The scientific revolution for sustainable development has begun, but its benefits must reach everyone, everywhere. During the first two years of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (IDSSD 2024–2033), proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, 396 initiatives — 209 endorsed and 187 under review — across 79 countries mobilized scientific collaboration in support of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Yet significant challenges remain. A persistent "science divide» continues to separate those at the frontier of innovation from those at risk of being left behind. Inequalities in infrastructure, skills, and access to scientific opportunities limit participation and impact. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, represents 17.5% of the global population but accounts for less than 1% of the world's researchers. Addressing these gaps requires rethinking how science is organized, financed, and connected to decision-making. The first two years of the Decade demonstrate that a distributed, science-led approach can mobilize global action, strengthen partnerships, and build a more inclusive and sustainable scientific future.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development committed all United Nations member states to seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet the distribution of progress across developing countries remains contested and unevenly documented. This critical narrative review examines what can be defensibly concluded about progress toward the SDGs in developing countries, why interpretations diverge and where the evidence is weakest. Peer-reviewed studies, together with authoritative institutional assessments, were identified through structured web-based scholarly searching and metadata verification, appraised for methodological quality and relevance, and synthesised thematically rather than catalogued. Five interlocking themes structure the analysis: the architecture through which progress is measured; the empirical record of aggregate trajectories and projections; regional and structural heterogeneity, with particular attention to sub-Saharan Africa; interactions among goals and the recurring tension between socioeconomic advance and environmental sustainability; and the means of implementation, encompassing financing, governance and exposure to systemic shocks. The available evidence indicates broad but decelerating gains in several human-development dimensions, alongside stagnation or regression in environmental and, in the poorest settings, poverty-related targets. Convergent findings suggest that most developing countries, and a majority of sub-Saharan African countries in particular, are not on a trajectory to meet the more demanding targets by 2030 on current rates of change. Interpretations nonetheless diverge because composite indices, target-level dashboards, model-based projections and machine-learning classifications embed different assumptions about weighting, imputation and indicator selection, and because data availability is most constrained precisely where development challenges are most acute. The synthesis further shows that gains are fragile, as illustrated by the disproportionate setbacks that pandemic responses imposed on developing countries. Confidence in country-level conclusions is limited by measurement heterogeneity and by a research literature skewed toward wealthier settings. The review identifies priorities for strengthening the evidence base, including improved subnational and disaggregated data, causal evaluation of interventions and integrated modelling of trade-offs, to inform realistic development planning toward and beyond 2030.
Lauwali Barau· Asian Journal of Geographica...· 0 citations
This article presents a relatively new actor in the international governance of science, technology and innovation (STI) that seems to be going unnoticed by the intellectual property (IP) scientific community: the United Nations Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) (UNTB). Established to facilitate technology transfer, development and transformative change for LDCs, the UNTB is presented with three types of challenges: structural, in view of the institution’s lack of resources and barriers impairing full implementation of its operational units; substantive, stemming from lack of normative guidance on how to apply and interpret IP in accordance with sustainable development goals; and governance, materializing on account of the fragmented and dense nature of the landscape of international STI and IP norms and institutions. This article demonstrates how the UNTB can leverage partnerships and make use of its main tools – Technology Needs Assessments and technology transfer through the IP Bank – to provide for and overcome each of these challenges. While the UNTB’s gradual implementation remains a hurdle, the conclusion is that this new organization has untapped potential to align IP with LDCs’ development concerns and to become a reference actor for LDCs with regard to STI, technology transfer and IP.
Felipe de Andrade· Queen Mary Journal of Intell...· 0 citations
With five years remaining before the 2030 deadline, the United Nations reports that 35% of assessable Sustainable Development Goal targets are on track or advancing moderately and that 18% have regressed below their 2015 baseline. Explanations for the shortfall divide into three diagnoses that are rarely tested against one another: an investment gap now estimated near four trillion dollars a year, a governance architecture that sets goals without binding anyone to them, and a measurement system that cannot see roughly half of what it is meant to track. This policy analysis appraises the progress record against the monitoring infrastructure that produces it, then examines the four constraints that the literature treats as parallel obstacles: commitment design, measurement and visibility, selective national implementation, and financing. The analysis finds the constraints are causally coupled rather than additive. Indicator selection removed the distributional and environmental content of several goals; the goals that lost measurability were subsequently deprioritised in national reviews; weak accountability then permitted the shortfall to be attributed to insufficient finance; and financing responses concentrated on the goals that remained visible. Shocks act on this cycle as an amplifier rather than an independent cause. The paper sets out three feedback loops that sustain the cycle, identifies the points at which each can be cut, and argues that a post-2030 architecture that fixes financing without fixing bindingness and measurement will reproduce the same shortfall.
