Implementing the 2030 Agenda in the municipal spatial planning process: Challenges and opportunities in a Swedish context

All the member states of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda unanimously in September of 2015, with the aim of transforming our planet into a sustainable place by 2030. The Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), spanning over ecological, economic, and social sustainability, which are necessary for the transformation of the planet, and all member states should strive to achieve them. In the Agenda, it is stated several times that local authorities are important for achieving the goals and implementing them in society. The Government of Sweden has begun working on the implementation of the Agenda nationally, and believes, like the UN, that it is at the local level, implementation of the Agenda should take place. In this regard, municipalities play a central role, as their areas of activity span over many of the SDGs and are responsible for a sustainable development of land and water areas within its boundaries. The 2030 Agenda could, in this regard, strengthen the municipal spatial planning. This paper aims at investigating how municipalities implement the Agenda in their organization, how urban planners and plan architects address sustainability in their projects, and how the Agenda could support that. The results of this thesis show that the implementation of the Agenda in the examined municipalities is weak. Urban planners and plan architects have not received information or training on how to apply the Agenda to their work, and the SDGs are not usually used in projects. Several barriers are in the way of a smooth implementation, from lack of knowledge, conflict of interest, unspecific sustainability goals, to ambiguities in how to define sustainable development within the municipality. One way to overcome these barriers is to address the Agenda in the comprehensive plan of the municipality. On the other hand, the results show that there is a clear way of working with sustainability in large spatial planning project. By defining, early in the process, what sustainability means in the ...