti-politics – rendering neutral and technical the contested environment/development politics of Bolivia.

Finally, and in answer to my second question, I have used assemblage thinking to identify a counter-assemblage that is emerging and consolidating in relation to the exclusions outlined above. This means identifying the organisations, discourses, politics, landscapes and histories that are coming together in exclusion from mainstream development agendas in Bolivia and in opposition to extractivism. What I find exciting is that assemblage thinking enables the inclusion of material components too – trees, riverways, habitats, wildlife, canoes, speedboats and roads. Following the work of urban geographers, for example Ash Amin, this opens-up interesting lines of enquiry into the sociality and liveliness of particular territories, as place, and how they are generative of reworked and progressive environment/development politics. In this new work, I am researching the generative liveliness of the hybrid spaces that partly emerge from policies for conservation, territory, collectivity and extractivism. Despite calls for academics to make a pragmatic step to get behind the SDGs, the Bolivian case has made me question this step and, instead, I plan to examine the stifled, excluded, contentious and more transformative politics of the counter-assemblage.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Jessica Hope, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and Chair of the Developing Areas Research Group (DARG) of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Her research spans human geography, development studies and political ecology and addresses questions of socio-environmental change in response to climate change. Her current project, funded by an RGS Environment & Sustainability Grant, investigates reiterations of sustainable development in Bolivia, as promoted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). You can follow her on Twitter. This blog was originally posted on the Open University blog and has been reposted with kind permission from Jessica.

Dr Jessica Hope

Three history lessons to help reduce damage from earthquakes

Posted on August 23, 2019April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Earthquakes don’t kill people,’ the saying goes. ‘Buildings do.’
There is truth in the adage: the majority of deaths during and just after earthquakes are due to the collapse of buildings. But the violence of great catastrophes is not confined to collapsed walls and falling roofs. Earthquakes also have broader effects on people, and the environments we live in.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)’s second Disaster Resilience Week starts in Bangkok on 26 August 2019. Practitioners and researchers have achieved great progress in reducing disaster risk over the past few decades, but we must do more to save lives and protect livelihoods.

Can history help?

Building against disaster

Buildings are a good, practical place to start.

Material cultures offer paths to resilience. A major example is traditional building styles that reduce the threat from seismic shaking. A building is not only a compilation of bricks and stones, but a social element that reflects the cultural life of a community. This is the powerful point made by the Kathmandu-based NGO, National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), in a recent report on traditional Nepalese building styles.

NSET, and others working in the field, have identified features of traditional building styles that limit damage during shaking. For example, diagonal struts distribute the load of a roof and limit damage during earthquake shaking.

Historic building with diagonal struts at Patan Durbar Square, Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

This is important because parts of falling buildings often kill people.

Nearby, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the royal government is investigating the earthquake-resistant features of traditional rammed-earth buildings.

An old (c. 400 years?) rammed-earth residential building near Paro, Bhutan. Photo: Daniel Haines, 2017

In fact, seismically-appropriate building styles have evolved along similar lines across a huge Eurasian arc of tectonic unrest, from Italy to Kashmir.

But in most countries, population pressure and the use of cheap, unreinforced concrete construction in growing towns and cities has crowded out traditional construction methods.

Reducing disaster risk always means weighing costs in the present against potential protection in the future. Recovering or encouraging traditional methods is potentially cheaper than enforcing modern seismic engineering.

Long-term health impacts

Focusing only on buildings, though, neglects other important aspects of large earthquakes. These shocks do not only shake buildings down, but can dramatically re-shape landscapes by causing huge landslides, changing the level of water in rivers and leading to flooding.

History shows that these changes can hurt people for months or years after the rubble of buildings have been cleared and reconstruction has begun.

For example, a giant (8.4 Mw) earthquake struck northeast India in 1897. Its epicentre was near Shillong, in the borderlands between British India and China. Luckily, the quake happened in the afternoon, so most people were out of doors. The official death toll – the number of deaths that the colonial government attributed directly to the earthquake – was around 1,500.

Yet officials also thought the poor health conditions that followed the earthquake and the substantial floods that it caused were largely responsible for a major cholera epidemic which killed 33,000 people in the Brahmaputra Valley during the same year. That is twice as many as the previous year.

From the available evidence, it is not yet clear how directly the earthquake and the cholera deaths were linked, but other examples saw similar scenarios. In 1934, another major (8.0 Mw) quake devastated parts of Nepal and North India.

