Description
Agenda 2030 confirms the global efforts to harmonize goals and mobilize resources for sustainable development. To what extent is the Global Gateway (GGW) strategy contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Launched in 2021 by the European Commission, the GGW strengthens partnerships with countries from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean. With an announced investment of 300 billion€ to develop “sustainable and high quality” projects over 2021-2027, the GGW corresponds to a tipping point in the EU international cooperation agenda. Although the GGW does not explicitly mention the 17 SDGs, we targeted broad topics that are likely to demonstrate a notable contribution from the EU to the achievement of SDGs. An innovative analysis methodology combining Natural Language Processing, network analysis and statistics, highlights latent semantic paths between the GCW’s development objectives and the SDGs. These paths are represented as “chains of concepts” mostly used in scientific expertise. Our analytical prism focuses on six intertwined dimensions of global governance: climate change, biodiversity, “One Health”, cities, social vulnerability and sustainable development. Our key finding is double: 1) the convergence of goals from the GGW and the SDGs is strong, unsurprisingly; 2) this convergence is still rather underexplored in international studies literature. The analysis illustrates the potential of this approach to renew our view of governance strategies.
