COALESCE: UN Sustainability Goals in the EU
A Research Ireland funded project studying how the UN Sustainable Development Goals are translated into actionable policy through EU committee debates and policymaking processes.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the most high-profile political commitment to address the challenges faced by humanity in the 21st century. Despite their lofty ambitions, we do not know enough about how these overarching goals are translated into actionable policy initiatives. To address this gap in our understanding, this project focuses on the committees that drive the EU policymaking process, and the policy debates that shape the resulting policy agreements.
To study the role of the SDGs in EU policymaking, we consider both recorded committee debate videos from the Council and European Parliament, and the policy texts that represent the inputs/outputs of these committees. The multimodal nature of these data implies that a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach is required, integrating cutting-edge methods from machine learning and natural language processing with theoretical insights and statistical methods from political science. We aim to develop a workflow that first collects and processes as much relevant content as possible relating to SDG discussions in EU committees. We then employ large language models to extract a comprehensive empirical picture of how precision and vagueness in committee debates shape the manifestation of SDG commitments in policy agreements. We also explore how ideology, institutions, and past policy performance shape committee debates and how these debates, in turn, shape intra- and inter-institutional policy agreements that drive SDG implementation.
Without precisely formalised policy commitments, there is little chance that the SDGs will come to fruition. If successful, this project will refocus our attention on the origin of such agreements (the policymaking process) and put committee deliberations at the heart of our understanding of the SDG implementation process. The resulting insights can guide efforts to give the SDGs more effective policy impact and enhance our ability to successfully address the global challenges they aim to confront.
This project is funded by Research Ireland through the COALESCE programme.