This time, the official death toll in India was around 7,500, but again many more people died from related health complications over the following years. In one district in northern Bihar province, an average of 55,000 people died of fever every year over the next decade. In other areas, malaria was unusually prevalent over the same period.

Government reports held secondary effects of the earthquake responsible for the high death rate.
Events that happened long ago therefore demonstrate the complexity of earthquakes’ impacts, even on the relatively straightforward question mortality. Studying them highlights the need to focus present-day disaster responses on long-term health implications.

Of course, this says nothing of earthquakes’ less concrete, but very important, impacts on social structures, community life, governance or the economy.

History in action

In some cases, historical researchers are contributing directly to initiatives to reduce risk from natural disasters.

Hurricane Katrina showed in 2005 that low-lying New Orleans is terribly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Craig Colten, a historical geographer at Louisiana State University, is working with a team of scientists to find solutions by raising the height of the ground in parts of the city while adding forested wetlands on its north shore. Colten is studying analogous historical efforts in other American cities – flood-control measures in nineteenth-century Chicago and responses to hurricanes in Galveston, Texas, around 1900 – as well as examining previous proposals for creating buffers between New Orleans and the sea.

These historical examples provide evidence of what works and what does not. They also highlight the politics of decision-making that help determine whether local communities will support landscape engineering projects.

The international frameworks governing disaster risk reduction such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals understandably focus on the present, not the past. Historians need to join the conversation to show practitioners that lessons from the past can help build resilience in the future.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Daniel Haines, an environmental historian at the University of Bristol.

Dr Daniel Haines

Bristol and the Sustainable Development Goals

Posted on July 12, 2019April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image credit: @Bristol Design, Bristol City Council

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are often referred to as “the closest thing the world has to a strategy.” The 17 Global Goals, agreed at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, set out 169 targets to be achieved by the year 2030. These targets cover a wide range of issues, such as poverty, inequality, gender equality, education, health, infrastructure, energy, climate change and more. Underpinning the Goals is an ambition to reduce our impact on the planet and reduce divisive inequalities in society without making anybody poorer or worse off.

Progress towards meeting the SDGs is normally monitored and reported at the national level through the production of Voluntary National Reviews which are presented to the United Nations at an annual event known as the High-Level Political Forum.

However, there has been a surge of interest in ‘localising’ the SDGs in cities around the world by promoting their use, integrating them into city plans and policies, and monitoring progress at the city (rather than national) scale by undertaking Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs). In July 2018, a handful of cities around the world reported on their own progress by submitting VLRs to the United Nations.

Inspired by these city-level pioneers, researchers at the Cabot Institute secured a grant from Bristol University’s UK Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account to produce the UK’s first VLR, Bristol and the SDGs: A Voluntary Local Review 2019

This report was produced through a partnership between the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol and the Bristol City Office. It reflects a whole-city approach to tackling the SDGs and includes information on the activities of 90 Bristol based organisations working to make the city more economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. The report covers all 17 SDGs and includes data from over 140 statistical indicators.

In many areas Bristol is performing well. There have been very significant improvements in the quality of education in the city, particularly in early years attainment. Bristol’s economy has grown consistently in recent years while unemployment has fallen. Energy consumption and local carbon emissions have fallen, and a strong civic commitment to climate action is clear: Bristol City Council was the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency, followed shortly thereafter by the University of Bristol. While these trends and initiatives are positive, we cannot be complacent. Bristol’s stated ambition to achieve carbon neutrality will require sustained efforts at scale by a wide range of stakeholders across sectors and levels of government.

In other areas Bristol has performed less-well. Child poverty has been rising in the city and food insecurity is deep in some areas. The gender pay gap in the city has barely changed despite rising wages for women. Where it is possible to disaggregate indicators, it is clear that inequalities persist across neighbourhoods, income groups and ethnicities. Poverty, food insecurity and youth opportunities are spatially concentrated. Despite falling mortality rates overall, the life expectancy gap between the most deprived and least deprived citizens has grown. And the unemployment rate among some ethnic minorities is nearly double that of white citizens.

Bristol’s One City Plan, which was developed through extensive engagement with citizens and stakeholders and is mapped onto the SDGs, already reflects many of these challenges, which will not surprise most Bristolians. Fortunately, as our report shows, organisations across the public and non-profit sectors, as well as the city government, are tackling these issues in creative ways, from the neighbourhood scale to the city scale. Many others are seeking to make positive impacts further afield.

