Co-Creating Local Socioeconomic Pathways for Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize the importance of action locally for achieving socioeconomic sustainability globally.  Local communities must focus on a locally relevant subset of goals and understand potential future pathways for key drivers that influence local sustainability to contribute to national- and global-scale SDG achievement.  A participatory method to co-create local socioeconomic pathways was developed by downscaling the SDGs and driving forces of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) through contextual analysis and community engagement.  The SSPs and SDGs were linked by identifying the driving forces and how the local socioeconomic pathways contribute to achieving local sustainability goals from the bottom up in alignment with global SDG initiatives.