Social Clocks As Instruments for Measuring the Progress Towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals

This paper presents a new methodology for monitoring the progress towards various types of policy goals. It works with an ideal schedule of goal attainments, which is represented by the shortest way from a starting point to the respective policy goal. This way it becomes possible to determine how many years a social actor is ahead or behind this ideal schedule. The related social clocks facilitate the comparison of different policy goals and social actors since time leads and lags are universal concepts. Comparisons between policy goals can be used for analysing asynchronies between different components of social development, e.g. between general democratisation and female empowerment. Similarly, comparisons between actors may be used for their categorisation: "leaders" that are ahead of the schedule, "laggards" that are behind, and "on-timers" just following the planned schedule.

A typical example of normatively binding policy goals are the Social Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which were initiated in 2012 at the international Rio+20 conference: in 17 policy-domains they define for all countries binding development goals, which are to be realised in the 15 years between the end of 2015 and 2030. We will show the usefulness of social clocks for describing the progress with regard to three of these goals: the reduction of poverty, the improvement of safely managed sanitation, and the eradication of food insecurity. Empirical analyses show, that already in 2020, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru were laggards with regard to poverty reduction. In principle, they could compensate this delay till the end of the planning period (2030). However, for Peru and Ecuador this seems to be unlikely due to the limited development-speed of these counties. Consequently, the paper ends with a general discussion on how social clocks can be used for early warning about the missing of targets.