In producing this report we encountered a range of difficult questions, data issues and new insights. The functional area of Bristol is much larger than the City of Bristol—the subject of this report. This difference between the de facto urban area and formal administrative boundaries create challenges in both implementing and monitoring the Goals at sub-national level. Beyond this, there is a clear need for an indicator framework that is tailored to the urban scale and suitable across income contexts. We faced a number of data gaps particularly in monitoring poverty, food insecurity, gender equality, domestic material consumption, aquatic life and life on land. A subnational perspective also highlights the importance of disaggregating data if we are to take the ‘leave no one behind’ ethos of the goals seriously. Many indicators showed positive trends at the city level but held hidden inequalities held when disaggregated. If cities are to effectively work towards the ‘Leave No One Behind’ agenda then more ward level data is needed.

Looking forward, cities have an important role to play in tackling global challenges, including influencing how the concentrations of capital in cities are channelled beyond their boundaries. Where and how the capital generated in cities can have enormous consequences on achieving the SDGs within cities and elsewhere and it is vitally important that large investment and pension funds consider how they responsibly use their resources.

But cities cannot do it alone. City governments need support from private sector and non-profit actors, as well as higher tiers of government and international organisations. It will not be possible to achieve the SDGs locally without increased devolution of local powers. The SDGs and the One City Plan both provide the kind of shared vision needed to forge strategic cross-sectoral partnerships to achieve a sustainable future. Cities are increasingly taking the lead in confronting global challenges, but they need support to follow through.

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This blog is written by Allan Macleod, SDG research and engagement associate working across Bristol Green Capital Partnership, Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Allan Macleod

Marvin Rees interview on the Sustainable Development Goals

Posted on September 27, 2018April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

This week is UN Global Goals week, an annual week of action where the United Nations and partners from around the world come together to drive action, raise awareness and hold leaders to account in order to accelerate progress to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals.

Dr Sean Fox, Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, recently interviewed me about why I support the Sustainable Development Goals. You can read the transcript below.

SF: You’ve been a vocal supporter of the Sustainable Development Goals, when some mayors don’t talk about them. Why do you think they’re important?

MR: I think it’s important to talk about them because we often fall victim to the stereotype of thinking the SDGs are for the global south, when actually the SDG themes clearly cross over. For example, take Water. It’s a northern hemisphere issue as well. The challenges may not be as extreme as in sub-Saharan Africa or Asian countries, but it is increasingly an issue for us with Climate change and migration.

But then the other thing is really making sure this is not just about national governments. In fact if you leave it to national governments we’ll fail, because they don’t cooperate they contest. They have hard borders. They don’t talk about interdependence like we do at the city level. We share a population in Bristol with so much of the rest of the world and we need to work as though that is true, because our population here cares about the population there. The SDGs are real and raw in the Northern and Southern hemisphere as well as within families.

SF: How can the SDGs be beneficial for Bristol?

MR: We are trying to build a global network of cities through the Global Parliament of Mayors and that involves coming up with a common language. The SDGs can be that language. There’s a proposition that national governments are failing in everything from climate change to migration, inequality and health, and it’s a failure of national policy. But it’s also a failure of a global governance structure that is overly dependent on nations. We urgently need global governance to move into its next iteration, with international networks of cities working and sitting alongside national leaders as equal partners in shaping international and national policy. We’re trying to change the architecture.

However, if we want these international networks of cities to work, we have to be able to talk to each other. One of the things that bonds mayors at a mayoral gathering is their challenges: Rapid urbanisation, health and wellbeing, adequate housing, air quality, quality education, water supplies. All mayors face the same challenges. Mayors connect at these gatherings because we’re trying to do something. I think the SDGs offer language, images and targets around which a global network of cities could rally. We need to attach ourselves to them, and interpret the SDGs as they are relevant to our local area so we can deliver them locally and globally, even if our national governments are failing.

SF: National government also share common objectives. What is the difference between being a city leader rather than a national leader?

MR: One is the proximity of leadership to life. National leadership is much more abstracted from life. I met the mayor of Minneapolis and she told me they had the largest Somali community outside of Somalia. Then I was in a taxi with a Somali taxi driver, and I was talking about this and said ‘I was in Minneapolis, there’s a big Somali community there’. He said ‘I go to Minneapolis regularly, my family are there!’ So a Bristolian lives here, but he also lives in Minneapolis because his family are there.

