TITLE:
Alignment of the European Green Deal, the Sustainable Development Goals and the European Semester Process: Method and Application
AUTHORS:
Phoebe Koundouri, Stathis Devves, Angelos Plataniotis
KEYWORDS:
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), European Green Deal (EGD), European Semester Process, Country Specific Recommendations (CSR’s), 3-D Mapping
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.11 No.4,
August
18,
2021
ABSTRACT: The Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) along with the European Green Deal and its 9 Policy Areas, are the
key strategic frameworks for the transformation of Europe into a
climate-neutral continent in the future decades. Thus, the mandates derived
from these contexts must be taken into consideration by the European countries.
This report aims to suggest a methodology for the co-integration of the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and
the European Green Deal (EGD), with the Country-specific recommendations
(CSRs) made by the European Commission as part of the Semester process. At the
same time, all these should be aligned with the EU Recovery Plan, to supply
applicable strategies to the European policymakers and strengthen the national
recovery Plans of the Member States, which are driven by the above-mentioned
EU-driven packs, in line with the superior UN Agenda for the Sustainable
Development. For the alignment of CSRs, the SDGs, and the EGD a 3D-mapping
approach is proposed. After the Introduction in Section 1, the framework of the
applicable Policies is presented in Section 2 and our Methodology is described
in Section 3. In Section 4 our results are demonstrated for the EU and in Section
5 the main conclusions are listed along with a discussion for future
directions. Our analysis shows that overall, the EU has sufficiently
incorporated the SDGs in its strategic priorities, although there is still room
for improvement. Several issues identified by SDSN’s Sustainable Development Report
2020 either as major or significant challenges have not been captured by the
CSRs. The role of these Country-specific results and their mapping, as provided
in the Supplementary Material, is to support the EU Commission and the Member
States to reinforce the alignment of their policy priorities with the ambitions
of the major Sustainability Agenda.