A new approach to problem-solving across the Sustainable Development Goals

The financial, social, and environmental challenges embedded all through the world’s 17 Sustainable Growth Objectives (SDGs) would require many breakthroughs from enterprise as typical. COVID-19 has only underscored the SDGs’ central message that the underlying issues are each interconnected and pressing, so new mindsets are required to generate quicker progress on many fronts directly. Our current report, 17 Rooms: A new approach to spurring action for the Sustainable Development Objectives, describes an effort to innovate across the technique of SDG problem-solving itself.

What’s 17 Rooms?

17 Rooms goals to advance problem-solving inside and throughout all of the SDGs. As a partnership between Brookings and The Rockefeller Basis, the primary model of the endeavor was convened in September 2018, as a single assembly on the eve of the U.N. Normal Meeting in New York. The initiative has since developed right into a two-pronged effort: an annual flagship course of centered on global-scale coverage points and a community-level course of wherein native actors are taking 17 Rooms strategies into their very own arms.

In sensible phrases, 17 Rooms consists of contributors from disparate specialist communities every assembly in their very own “Rooms,” or working teams, one for every SDG. Every Room is tasked with a typical project of figuring out cooperative actions they’ll take over the next 12-18 months. Rising concepts are then shared throughout Rooms to identify alternatives for collaboration.

The initiative continues to evolve via ongoing experimentation, so strategies will not be overly mounted, however three design ideas assist outline key components of the 17 Rooms mindset:

1. All SDGs get a seat on the desk. Insights, contributors, and priorities are valued equally throughout all of the specialist communities centered on particular person dimensions of the SDGs
2. Take a subsequent step, not the proper step. The method encourages contributors to determine—and collaborate on—actions which might be “sufficiently big to matter, however sufficiently small to get finished”
3. Conversations, not displays. Discussions are structured round collaboration and peer-learning, aiming to concentrate on what’s finest for a difficulty, not any particular person group

These ideas seem to contribute to 3 distinct types of worth: the development of motion, the era of insights, and a strengthened sense of neighborhood amongst contributors.

The annual international flagship

The extremely curated annual flagship kinds the “tip of the arrow” in driving the evolution of 17 Rooms methodologies. The primary session in September 2018 struck a chord of enthusiasm amongst contributors as a result of unencumbered and pressing hackathon-type spirit of motion throughout all 17 working teams. In 2019, the second annual flagship gathering in New York included extra deliberate Room-by-Room preparations and a semi-structured trade of insights between Rooms, resulting in a public report of really useful priorities for the next 12 months.

Determine 1. 17 Rooms flagship course of as of 2020

Supply: Brookings Establishment and Rockefeller Basis

In 2020, the pandemic despatched every little thing digital—17 Zooms!—and Rooms had been requested to determine particular priorities in mild of COVID-19. Determine 1 exhibits the 12 months’s five-step sequence throughout Rooms. On the finish of the method, each Room published its own short document of insights and actionable concepts for the 12 months forward, and the secretariat printed a synthesis report, Great Transitions: Doubling Down on the Sustainable Development Goals, impressed by the work of the Rooms. The latter report described 4 emergent tendencies—for justice, nature, expertise, and the following era—that arose from the flagship deliberations and require augmented effort for the SDGs to succeed.

17 Rooms-X and 17 Rooms-U

All through 2019 and 2020, localized actors noticed alternative in implementing their very own community-level 17 Rooms processes. A number of universities in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. have notably been first-movers in deploying 17 Rooms strategies to stimulate bottom-up consciousness and cooperation throughout numerous constituencies. For functions starting from strategic planning to native stakeholder engagement, to cross-faculty coordination, 17 Rooms has provided a strategy to stimulate new types of cooperation and alignment amongst broad ranges of neighborhood members. Conversations are additionally underway with potential companions focused on exploring what fashions for cities, organizations, and nations would possibly appear like.

To begin consolidating strategies and peer studying, Brookings and The Rockefeller Basis launched a 17 Rooms-X “neighborhood of follow” on February 25. Greater than 90 folks from three dozen organizations joined to begin sharing insights on how 17 Rooms may also help deal with native issues. Amongst different highlights, Ángel Cabrera talked about how 17 Rooms helped Georgia Tech’s faculty, students, and staff align around a newly developed strategic plan; Sarah Mendelson defined how 17 Rooms unearthed hidden SDG-relevant connections forward of a pioneering “Voluntary University Review” at Carnegie Mellon University; Miguel Ruiz Cabañas spoke about 17 Rooms as a facilitator of cross-disciplinary collaboration and neighborhood stakeholder engagement at Tec de Monterrey; and Joseph Wong described how 17 Rooms helped catalyze a groundswell of curiosity within the SDGs towards practical deliverables at the University of Toronto.

Watch this house…

Over the approaching 12 months, the 17 Rooms initiative will pursue a brand new cycle of experimentation to maintain updating strategies, codifying insights, and nurturing the neighborhood of follow. A proper secretariat workforce has just lately been established to assist this effort from inside the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings, working in shut day-to-day collaboration with the innovation workforce at The Rockefeller Basis and the remainder of the 17 Rooms community. The 2021 annual international flagship—“model 4.0”—will proceed as a digital course of till COVID-19 subsides, with heightened consideration to the implications of the pandemic and in addition the worldwide coverage calendar over the approaching 12 months. Offshoot efforts will even obtain strengthened assist to share learnings and insights throughout the neighborhood of follow, together with the launch of a beta toolkit.

The 17 Rooms strategy affords a brand new type of problem-solving within the broader panorama of efforts required to advance the SDGs. For communities of every kind and at any stage of their SDG journey, we hope 17 Rooms may also help drive motion in direction of SDG outcomes in any respect scales. Any group focused on conducting its personal 17 Rooms-X experiment is welcome to write down us by way of 17rooms@brookings.edu.