Now we don’t govern like that, but he lives like that. We’re a city with a global population, so there’s a vested interest in cities looking out for each other’s interests because they share populations, families, and remittances flows. There must be someone in Somaliland that wants Bristol to do well and there must be someone in Bristol that wants Somaliland to do well because that’s thier cousin, that’s their gran. I want Jamaica to do well, I want Kingston to do well.

Additionally, cities are better placed to recognise their interdependence. Nations may recognise their interdependences but they’re always drawn to borders, competing GDPs and trade deficits. It seems to be a much more a zero sum game.

SF: Why should UK mayors bother with Global Goals and networks? Why not just focus on Bristol?

MR: Often politicians offer to purchase your vote with promises. I don’t like that. It needs to be what are we going to do. We should be a city that wants to change the world, all cities should! We should want to deliver on the SDGs not just for Bristol but for the world, even if you don’t have family elsewhere, because we’ve got to save the planet. I think it’s pretty clear. We need to be delivering against the SDGs as part of our global responsibility in an interdependent world.

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This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from Marvin Rees and Bristol Mayor’s Office. You can view the original interview here.

Marvin Rees is the Mayor of Bristol. He leads the city council and its full range of services – from social care to waste collections. He also performs a broader role representing the interests of Bristol’s citizens on a national and international level.

Marvin Rees

Dr Sean Fox

Dr Sean Fox is a member of the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment and a Senior Lecturer in Global Development.

This is the second blog in our #GlobalGoals series as part of Global Goals Week 2018. Read the other blogs in the series:

Global Goals, Local Action: Bristol and the SDGs

Global Goals, Local Action: Bristol and the SDGs

Posted on September 25, 2018April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

This week is the #GlobalGoalsWeek which is a campaign to improve awareness about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals or SDGs). The 17 Global Goals cover everything from Ending Poverty, to Climate Action and they have been called the closest thing the world has to a strategy. This week we’ll be publishing some of the SDG activity that’s been happening in Bristol. To follow what’s going on check out #BristolSDGs or #GlobalGoalsWeek we’re planning blog posts from amongst others the Mayor of Bristol, Bristol City Council’s SDG ambassador and other members of the Bristol SDG Alliance.
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As the Global Goals week commences we consider how the work towards localising the SDGs in Bristol has developed in the last 9 months and look to share some lessons on the process of localisation.

In 2015 the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were ratified by 193 of the UN member nations. These goals set ambitious targets to address worldwide issues of sustainable development, such as social inequality, responsible and inclusive economic development and environmental protection. They were created for everyone, everywhere and have been described as ‘the closest thing the world has to a strategy’.

Who will be responsible for ensuring we achieve these goals and how will they be achieved?
In the realm of international agreements, national governments have traditionally been responsible for local implementation. But a combination of profound global demographic shifts and a sense that national governments are increasingly incapable of tackling complex global challenges due to domestic political wrangling has given rise to a global movement to place cities at the heart of efforts to tackle both local and global challenges. This movement, which is coalescing around a constellation of city-to-city networks (such as ICLEI, C40 and the Global Parliament of Mayors), is now grappling with the challenge of ‘localising the SDGs’. How can we usefully translate this global agenda into local practice in a way that meaningfully transforms lives?

This is the question we are working to answer through a University of Bristol funded project on Localising the SDGs for Bristol, in partnership with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP), and Bristol City Council.

To date the project has involved engagement locally and internationally. Our previous blog post came after the Global Ambition, Local Action conference, held in Los Angeles which Allan Macleod, the Cabot Institute SDG Research and Engagement Associate, attended. Just over a month later he was also part of the hundred of delegates who gathered in Bristol for the Data for Development Festival. During three days of plenaries, breakouts and workshops the role and use of data and technology in achieving and monitoring the SDGs was discussed. Additionally, Mayor Marvin Rees showed his local support and commitment to the SDGs by announcing an SDG Ambassador in his Cabinet (Councillor Anna Keen).

The strong leadership and commitment to the SDGs from Bristol’s mayor has been complimented by many stakeholders across the city. Bristol boasts an SDG Alliance consisting of members from organisations across Bristol including some of the city’s anchor institutions with both universities, the City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership represented as members of the Alliance. The network has been growing and now consists of well over 50 stakeholders from diverse backgrounds looking to mobilise SDG activity in Bristol. Through a series of interviews with key city stakeholders and alliance members, a Bristol Method+ report was released during the UN High Level Political Forum in July 2018. This report detailed the initiatives and actions that have occurred locally towards making the SDGs more mainstream in the city.

