Journal of Sustainability

Special-Issue Information

The adoption of the 2030 Agenda marked a major turning point in global sustainability governance. Yet, as the 2030 horizon approaches, it has become increasingly clear that the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends to a large extent on what happens below the national scale. Cities and regions are not simply sites where SDGs are applied. They are central arenas in which sustainable development is interpreted, negotiated, prioritised and governed. Early contributions already pointed to the emergence of a global urban agenda and the growing recognition that sustainable development cannot be addressed without a serious engagement with urban and territorial questions (Parnell, 2016; Croese et al., 2020). More recent work has reinforced this argument by showing that SDG localisation is shaped by urbanisation patterns, place-specific development trajectories, multilevel governance arrangements, and institutional capacities that vary substantially across territories (Katsikis et al., 2025; Bexell et al., 2025; Gustafsson & Krantz, 2025).

Objective & Scope

This Special Issue invites contributions that examine how cities, regions and other subnational territories contribute to the implementation, governance, monitoring and political translation of the SDGs. We are particularly interested in papers that move beyond a generic discussion of “local implementation” and instead analyse the territorial conditions, governance mechanisms and institutional processes through which SDGs are operationalised in different contexts. This includes work on local and regional strategies, planning instruments, policy integration, stakeholder coordination, indicator systems, Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs), and the tensions that arise when global sustainability goals meet uneven territorial realities. Recent scholarship has shown that local SDG action is often marked by selective prioritisation, qualitative rather than indicator-based review practices, and recurring tensions between global aspirations and local constraints, institutional continuity and transformation, and short-term political imperatives and long-term sustainability goals (Ortiz-Moya & Yang, 2025; Bexell et al., 2025).

The Special Issue is grounded in the view that SDG localisation is not merely a technical exercise of policy alignment. It is also a territorial and political process. Place matters because sustainable development challenges, institutional capacities, social inequalities and environmental pressures are unevenly distributed across space. A territorial perspective therefore helps reveal why the same SDG framework may generate very different policy trajectories across metropolitan areas, intermediate cities, rural regions, cross-border spaces or shrinking territories. This perspective also resonates with recent place-based analyses of SDG localisation and with broader calls to better spatialise sustainable development research and policy design (OECD, 2020; Vercruysse et al., 2022; Katsikis et al., 2025).

At the same time, the Special Issue seeks to engage with the practical and institutional dimensions of SDG implementation. Research has shown that municipalities and regions often face significant challenges in embedding the SDGs into routine governance, balancing internal organisational change with external collaboration, and translating broad sustainability ambitions into operational strategies, monitoring frameworks and concrete interventions (Gustafsson & Krantz, 2025; Zinkernagel et al., 2023). Related work also suggests that policy fields such as smart city development, resilience planning and integrated urban policy can act as important, but uneven, vehicles for SDG localisation depending on context, institutional design and political commitment (Clement et al., 2023; Croese et al., 2020).

We welcome theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions, including comparative and interdisciplinary papers. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

territorial and place-based approaches to SDG localisation
the role of cities and regions in implementing and governing the SDGs
the geography of the implementation of SDGs
multilevel governance, policy coordination and institutional change
Voluntary Local Reviews and subnational monitoring practices
SDGs in urban, regional and spatial planning
social and territorial inequalities in SDG implementation
the politics of prioritisation, trade-offs and policy coherence
local capacity, public administration and organisational transformation
digitalisation, smart cities and innovation as drivers of SDG localisation
citizen participation, co-production and stakeholder engagement
comparative analyses across cities, regions or national contexts
critical perspectives on the limits, contradictions and uneven geographies of SDG localisation

Contributions from geography, urban and regional studies, planning, public policy, sustainability studies, political science, environmental governance and related fields are particularly encouraged. Papers may focus on any world region and may use qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods.

This Special Issue seeks to build a conversation that is both analytically rigorous and policy relevant. At a time when progress toward the SDGs remains highly uneven and when cities and regions are under growing pressure to address climate, social and economic challenges in an integrated way, there is a strong need for research that clarifies what territorial SDG implementation actually looks like in practice, what enables it, and what continues to constrain it. OECD work has emphasised that subnational governments are indispensable to achieving a large share of the SDG targets, while recent assessments of VLRs show that local and regional governments are becoming increasingly active in shaping their own review and implementation practices, even if these remain diverse and uneven across contexts (OECD, 2020; IGES, 2025).

Journal of Sustainability

An Applied Scholarly Journal on Sustainability

Protected: Localising the SDGs: The Role of Cities and Regions in Sustainable Development

Special-Issue Editors

Special-Issue Information

Objective & Scope

Articles

References