The Interdependence of the Sustainable Development Goals: Network Analysis as a Methodology for Policy Impact Evaluation

Abstract

Network analysis using mixed graphical modeling is a computational social science approach with the potential to transform decades of sustainable development goals (SDGs) open data from the official SDG Indicators Database into digestible insights using open-source software R. Flexible and free, R provides the ability to perform network analysis. As we demonstrate, network analysis is a promising tool for exploratory analysis in policy evaluation accounting for the systemic nature of the SDG relationships, with a new opportunity to benefit from its statistical power based on large sample sizes without limiting its interpretability and approachability.