Another way the SDGs have been made locally relevant is through the One City Plan. Our research seeks to identify and support mechanisms for embedding the SDGs in local planning and governance processes by engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in the city.

Bristol City Council, a pivotal stakeholder is currently working to bring partners together for a new One City Plan. This Plan seeks to use the collective power of Bristol’s key organisations to achieve a bigger impact by supporting partners, organisations and citizens to help solve key persistent city challenges and improve the lives of Bristolians across the city. The core themes behind this plan align with the SDGs and it provides a great opportunity for Bristol to lead nationally and internationally on the SDGs. As a result, the Goals were integrated into the plan and mapped onto Bristol’s local priorities. By building on the work in ‘Hacking the SDGs for US Cities’, 75 of the 169 SDGs targets were found to be directly relevant to Bristol. These targets are being blended together with locally-developed priorities to form the One City Plan goals to result in ‘Bristol’s SDGs’.

Our work with Bristol city council has shown three important features of localisation. Firstly, the SDGs largely overlap with the remit of most city councils. As a result of this, the most cost effective, and beneficial method of localisation is a translation of local priorities onto the goals and the integration of the goals into the local priorities of the city. Lastly, the SDGs provide an opportunity for city leaders to engage in discussions around the same topic. They provide a global language for city leaders to share learning and best practices across contexts and borders. This is especially important as cities are increasingly aiming to take a more prominent role in international leadership.

During our project, it has become clear that Bristol has developed a solid foundation for SDG localisation and has begun to be a global leader in implementing the SDGs. However, it is a particularly exciting time to be working collaboratively on implementing the SDGs in Bristol as the city will be hosting the Global Parliament of Mayors Annual Summit (GPM) in October. The GPM will provide Bristol with an additional opportunity to showcase its leadership and demonstrate its credentials as an important international city that is working to improve the lives of all its citizens, while also working to tackle the challenges that we face as a global community.

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Allan Macleod

Cities’ contributions to the global SDGs: A Bristol view

Posted on August 7, 2018April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

Earlier this month, people from around the globe gathered in New York for the annual review of the world’s progress towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an event known as the ‘High Level Political Forum’ (HLPF). These globally-agreed goals were developed in 2015, providing a vision for what the world should look like in 2030. Covering all three dimensions of sustainability through 17 Goals, 169 targets and 244 indicators, the SDGs have been called ‘the closest thing the world has to a strategy’.

This year the HLPF focused on 6 of these Goals, including sustainable cities and communities, SDG 11. The inclusion of cities as a specific goal is a success, and it is the first time that a subnational unit has been included in a UN statistical reporting framework.

But cities have an important role to play in meeting all of the Goals, beyond just SDG11. Urbanisation is increasingly seen as a key cross cutting element in almost every aspect of sustainable development. Forecasts suggest that by 2050 almost 70% of the world’s people will live in cities. The concentration of people living and working in urban areas creates acute sustainable development challenges in cities. And what happens within individual cities can have far-reaching environmental impacts on resource use, pollution and carbon emissions in far-away places. Because local sustainable development challenges have national and even international implications, cities have the power and the opportunity to make progress towards the global SDGs, by tackling city-level challenges through innovative technical and organisational solutions.

Indeed, the 2017 HLPF declaration highlighted “the need to take appropriate action towards localizing and communicating the [SDGs] at all levels, from the national to the community and grassroots level […] Efforts should be made to reach out to all stakeholders, including subnational and local authorities.” (para 28)

So, to achieve the ambitious SDGs by 2030, cities must be fully engaged with all the goals, and can work with each other to share learnings, as well as interact at national and global policy levels. For example, New York City presented the first-ever official city-level review of progress towards the SDGs at the HLPF 2018 linked with their OneNYC approach – and invited other cities to work with them.

Despite Bristol’s many successes, we continue to face important challenges. Prominent among these is intense inequality across economic, social and environmental domains: such as income inequality, poor air quality and persistent gaps in health and education outcomes across the city. The SDGs offer a framework for taking on these challenges in an integrated way to achieve sustainable and inclusive prosperity that leaves no-one and nowhere – including nature – behind.