Keywords: 2030 agenda, sustainable development goals, policy coherence, sdg indicators, development finance, global governance.
The New Space is imposing a global reorganization in the space sector, leaving national programs to coordinate civil, commercial, and military interests across the space power triad under governance arrangements. This article asks how the Brazilian space ecosystem is articulated across the three domains and which governance mechanisms could close structural gaps that might erode its long-term economic sustainability. The evidence base combines 16 semi-structured interviews with government, industry, and academic experts, documentary analysis, and a modified Space Technology Ladder. Three findings hold together. Public funding remains the ecosystem’s primary energy source, while horizontal integration across the three domains stays uneven. The civil program, historically undercapitalized, is the most tractable instrument available for inducing commercial activity, and currently the most underused. The Brazilian program has not settled on a primary international partner for space development, and this distributed pattern limits the capability transfer available from any single bilateral relationship. We frame these findings as structural decoupling at four institutional levels and argue that addressing it requires repositioning civil procurement as a market-shaping instrument rather than a residual budget line.
Bruno Nunes Vaz, Lucas Novelino Abdala· New Space· 0 citations
In recent years, the continuous and rapid development of technological innovations, and above all digital innovations, has been radically transforming established processes in global production of goods and services, as well as production and supply chains. This is leading to flexible yet unstable development at all levels of the global economy, changing the nature of relationships among economic actors at the micro-, macro-, and meso-levels, and affecting all spheres of citizens’ lives. In this context, global crises are becoming a permanent feature and require public administration and business management systems to promptly identify and control manifestations of such disruptions in the socioeconomic environment and to select scientifically sound and relevant tools to ensure governability toward the sustainable development of society. This article identifies and substantiates the hypothesis that timely identified and well-founded trends lay the foundation for rethinking the nature of ongoing processes and analyzing the strategic behavior of both economic entities and authorized government bodies. It is argued that the key factor influencing socio-economic processes today is the war in Ukraine, as its consequences affect various regions of the world, causing serious problems for the global economy, characterized by a slowdown in growth, rapid inflation, and recession. It has been established that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will have a key impact; therefore, the effective use of AI should be aimed at remaining flexible, understanding market needs, and constantly adapting to technological progress. Furthermore, investments in artificial intelligence solutions will enable companies not only to optimize business operations and reduce costs but also to provide customers with the expected value and experience. A proposal has been substantiated regarding the need for broad involvement of the domestic scientific community, with mandatory collaboration with European partners within the framework of European integration programs, to analyze and forecast identified trends with the aim of making them systematic and scientifically sound. Key objectives of state economic policy have been developed and proposed as a response to the challenges posed by global development trends.
Keywords: global trends, economic development, state economic policy, threats and challenges.
S. Davymuka, N. Popadynets· Actual problems of innovativ...· 0 citations
Financial technology (FinTech) is recognized as an important enabler of sustainable development. However, it presents a fragmented and limited explanation of how FinTech may contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through this hybrid systematic review of 93 articles published between 2015 and May 2026, this study explores responses to these questions. First, it synthesizes four mechanisms through which FinTech contributes to the SDGs: financial inclusion and access to capital, transparency and governance, risk mitigation and resilience, and data‐driven decision‐making. This review develops an integrated theoretical framework combining institutional, innovation diffusion, capability, and stakeholder perspectives. Our analysis suggests that FinTech may contribute unevenly across the economic, social, and climate‐related SDGs and that uncertainty is increasingly conditioning sustainability outcomes. Finally, this review offers theoretical, policy, and future research implications on the subject.
JEL Classification:
A1O1O3
Salman Bahoo, G. Kondrateva, Ramil Khabirov et al.· Business Strategy and the En...· 2 citations
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