The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an extraordinary vision of what global development should look like between now and 2030. Starting with the concept of sustainability, the SDGs go far beyond the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to incorporate a set of environmental and social-justice priorities that require national action at all levels of income. As agreed by 193 signatory nations at the September 2015 United Nations General Assembly, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/ transformingourworld) is meant to be universal, indivisible, and interlinked. In conventional development arenas like extreme poverty and hunger the SDGs also inspire, doubling down on the MDGs by defining success in absolute rather than relative terms. Global partners target an end to poverty in all its forms, for example, rather than a 50 percent reduction in extreme-poverty headcount ratios.

The UN's drive for universal norms and targets involved widespread public debate and painstaking negotiations and compromises between national governments. The process was simultaneously more transparent and much more difficult and convoluted than when the MDGs emerged from behind closed doors a decade and a half ago. Some widening in the scope of commitments was inevitable and also desirable, to accommodate sustainability goals and build a truly global coalition. But there was also widespread awareness as negotiations proceeded that fewer goals might allow for greater success. By the latter standard, the 2030 Agenda is daunting. With 17 global goals and 169 highly ambitious targets, the Agenda seems in danger of departing not just in scope but also in coherence from the elegant eight goals and 17 targets of the MDGs.

In practice, therefore, a great deal remains on the table in terms of shaping global action. This is true not just in the conventional sense of identifying costeffective approaches to individual targets but also in the deeper sense of operationalizing – and unavoidably, prioritizing – targets at the national and global levels. This book makes a vital contribution to what should be a collective effort to prioritize.