For the last few years, Bristol has been grappling with how it can best engage with the SDGs through an alliance of stakeholders from across the city. This work and their views have informed our ‘Driving the SDGs agenda at a city level in Bristol’ report, released during this year’s HLPF, where UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development and partners launched an initial review of UK progress ‘Measuring Up’.

This tells the story of the Bristol SDG Alliance, formed in 2016 to advocate for the practical use of the SDGs in Bristol – to ‘localise’ the Goals to the city – and shares key learnings.

Hosted by Bristol Green Capital Partnership, in part because the SDG agenda integrates the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability, the Alliance has submitted evidence to a parliamentary inquiry, commissioned an SDGs & Bristol report, and facilitated an innovative academic role to link SDG research and engagement in Bristol.

In this role, I have been able to work collaboratively with Bristol City Council on behalf of the Alliance to integrate the SDGs into the emerging One City Plan. In addition, many businesses and other organisations in the city appreciate the relevance of the SDGs to their work, such as Airbus and Triodos Bank, among others.

As we move forward, we will be grappling with some of the challenges facing other cities working to localise the SDGs. For example, how best to monitor progress.

This is a challenge even at the national level, with the UK’s national statistics office still working hard to assess and collect the data to report on the SDGs nearly 3 years after they were agreed – see the national reporting platform. Such monitoring challenges are more acute at a city level, with extra complexities and fewer resources available to address them.

For the SDGs to be achieved by 2030, challenges such as these will need to be overcome by cities. The theme for 2019’s SDG review is ‘inclusiveness and equality’, where the UK will also undertake its first official national review. Bristol is well-placed to contribute in 2019. Collectively the city may wish to follow New York’s initiative and report alongside the UK on our city’s progress next year.

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This blog is written by Allan Macleod, SDG research and engagement associate working across Bristol Green Capital Partnership, Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol. It has been reposted with kind permission from the Bristol Green Capital blog. View the original blog.

Allan Macleod

Rural energy access: A global challenge

Posted on April 18, 2018April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image credit: Amanda Woodman-Hardy

Energy affects all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

A statement made at the beginning of a rural energy access session at the Global Challenges Symposium on 12 April 2018. To give some context for those who aren’t aware, the SDGs are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity (see UNDP). As the goals are interconnected – tackling affordable and clean energy will mean also tackling the issues associated with the other goals.

During the session led by Dr Sam Williamson, held in Bristol and co-organised by the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, four issues were discussed with Nepal as a case study:

How does a lack of energy access impact rural lives?
How can technology enable access to modern sustainable energy?
What are the key economic and policy interventions to ensure successful rural energy access projects?
What is the social impact of having access to energy in rural communities?

I felt incredibly lucky to be in the same room as the invited guests from Nepal: Biraj Gautum (Chief Executive Officer at PEEDA); Giri Raj Lamichhane (Head Teacher of Dhawa School, Central Nepal); Sushila Lamichhane Adhikari (Regional Director, Learning Planet, Central Nepal); Muhan Maskey (Policy and Institutional Strengthening Expert, Renewable Energy for Rural Livelihoods Programme, Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, Government of Nepal); and Ramesh Maskey (Associate Dean, School of Engineering, Kathmandu University). Listening to them speak, it was clear that the Nepalese have come through such adversity (including the 2015 earthquakes – more on this below) and have survived without access to energy like we know it in the Western world. They are incredibly resilient and wonderful people. I was certainly in awe of them. Here I summarise their thoughts and hopefully provide you with a new knowledge of real rural lives affected by a lack of access to energy.

1. How does a lack of energy access impact rural lives?

Hearing from Sushila it was clear that a lack of energy access affects rural lives in ways I could not have imagined – cooking is not possible unless using indoor stoves which cause lots of pollution and health issues especially in women and children. The burning of firewood, cow dung and kerosene on these stoves is used for lighting and cooking. Can you imagine breathing in the fumes from kerosene whilst sat cooking indoors? What is also true is that it is mainly women and children who are affected by indoor air pollution and as a result suffer many negative health effects. It is clear that more research needs to be done to customise the cooking technology for Nepal and other areas so that it moves away from indoor stoves. Interestingly, a member of the audience from Ghana mentioned that the electricity there can be so unreliable that people don’t always want to invest in electric cookers, they’d rather go out and collect firewood for their stoves. Unfortunately rural Nepalese villages cannot get electricity when they need it for cooking or lighting so many are in a similar situation.

