Voluntary local review framework to monitor and evaluate the progress towards achieving sustainable development goals at a city level: Buraidah city, KSA and SDG11 as a case study

Abstract

Around the world, cities are on the front lines of sustainable development. They are re-sponsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions. Many of these cities are experiencing dan-gerous levels of pollution, underemployment, and health disparities. Since 2015, 193 countries have endorsed the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), intended to help address a wide ranlge of challenges affecting cities and ultimately secure the resources for their next generations. All states are expected to present the national progress towards the SDGs through a Voluntary National Review (VNR). Despite the importance of the cities within this framework, only a handful of them worldwide have actively begun to review and assess progress towards these SDGs on a city scale. This paper seeks to develop a Voluntary Local Review (VLR) framework to assess and evaluate the progress of cities towards contributing to the SDGs. This framework has been developed by localizing the international and national frameworks to measure the performance of cities as they ad-vance towards achieving the SDGs. Such a framework can serve as a tool for benchmarking progress on different aspects of sustainable development and help urban planners and policymakers priori-tize policies and actions to improve urban quality of life. This framework is applied to monitor and evaluate the progress of the city of Buraidah in Saudi Arabia, as it strives towards achieving the targets of SDG11 (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”).