Samoa

The re-opening of Samoa’s borders in late-2022 kickstarted the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This offers an opportunity to rebuild sustainably its tourism, maritime transport, and fisheries sectors. Samoa’s ocean resources can also augment its resilience to future shocks such as climate change. Through an analysis of Samoa’s economic trends and environmental pressures, institutional set-up and policy tools, as well as financing landscape, this report identifies opportunities and challenges for Samoa’s ocean economy to drive sustainable and resilient development. The Samoa Ocean Strategy offers a blueprint for such a pursuit, but there remain gaps and impediments. To address them, the report provides several cross-cutting and sector-specific policy recommendations to accelerate Samoa’s transition to a sustainable ocean economy.

Achieving sustainable, equitable and resilient societies is humankind’s challenge for the 21st century. In pursuit of this ambition, the international development community needs a shared, universal framework, within which to work more closely together. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the obvious answer, but a number of technical, political and organisational challenges prevent development co-operation providers from using them as their common results framework. Based on seven case studies, this publication identifies two critical factors and one game changer that can help overcome those challenges. First, country leadership needs to be supported by the international community. Second, development partners need to change their set-ups in order to deliver on the SDGs. Finally, by forcing governments and development partners to reset their long-term strategies and rethink their internal systems, the COVID-19 pandemic provides them with a rare opportunity to use the SDG framework collectively as a roadmap to recovery: this can be a game changer.

This case study explores whether the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be used as a shared framework for results by development co-operation actors in Samoa. The study offers an introduction to Samoa’s progress in mainstreaming the SDGs in national policy making, as well as in monitoring the SDG targets and indicators. It then focuses on the experiences of development co-operation partners in aligning their country-level programmes and frameworks with the SDGs, and identifies enabling factors, drivers and obstacles that contribute to SDG alignment and monitoring in Samoa. The study concludes with recommendations for both the government and its development partners to increase the collective use of the SDG framework and improve policy coherence, effectiveness and sustainable impact of all development efforts.