Things we take for granted in the UK – like using our mobile phones, using social media and getting search engines to answer our burning questions in life (#firstworldproblems!) – are limited in Nepal. Access to communications like the internet and to the news is one of the most valuable things to come out of having access to energy.

Apparently the government of Nepal say giving access is one part of the energy problem, the other part of the problem is transformational access. I.e. not just providing access to power but making sure it is provided everywhere, that it is clean and sustainable and that there is a support network in place to maintain it. There is a lot of work to be done globally to address this issue.

I didn’t get chance to interact much with my mum when I was growing up as she was out early in the morning collecting firewood so wasn’t there when I woke up and was busy cooking in the evening.

One of the things you forget about lack of energy access is how it affects the social side of people’s lives. The quote above was given by Biraj (as seen in the picture above, stood up). It is common for women to spend four hours collecting firewood for their stoves so they are on when the children wake. I can’t even imagine getting up four hours early every single day to do this, let alone spend an hour collecting 20 litres of water and hiking it up a steep mountain every time I need water for cooking, washing and drinking. After hearing this I am in awe of rural Nepalese women. They are superhuman to me, pushing the boundaries of what a woman does for her family. I am embarrassed that I have so many luxuries in my life resulting from having access to energy, whenever I require it. I just need a plug and a socket. It is time for us in the Western world to help support areas without access to energy, we have a duty to families the world over.

2. How can technology enable access to modern sustainable energy?

The market is very small in Nepal for research and development in new energy technology. It is cheaper to get technology from China. There is a real lack of finance, knowledge and government support which means that rural Nepalese have not been able to fully exploit the natural resources available to them for sustainable energy e.g. through installing hydro-power. There is also the problem that to the average rural person in Nepal, lifting water which can be used for drinking, cooking, washing and chores, is a more important focus for development than energy access. It seems a catch-22, having energy access would actually improve water lifting from source up to areas of need in the Nepalese mountains, since a lot of water pumps require energy to run.

Another great challenge is to make Nepalese energy technology for rural areas easy to maintain and robust. Remote areas are often hard to get to and it could be a long time before anyone could come and fix any issues and obviously the cost of doing so may be prohibitive. Therefore technology needs to be simple and locals need to be trained in maintenance. It was also suggested in the room that tech should be developed so that it can be fixed remotely if needed. It is also important for researchers to check new energy technology is actually working after they have developed and installed it in rural areas.

3. What are the key economic and policy interventions to ensure successful rural energy access projects?

It was good to hear during this session that the energy grid in Nepal is starting to approach the rural areas of Nepal which means that it is possible for the micro-hydro-power that currently exists in rural areas to be injected into the grid and payouts can be made to rural people who own them. However a lack of available funds means the rural Nepalese cannot build micro-hydro-power plants. Most micro-hydro-power plants are instead run by the government, whole communities or private individuals and there is a policy imbalance between government-owned power and community-owned power in Nepal.

These energy inequalities seemed to be echoed by a delegate from Ghana who said that some wealthy people in Ghana are able to get enough power from solar power to not have to rely on the governments unreliable electricity. They can sell their energy back to the grid and get richer in the process, causing further inequality in energy access.

4. What is the social impact of having access to energy in rural communities?

As mentioned earlier, there is a big social impact of not having access to energy in rural areas of Nepal. By having access it means that cooking is easier and not having to collect fire wood means time is freed for maintaining gardens to produce your own food. Three to four hours a day can be saved from not having to collect firewood which can improve women’s social lives and involvement in their communities.

As is the case in most societies, you will always get people who are resistent to change. In Nepal it was said that there may be some Nepali men who may not want women to have extra time available to them (from not collecting firewood) and may want them to stick to traditional roles instead.

Having access to energy can revolutionise rural lives without destroying traditional roles. A Somali delegate said that energy is expensive but available in rural Somalia. Mobile phone access means nomads can find for e.g. the price of a goat and where the nearest one is so they don’t waste time and physical energy trekking to find one. Phones can be charged in the cities. There is also micro-insurance available in Somalia (I had not heard of it either!) being used by nomads with mobile phones to protect for example, against the impact of drought on food availability. A novel idea, being used currently and shown to work. It is a system which could be copied and replicated in other rural areas lacking energy access. It was clear that there is a lot of scope for African nations and Nepal to learn best practice from each other in regards to rural access to energy.

The 2015 earthquakes – and energy

It was asked of the Nepalese visitors, what role did energy play in the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal? Their answers were grim…villages were flattened, there was no power supply, no place to cook, and it was difficult to contact relatives who were far away and may have also been affected by the quakes. Micro-hydro-power plants were destroyed and the national grid was down. There was a governmental dilemma as to what to do – whether to revive micro-hydro-power plants or extend the national grid? As it happened the national grid was a first priority and it is being rebuilt with a view to extend it.

Throughout all of this adversity, the resilience and positivity of the Nepalese visitors really shone through when they said that all the families, communities and pets came together in one space (shelter) regardless of wealth or who they were and that this was a great experience to come out of the earthquake. The earthquake also forced Nepal to become more self-sufficient in energy post-recovery and they are installing more renewables as a result.

Damaged house in Chaurikharka – by Sumita Roy Dutta – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Academics can research and write about rural energy access issues, but attending this Symposium showed that there is much we can learn from people who are actually living day in day out with these issues. We need to collaborate and bring minds and experiences together to solve the issues around the Sustainable Development Goals. I am happy to say that the Symposium was a great step in doing this and we hope that there will be many relationships and research interests developed from this Symposium that can apply for funding from the Global Challenges Research Fund to further research, and to improve and save lives globally. Watch this space!

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute Coordinator Amanda Woodman-Hardy @Enviro_Mand. You can find out more about the Global Challenges Symposium on the official website. You can read more about reliable and sustainable micro-hydro-power in Nepal in a blog by Caboteer Joe Butchers.

Localising the Sustainable Development Goals for Bristol

Posted on February 20, 2018April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

This is the question we are working to answer through a new University of Bristol funded project on Localising the SDGs for Bristol, in partnership with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP), Bristol City Council and Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

Bristol is a city of great wealth and has strong environmental credentials as the former European Green Capital in 2015. The city is also home to a vibrant cluster of ‘green economy’ companies and environmental charities. However, Bristol also faces many challenges. Homelessness is twice the national average; nearly 16% of Bristolians live in England’s 10% most deprived areas; and Bristol health outcomes are worse than the national averages for many indicators (e.g. life expectancy, suicide, childhood obesity, smoking).

These are precisely the kinds of challenges that the Sustainable Development Goals are encouraging us to confront and tackle by 2030. Importantly, ‘sustainability’ isn’t just about the environment; it is also about building a prosperous and inclusive economy that leaves no one behind. Inclusion, equality and opportunity are essential to achieve sustainability.

Our research seeks to identify and support mechanisms for embedding the SDGs in local planning and governance processes by engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in the city.

Bristol City Council, a pivotal stakeholder is currently working to bring partners together for a new One City Plan. This Plan seeks to use the collective power of Bristol’s key organisations to achieve a bigger impact by supporting partners, organisations and citizens to help solve key city challenges and improve the lives of Bristolians across the city. The core themes behind this plan align with the SDGs and it provides a great opportunity for Bristol to lead nationally and internationally on the SDGs. As this plan comes together we aim to input insights from other cities around the world that are also working to implement the SDGs.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti committing to the SDGs for LA

To that end Allan Macleod, the Cabot Institute SDGs Research & Engagement Associate, recently attended the Global Ambition–Local Action Conference hosted by the Occidental College in Los Angeles. The conference focused on what cities can and are doing to address the SDGs and how they can mobilise data and resources to further their work. It was a very informative experience, but was it was also inspiring to see how Bristol compares to some of the largest and most important Global Cities. It was clear that Bristol has developed a solid foundation for SDG localisation and has a real opportunity to become global leader in implementing the SDGs. In doing so the city will both confront the need to develop a more inclusive and sustainable local economy while contributing to global efforts to tackle transboundary problems together with other cities.

This is a particularly exciting time to be working collaboratively on implementing the SDGs in Bristol as the city will be hosting two major conferences in 2018: the Data for International Development Festival at the end of March and the Global Parliament of Mayors Annual Summit in October. Both these events provide Bristol with an opportunity to showcase its leadership and demonstrate its credentials as an important international city that is working to improve the lives of all its citizens.

What experiences do you have of the SDGs abroad or in Bristol? Do you have an ideas or lessons that can be applied to Bristol? If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to get in touch at Allan.macleod@bristol.ac.uk.
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This blog is written by Dr Sean Fox, a Lecturer in Urban Geography and Global Development at the University of Bristol and Allan Macleod, Cabot Institute SDGs Research & Engagement Associate.

Sean Fox